There have been many heated exchanges over the years debating Gaudí’s birthplace. The facts, as we know them, state that Antoni Gaudí was born on 25 June 1852. Having recently lost two children, Gaudí’s anxious parents, Francesc and Antonia, as a precaution, immediately took him to the church of Sant Pere Apostol in Reus to be baptised; a perfectly normal practice for traditional God-fearing Catholics.
Whether he was born in the family home on Carrer Sant Joan in the provincial city of Reus (nineteenth-century Catalonia’s second city) or, as other people argue, at his father’s workshop the Mas de la Calderera a few kilometres away seems of little consequence to the dispassionate outsider. Stuck out amongst the undergrowth of the dried-out flash-flood riverbed – the Riera de Maspujols – the make-do Mas de la Calderera is on the outskirts of the neighbouring village Riudoms. It seems highly unlikely that Antonia would have risked a bumpy mule-drawn carriage ride out to her husband’s workshop in the last week of her pregnancy. For those claiming kinship to a potential future saint, however, these small but important details really matter, and understandably so. The diplomatic solution to this thorny dispute, and the most likely conclusion, is that Antoni Gaudí was almost certainly born in Reus. If we accept this, we should also move forward and recognise that it was the flora and fauna of Riudoms that gave him the major inspiration for his extraordinarily rich creative life.
Much is made of the central importance of childhood games in the formation of the creative mind. A great deal of stress is placed on that moment of revelation when play becomes truly inventive and inspirational. As a young boy suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Gaudí was frequently transported by donkey to the Mas de la Calderera for rest and recuperation. While there, he became an inquisitive and avid watcher of everything around him. Lying in the shade or scrambling through the undergrowth he could chase lizards, watch the perilous scorpion arching up its threatening tail, listen to the ceaseless drum of the cicada and start to recognise the rhythms and patterns of nature. Throughout his life the Baix Camp would remain a reference point, with its seemingly endless vineyards and stands of hazelnut, almond and olive trees rising slowly up towards the serra. Set against the dramatic backdrop of a cerulean blue sky, it represented to the adult Gaudí a childhood Eden.
In the history of architecture the most famous example of childhood play informing adult practice is that of Frank Lloyd Wright. When Gaudí was exhibiting his papier-mâché copies of the Alhambra at the Philadelphia Centennial, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, was there at the huge exhibition buying for her gifted son another foreign import, a set of the famous pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel’s building blocks. These simple hard-edged shapes transformed the young Frank’s way of seeing and feeling space. Looking back, he would reflect that ‘these primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects . . . the maple-wood blocks . . . are in my fingers to this day’. And Frank Lloyd Wright would, throughout his career, transform architecture, remaining loyal to the infinite potential and variety of those cubes, rectangles, triangles, pyramids and the straight lines he found in Fröbel’s bricks.
Gaudí’s architectural kindergarten was radically different, organic and almost entirely devoid of the straight lines that would regiment Frank Lloyd Wright’s imagination. For Gaudí, a dried-out snake skeleton, bending slowly round, might give a masterclass in articulation. Trees, it appeared to the novice eye, seemed to shoot out their branches in apparently random patterns; while ants worked in teams lifting staggering weights; and far out at sea cloud formations, if you learnt to read them, signalled oncoming storms. Weathered sandstone beaten by wind and waves appeared almost molten as nature manifested its extraordinary transformative power.
When straight lines appeared in nature they were there for a purpose. The hexagonal honeycomb (one of Gaudí’s enduring motifs) provided a lesson in creating the most efficient form for maximising the contact between contiguous surfaces, as the worker bees artfully created a natural air-conditioning system to keep the queen perfectly cool in her brood comb under the heat of the midday sun.
Down in the scrubby undergrowth, a beetle’s glorious carapace shone like a jewel, while behind it the slow snail dragged along its towering home. Gaudí was transfixed by the delicate fern fronds that moved with the wind, and watched as the blossoms burst and the date palms pushed out their fingers; the full cornucopia of rival plants fighting for their corner like buildings shouting for attention in a tight city grid. Little could Gaudí know that his childhood visions would soon find a scientific explanation in the seminal masterpiece written by Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson On Growth and Form, in which the Scottish scientist elucidated his universal theory of morphogenesis – the natural evolution of a shape.
Just a short walk down the riera brought Gaudí to the Mediterranean seashore, where in the rock pools he could study the transition from land to sea as the push and pull of water smoothed off the pebbles and ate out the rock, providing hiding places for the molluscs, starfish and crabs. On the sand, the washed-up shells seduced him with their intricate spirals and whorls. Tests of dried-out sea urchins, their calcareous shells divided neatly into five, revealed on their nubbed surface nature’s propensity for producing symmetrical patterns as elegant as any ceramic bowl. Desiccated sea cucumbers and the curling seaweed displayed other amazing details, as did driftwood and weathered bark. Looking closer, Gaudí could wonder over the veins in a leaf; the swelling crown of an artichoke; the swollen knuckles of the towering bamboo; the skeletal structure of the ubiquitous prickly pear; or, better still, the spiky aloes’ spiralling growth and the glorious head of a rogue sunflower blown across from the fields nearby, both perfect examples of the complex Fibonacci sequence and Fermat’s spiral of primes. As incredible, and eerily majestic, was the tensile strength revealed in the spectacular architecture of a spider’s web; at its most beautiful at first light when illuminated by droplets of morning dew, it created an ephemeral illusion of a kaleidoscope or the rainbow burst of a cathedral’s stained glass. Like Isaac Newton, Gaudí was a devil for detail, trusting above everything empirical evidence, especially when dressed up with beauty. None of these lessons were lost on Gaudí. Absolutely nothing was wasted. From the earth to the stars Gaudí had the images engraved into his imagination until he knew where they might fit. From the cosmic to the banal, everything added grist to the mill. Almost fifty years later, the motifs and subjects that he had captured during his childhood would reappear with a dramatic realism on the façade of the Sagrada Família; even a full-size sardine boat, complete with lantern, was later transformed by Gaudí into stone.
If this was what Gaudí would later describe as ‘the Great Book of Nature’, it still needed a structure to underpin it and make sense of the whole. Youthful wonderment might in adulthood seek out scientific explanations, or look further back to the search for spiritual meaning first proposed by Saint Isidore in his Etymologiae or Saint Ildefonsus in his De progressu spiritualis deserti, where everything in nature might be read as a symbolic reminder of Christ’s teachings and his sufferings on earth. In Gaudí’s personal evolution as an architect in service to the Church, Charles Darwin and D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson would have to be pushed to one side to make space for the theory of genesis and the omnipotence of God. Just as Gaudí’s keen sense of observation would have to find a way of translating all that he had seen in his youth into the creation of a new and revolutionary language of form.
In this respect, nothing for Gaudí compared to the first-hand experience of watching his father fashion seductive shapes in the white heat of the forge. A skilled fabricator of brandy stills, Francesc carefully computed the correct volume of a copper alembic as flat surfaces were hammered out, pulled, beaten, encouraged, teased and gently stretched out into their entirely practical yet satisfying three-dimensional form. For the adult Gaudí working on the Sagrada Família, it was the combined DNA of eight generations of craftsmen ancestors that would always lead him to favour working with architectural models rather than poring over sterile 2D plans. For him, like his father, space and volume were properties that had to be felt with the hand and measured by the eye. Plans, at the end of the day, were mere abstractions that automatically put the architect at one remove.
Like many geniuses before him, Gaudí was a student whose progress in school was nothing out of the ordinary. He excelled in geometry but remained average in almost everything else. He had a romantic strain – not fixated like so many on the beautiful young female Reusencs – but instead focused on Catalonia’s history as he shared with his classmates Toda and Ribera their fantasies and dreams of ruins and the restoration of Catalonia’s glorious past. The three teenagers, fired up, actually embarked on an attempt to restore the abandoned Cistercian monastery of Poblet. In the scant dozen issues of their own school magazine El Arlequín the trio showed themselves to be exemplary followers of the new Catalan renaissance, the Renaixença.
Starting as a predominantly romantic movement, the Renaixença soon came to reflect the dynamism and diversity of an increasingly self-confident industrial Catalonia. Recovering the values and energy of Catalonia in its heyday during the Middle Ages, Catalan epic verse was celebrated in their poetry olympics – the Jocs Florals – as choral societies abounded and the popular excursionista groups focused on rediscovering abandoned architectural jewels hidden in the high Pyrenees. Firmly nationalist in inspiration, the Renaixença as a cultural movement was immensely attractive to the likes of Gaudí and his friends, who would follow its evolution from its liberal beginnings towards a greater conservatism as the movement matured. Already deeply imbued with a love of Catalan nature, Gaudí was easily seduced by the growing tendency in architecture that was to blossom into the Catalan art nouveau equivalent known as Modernisme. The hallmark of Modernisme was the introduction of nature into the city as decoration and distraction, employing stained glass, wrought-iron detailing, mosaic, carved plaster and sculpture. Underpinning the architectural Modernista style were the imported ideas of Pugin, Ruskin, the architectural theorist Viollet-le-Duc and William Morris’s reverence for handicraft and decoration, which naturally touched a deep chord in Gaudí. However, as we will see, he was never hidebound by the conventions of a particular style, his originality and genius was precisely his willingness to break the mould. He would outgrow the Renaixença just as he would leave the Modernista style behind. We should remember Gaudí’s enduring mantra: ‘Originality meant going back to the origin.’ And the origin, for Gaudí, was the family land in Riudoms, where nature posed those profoundly complex problems whose solutions he would slowly divine.
First, most importantly, Gaudí needed an architectural education. And it is of huge symbolic importance that his father Francesc, a key member of Reus’s menestral – artisan class – was prepared to sell his land, his parcel of Catalan terra, to pay for both Gaudí and his elder brother, a medical student, to study in Barcelona. The lessons learnt at the Mas de la Calderera would have to pass through the crucible of a rigid and traditional training to see if the sought-after originality had the strength to survive.
Gaudí arrived in Barcelona in September 1868 at a propitious moment. Madrid’s central government had finally capitulated and Barcelona, after centuries of being straitjacketed within its medieval city walls and living in the shadow of the imposing Ciutadella fort, was allowed to plan its modern eixample – extension. The radical urban planner Ildefons Cerdà provided a perfect model for Barcelona’s inevitable growth. His egalitarian grid plan, with its clearly socialist aspirations, despite them later being watered down, nevertheless represented a revolutionary new beginning. Coupled with this, Gaudí’s fellow Reusense, General Prim, the Conde de Reus, in the same month as Gaudí’s arrival in the city had successfully forced the Bourbon queen, Isabella II, into exile in what quickly became mythologised as ‘the Glorious Revolution’. It was a brief honeymoon that ended with Prim’s assassination just two years later, resulting in the installation of an interim First Republic that in turn was soon replaced by a return to the Bourbon crown. But the optimism brought in on the wings of the short-lived Glorious Revolution was best reflected in the boom in transportation, textiles, shipping, steel, and especially the construction industry, which was further boosted by Barcelona’s privileged access to the Cuba trade and the explosion of the Indiano traders’ wealth.
With three years left at secondary school, and a further three in preparatory studies at Barcelona University, Gaudí had the opportunity to absorb his new surroundings and study the rich architectural fabric of Europe’s largest surviving Gothic quarter. One of the finest examples of Catalan Gothic, built during the fourteenth century, was the neighbouring parish church of Santa María del Mar, affectionately known as the Cathedral of the Ribera. The purity of its spare Gothic style could not help but impress itself on Gaudí’s youthful mind, just as its build philosophy of a shared communal and Christian effort would resonate with Gaudí when finally he was offered the commission of his life.
On 24 October 1874, 22-year-old Gaudí enrolled at Barcelona’s recently inaugurated architectural school. In many ways the state of architectural education reflected the revolutionary dynamism of Catalonia as a whole. Diversity of possible sources for inspiration exploded in the magazines, international exhibitions, trade shows and travellers’ photo-reportage as Spain and Catalonia celebrated their unique and colourful past. But behind all the novelty there had to be a guiding rationale. Viollet-le-Duc without a doubt provided the driving logic:
We must find this creativity through an accurate knowledge of the works of our ancestors. Not that such knowledge must lead us to imitate them slavishly, but rather it will reveal and make available all the secret skills of our predecessors. No doubt the very multiplicity of these skills makes their use today difficult. But when you discover these secrets lying behind the finest works in the bosom of the highest and most beautiful civilisations, you quickly recognise that all these secrets can be reduced to just a few principles, and that as a result of the sort of fermentation initiated when they are combined, the new can and must appear unceasingly.
The late nineteenth century was nothing if not the age of eclecticism, cultural colonialism and the art of pastiche. But what might Gaudí borrow from these? The Catalan Gothic was perhaps the most celebrated. The Romanesque, as seen in the monumental masterpiece of the portal of Santa Maria de Ripoll or the humble Capella d’en Marcús just around the corner from where he lived with his brother Francesc, was another source for inspiration. Roman remains abounded, as too did the eighteenth-century sgraffito exteriors that were so seductive to the eye and accompanied the neo-classical style with their wonderful plaster-carved putti, cornucopia, swirls, curlicues and endless decoration. From photographs he could easily appropriate the exotic, the eccentric, the ancient and new. He could immerse himself in the monumental, the religious or the seemingly infinite range of vernacular styles. There was perhaps a surfeit, even an orgy, of available possibilities.
What Gaudí really needed most was the armoury provided at architectural school by studying perspective, mechanics, hydrological engineering, stress, graphic statics, topography, mechanics and the selling of a project to a client with exquisite preparatory drawings. Gaudí baulked at much of the pedestrian, often repetitive teaching; but it was definitely advisable to reject from a position of knowledge, rather than one of ignorance that would almost certainly result in a failed exam.
In 1878, Lluìs Domènech i Montaner published in La Renaixença his hugely influential essay ‘In Search of a National Architecture’ in which, amongst other things, he highlighted the unique legacy of Islamic architecture to the storehouse of Catalan taste. As a teacher in the architectural school, Domènech, just two years older than Gaudí, was in a position of authority. An organisational genius, he was also a publisher, architect, book designer, author, expert on heraldry and future director of the Barcelona School of Architecture; and finally as a politician he would become president of Catalonia. As a scion of one of the gent de bé – the good families – and hereu, heir to the dynasty, he was connected in a way that Gaudí could only dream of. Most importantly, he would remain a rival of Gaudí’s throughout his life until his death in 1923. While the rivalry remained professional, and arguably brought out the best in both architects, their differences proved telling.
Gaudí’s strength of character, which he himself recognised as a liability, was what finally set them apart. None of the easy entrées afforded Domènech came as a given to Gaudí. He fought for his connections and at times must have suffered from acute loneliness, especially over a period of two months, in 1876, when the trauma of his brother Francesc’s death, the hereu, was quickly followed by the death of his mother. Just three years later, his sister Rosa died. Gaudí’s gift was to discover strength in adversity and transform suffering into a cathartic positive quality. Where Domènech was blessed with an easy social route to a client base – which in no way denigrates his incredible talent and extraordinary work ethic – Gaudí had to take on jobbing assistant work for other teacher-architects. It would prove a blessing.
Qualifying as an architect, finally, in March 1878, and with no one in his family circle available to come up with his first commission, Gaudí picked up small projects, including a set of lamp posts for the Ayuntamiento – still in place today in the Plaça Reial – and for a never-completed flower-stall for the Ramblas that bizarrely doubled up as a urinal. Other manifestations of his burgeoning talent included his visiting card, his work desk and a refit for the Farmacia Gibert on the elegant Passeig de Gràcia. It was just enough to pay the rent and be able to return to see his grieving father Francesc in his home town Reus with his head held high; but with little more to offer than optimistic promises of future success. Contacts came slowly and often by chance. But when they did, they were certainly the very best he could expect.
At the 1878 Paris Expo his display stand for the glove manufacturer Comella caught the attention of Don Eusebi Güell, a self-made multimillionaire industrialist with immaculate taste and enough wisdom to keep his ambition discreetly under wraps. Whether the chemistry was immediate is impossible now to say, but it would prove the ultimate partnership. Güell was generous with his connections and passed Gaudí on to the Marquès de Comillas (whose daughter would marry into the Güell clan), who commissioned from Gaudí a set of religious furniture for his private chapel in Comillas in 1880. The following summer, in preparation for a royal visit, Gaudí designed for Comillas a wildly exotic glass gazebo, as a one-off extravaganza, which was, in architectural terms, just one up the ladder from a party tent. In Barcelona he had also been absorbed into the architect Juan Martorell’s design team for the Jesuit college in Carrer Casp and for the church of the Salesian brothers. Coupled with commissions for an altar at San Andrés del Palomar and the chapel of Jesús y María, closer to home in Tarragona, Gaudí’s expanding religious portfolio was beginning to appear like a speciality. These commissions were, as is so common in the architectural profession, just the ones that saw the light of the day. There were many that never got off the drawing board: lighting for Barcelona’s harbour wall, a church altarpiece, and designs for a fashionable country estate in Gelida. A small theatre in Sant Gervasi de Cassoles was completed but was forgotten almost immediately.
One project proposal, however, was fascinating. Under the guidance of Juan Martorell i Montells, the godfather of Catalonia’s Gothic revival, the dream team of Martorell, Domènech and Gaudí was brought together to enter the competition for the final façade of Barcelona’s Gothic cathedral, which had remained unfinished almost 500 years on. If there were difficulties or personal rivalries to overcome, the businessman Manuel Girona hoped they might pull together and come up with a happy solution. Despite its obvious promise, the project unfortunately and inexplicably stumbled at the first hurdle.
The fantasy union of these three talents, which spanned the generations, however, revealed a far more complex web of connections. If Gaudí had picked up the furniture commission for Comillas, and Domènech the religious Universidad Pontificia, it was the more conservative and established Martorell who, through his seniority and sobering influence, was rightly judged to be the safer pair of hands. Martorell was rewarded with the Marquès de Comillas’s Sobrellano Palace and more significantly the family’s Chapel Pantheon. The small village of Comillas, on the northern Cantabrian Atlantic coast, was to be transformed into a showcase and haven for the latest Catalan Modernista style. The construction of a Catholic university, however, signalled that Comillas’s avant-garde pretensions to modernity were modulated by an orthodox Catholic world view. Although Gaudí was clearly the lesser partner in creating the new Comillas, it nevertheless represented a fantastic opportunity to associate himself with the elite of his profession and forge a deeper relationship with the Comillas-Güell clan.
In Spain and Catalonia the ties of friendship that arise from being brought up in the same village or town are extraordinarily strong. It is almost as if geography itself defines the strongest social group after or sometimes even before the nuclear family itself. Although occasionally described as eccentric, shy and pig-headed, Gaudí was no exception to the rule that placed a premium on familiarity, loyalty, trust and cooperation. Whether it was at the chess tables of the Ateneu or through a mutual friend, the poet Joaquim Bartrina, that Gaudí met his next client, Salvador Pagès i Anglada, is not known but, importantly, they both hailed from Reus. A generation older than Gaudí, Pagès i Anglada had founded the textile business the Sociedad Cooperativa La Obrera Mataronense in 1864, in the small workers’ town of Gràcia on the borders of the Eixample. Within a decade, the success of the pioneering cooperative, clearly built on the legacy of English and Scottish utopian models, demanded a new factory in the town of Mataró, just fifteen kilometres north on the coastline in the fertile plain of the maresme. Most importantly, as the larder of Barcelona, Mataró was linked by direct railway to the expanding metropolis as early as 1848, the first in the Iberian Peninsula. Pagès i Anglada’s visionary project needed an architect sympathetic to his ideals, prepared to be original, and almost certainly cheap. Gaudí fitted the bill. It is interesting to note that at the same time as Gaudí was forging his friendship with Güell, he was also being courted by a potential rival whose philosophy might seem radically at odds. Few young architects looking for work can afford principles if they want to see their drawing-board fantasies realised at all. What is clear from Gaudí’s reaction, however, is that he responded to Pagès i Anglada’s brief with immense sympathy.
The factory complex of La Obrera Mataronense included all the various industrial buildings: fulling mills for cleaning the wool, thread stores, bleaching halls for the cotton, the perimeter security walls, a garden, a café-clubhouse, meeting rooms, the quaint workers’ latrines in the shape of a pillbox, a porter’s lodge and housing for thirty staff. As his first large-scale project, it demanded all Gaudí’s attention, and was to last five years. He was joined in the studio by a partner, Emili Cabanyes, who as Mataró’s town architect was busy planning its own eixample in partnership with the celebrated civil engineer and poet Melcior de Palau, whose claim to fame was sealed in 1878 by translating into Castilian Spanish the poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer’s prize-winning epic L’Atlàntida, which had just taken the Jocs Florals by storm. (Gaudí, just a few years later, would transform the mythical Atlàntida into bricks, mortar, adobe and stone for his client Eusebi Güell.)
As interesting as the building project for La Obrera Mataronense was, the business also needed, in Pagès i Anglada’s opinion, a full-scale corporate rebranding. Through a proper marketing strategy and the fashioning of a holistic identity they hoped to focus on their cooperative philosophy and their novel systems of work. Although Pagès i Anglada’s textile cooperative and the future Sagrada Família seem at first glance diametrically opposed, it is surprising how the similarities begin to surface if you just scratch at the skin.
Both the Sagrada Família and La Obrera were paternalistic and perhaps overly didactic; especially when scrutinised by the standards of today’s taste. On the factory walls Gaudí painted encouraging uplifting slogans such as ‘Comrade, be sound, practise kindness!’ and the wonderfully innocent, ‘Nothing is greater than fraternity.’ Patronising advice that might best be described as the idealistic morphing of a utopian tract and a self-help motivational manual or the result of a brainstorming session at a corny 1950s management seminar.
‘Do you wish to be an intelligent man? Be kind!’ it was further suggested. Unusually, the workers were also encouraged to think out of the box as they were warned that ‘Too much courtesy is proof of a false education’.
If La Obrera was a laboratory test that aimed to improve the quality of the working man, the Sagrada Família focused on saving his soul.
The symbolic metaphor that Gaudí found for La Obrera Mataronense was the image of the worker bee. Over the years it would develop as a leitmotif for many of his other commissions, where sweet honey and drudgery provide the perfect recipe for social success. On the cooperative banner and La Obrera’s official stationery letterhead the bees buzzed backwards and forwards as if magically working the looms.
In the opinion of an early biographer, César Martinell, Gaudí always remained true to his early fraternal support for the honest working man. Not surprisingly, it was in the craftsman that he always recognised both the vision and integrity of his father, Francesc. But, of course, as Catalonia changed around him and the conflictual relationship between labour and the means of production increased – and as violent anarchism took firm hold – Gaudí subtly shifted his position. According to Martinell: ‘In later years he retracted his liberal ways, but he never abandoned his labourist ideals, though he did cease to flaunt them. What he did was to substitute Christian charity for secular philanthropy.’
Today La Obrera Mataronense is a shadow of its former self. Many of the houses were never built as planned and the factory was finally abandoned. Gaudí’s most important building, the bleaching shed, has been recently restored to its former beauty and now houses the Bassat contemporary art collection. Inspired by Barcelona’s fourteenth-century Saló del Tinell, where Columbus allegedly offered Ferdinand and Isabella the Americas on his return, and other civic buildings like the great medieval boatbuilding yards, Gaudí went for the same spacious effect at a fraction of the price. Covering 600 square metres with one roof, Gaudí avoided the use of columns and load-bearing walls by creating grand semi-circular arches formed out of a three-plank-thick laminate carefully bolted together. It is a stunningly simple solution to a complex brief.
During the summer of 1882, while still deeply involved in his collaboration with Emilio Cabañes at Mataró, the greatest commission of Gaudí’s life – the Sagrada Família – had started without him.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising, considering that Gaudí had little more to show prospective clients than an unfinished factory, some lamp posts, a shop refit, a glass gazebo, a never-produced flower-stall-cum-urinal and some religious furniture. The Sagrada Família’s junta – board of works – could hardly have sanctioned even interviewing an architect with such a spare curriculum. It needed a miracle or a stroke of fortune for Gaudí to get a foot in the door.