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Antoni Gaudí biography

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Quick Facts

  • NAME: Antoni Gaudí
  • OCCUPATION: Architect
  • BIRTH DATE: June 25, 1862
  • DEATH DATE: June 10, 1926
  • EDUCATION: Provincial School of Architecture
  • PLACE OF BIRTH: Reus, Spain
  • PLACE OF DEATH: Barcelona, Spain
more about Antoni

Best Known For

Antoni Gaud was a Catalan architect, whose distinctive style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous color and texture, and organic unity.


Synopsis

Born on June 25, 1852, in Reus, Spain, Antoni Gaud was an architect whose works became, except for certain overt symbols of nature or religion, essentially representations of their structure and materials, remarkable for their range of forms, textures, and polychromy and for the free, expressive way in which these elements of his art seem to be composed.

(born June 25, 1852, Reus, Spain—died June 10, 1926, Barcelona) Catalan architect, whose distinctive style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous colour and texture, and organic unity. Gaudí worked almost entirely in or near Barcelona. Much of his career was occupied with the construction of the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Família), which was unfinished at his death in 1926.

Life

Gaudí was born in provincial Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Of humble origins, he was the son of a coppersmith who was to live with him in later life, together with a niece; Gaudí never married. Showing an early interest in architecture, he went in 1869/70 to study in Barcelona, then the political and intellectual centre of Catalonia as well as Spain's most modern city. He did not graduate until eight years later, his studies having been interrupted by military service and other intermittent activities.

Gaudí's style of architecture went through several phases. On emergence from the Provincial School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1878, he practiced a rather florid Victorianism that had been evident in his school projects, but he quickly developed a manner of composing by means of unprecedented juxtapositions of geometric masses, the surfaces of which were highly animated with patterned brick or stone, gay ceramic tiles, and floral or reptilian metalwork. The general effect, although not the details, is Moorish—or Mudéjar, as Spain's special mixture of Muslim and Christian design is called. Examples of his Mudéjar style are the Casa Vicens (1878–80) and El Capricho (1883–85) and the Gell Estate and Gell Palace of the later 1880s, all but El Capricho located in Barcelona. Next, Gaudí experimented with the dynamic possibilities of historic styles: the Gothic in the Episcopal Palace, Astorga (1887–93), and the Casa de los Botines, León (1892–94); and the Baroque in the Casa Calvet at Barcelona (1898–1904). But after 1902 his designs elude conventional stylistic nomenclature.

Except for certain overt symbols of nature or religion, Gaudí's buildings became essentially representations of their structure and materials. In his Villa Bell Esguard (1900–02) and the Gell Park (1900–14), in Barcelona, and in the Colonia Gell Church (1898– 1915), south of that city, he arrived at a type of structure that has come to be called equilibrated—that is, a structure designed to stand on its own without internal bracing, external buttressing, and the like—or, as Gaudí observed, as a tree stands. Among the primary elements of his system were piers and columns that tilt to transmit diagonal thrusts, and thin-shell, laminated tile vaults that exert very little thrust. Gaudí applied his equilibrated system to two multistoried Barcelona apartment buildings: the Casa Batlló (1904–06), a renovation that incorporated new equilibrated elements, notably the facade; and the Casa Milá (1905–10), the several floors of which are structured like clusters of tile lily pads

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