Antoni Gaudí and his influence to modern architecture

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, known as the “most ingenious of all architects”, was born in 1852 in Spain and died in 1926. Gaudí was a member of the Centre Excursionista, a club that organised pilgrims to the historical sites of the once glorious past of Catalonia, and his works were most celebrated by the Renaixença, the quest for a Catalan unique identity and national independence.
However, Gaudí’s international fame as a visionary was established for another reason. According to Curtis (1982 p. 29), Gaudí is one of the most curious and original architects of the past two hundred years. The most influential elements of Gaudí’s work are the incorporation of the natural environment to the urban habitat, and the pioneering approach to the building as a vital part of the city and as a plastic site of interaction between the rational and the romantic. In the renowned works of Casa Milá, Park Güell, and Sagrada Família, Gaudí has creatively interwoven the private with the public, explored his vision of the modern city, and confessed the anxiety of modern life.
At the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th, Barcelona, like other cities, was experiencing rapid financial and spatial development, notwithstanding in unequal proportions. Gaudí, with characteristic forward-looking optimism, begun to design new garden suburbs and blocks of flats that were aligned, in style and function, to the new identity of the city. Works such as Casa Milá, Barcelona (1906-10) reflected the transformations of the city and of the new life in the city. Thus, Casa Milá’s ornamental motifs expressed the luxury and splendour of the newly found industrial wealth, but also anxiety, agonising insecurity, and an explicit fragility (de Solà-Morales, 2003 p. 10).
In addition, Casa Milá reflected the polarisation between nature and the city, and between naturalism and the dynamism of urban structures. Commonly known as “La Pedrera” meaning the quarry, Casa Milá’s wave-sculptured façade suggests a seaside cliff; yet the curved designs of the rooftop ventilations rise over and beyond the habitual and invite the vision of a triumphant future. Such aspirations are also to be found in the works of other Modernist architects and Gaudí’s chimney designs are, for example, present in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles (1947-53).
Another example of how Gaudí’s work gave birth to the Modernist vision of the city and influenced modern architecture is Park Güell. Commissioned in 1900 as a middle-class suburb of 60 single units, suited on Montaña Pelada, and overlooking the city of Barcelona, Park Güell emerged as an oasis of tranquillity, but also as its designer’s enthusiastic vision to incorporate and to balance the natural environment with a functional habitat. For example, the roof of the market meant to serve also as the plaza of the community, and the snake-like ribbon of benches that embrace it were designed by Gaudí to the measures of his own body. Yet underneath its elaborated surface, the terrace is connected to a massive water-storage system.
Park Güell transcends traditional architecture for two reasons. First, the complicity of its multi-layer structure, as explained above, transcends the limits of human experience. Second, by this work, Gaudí exceeds being a mere architect and becomes himself the new, multi-layered modern man, being at once the architect, the designer, the painter, and the sculptor. Such innovative solutions to the utility of open spaces and insights to the multi-function of the architect will soon form a pivotal point for future architectural designs, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1935).
A final example of Gaudí’s influential work is the unfinished church of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona (1883-1926). Unlike the peaceful, fluid co-existence of urban characteristics found in Park Güell, Sagrada Família is explicit of the fragility and insecurity of modern life. The rational construction of various parabolic and hyperbolic forms corbelled at the middle optimises the structural forces, but also offers the ultimate religious experience. This is so because Gaudí not only paid attention to the working of forces beneath the elaborated surface, but also compelled the ornamentation itself to become the expression of these inner forces. Years later, Santiago Calatrava acknowledged his debt to Gaudí’s empirical studies (Johnson, Langmead, 1997 p. 50).
Sagrada Família is a gigantic challenge, which reincarnates Gothic architecture and where every detail plays an aesthetic role in the work’s totality. Indeed, Gaudí’s complex vocabulary is so elaborated with symbolism and heavy on multiple allusions at all levels, that Salvador Dalí admitted that Gaudí ‘sought to appeal to every human means of perception’ (Dalí, 1971 [n.p]). By the use of allegory and metaphor in a panorama of geometrical symbols, animals and plants, and figures in relief or sculpture, Gaudí achieved a universal language.
In conclusion, Gaudí is one of the most prominent and influential architects, and according to Jenks (1977 p. 97), the only architect who really uses a pluralist language to produce multivalent works. Gaudí’s personal style incorporates Moorish elements, Gothic motifs, and Art Nouveau with a sense of quality and measure, without loosing its universal appeal. Further, Gaudí’s work has been influential because it does not merely elaborate structural principles; rather, it embraces profound conjunctions of the subjective and the scientific, of the spiritual and the material, and of the phantasmagorical and the practical.
Even so, Gaudí’s works tend towards eclecticism and exclusion, since their elaborated designs spurn standardised mass production and are made to be enjoyed by the privileged few. For instance, Park Güell may counterbalance the increasing industrialisation of the cities (Zerbst, 1997 p. 140-1); however, this seems a highly individualistic measure, suggesting a private bubble of elitist security and isolation rather than aspiring to the transformation of society as a whole.
All the same, Gaudí has changed our understanding of architecture because he has skilfully managed to give language and shape to utter spatial fantasy, while at the same time paying attention to the deeper structures and transformative forces. The harmony and variety of curves and overlapping surfaces found in Gaudí’s work attain a fluidity of neutral forms, and sublimate architectural experience to the realm of the surreal. The endless interplay between the building and its surroundings and the elaborated façades that project into the interior of living spaces transform what we experience and inhabit into a tangible vision of a peaceful co-existence between nature and the city.