No architect is more completely identified with a single city than Antoni Gaudí is with Barcelona. In little more than forty years he gave the Catalan capital a skyline of stone waves, broken-tile colour and a basilica still unfinished a century after his death. Cultural Heritage Online keeps his major works in its archive; this is the life behind them.
Reus, Barcelona and a coppersmith’s eye
Gaudí was born on 25 June 1852 in the Tarragona region — Reus by most accounts, Riudoms by others — into a family of coppersmiths. He always credited that workshop upbringing for his feel for volume and three-dimensional form. He studied at the Barcelona Higher School of Architecture and qualified in 1878. The story runs that the director, handing over the diploma, said he had given it either to a genius or to a madman.
Güell
The decisive meeting of his career was with Eusebi Güell, a wealthy industrialist who became his patron and gave him a free hand. For Güell he built the Palau Güell in the old city, the hillside Park Güell above Barcelona, and the crypt of the Colònia Güell workers’ village at Santa Coloma de Cervelló, where he tested the leaning columns and catenary arches he would use everywhere. A patron who did not ask for restraint let Gaudí become fully himself.
The Modernista houses
Gaudí was the boldest figure of Catalan Modernisme, the politically charged local branch of Art Nouveau. His first major commission, Casa Vicens, already broke with every convention of the Barcelona apartment block. He went on to remodel Casa Batlló into a shimmering, bone-like facade on the Passeig de Gràcia, and to raise Casa Milà — the building Barcelona nicknamed La Pedrera, «the quarry» — as a cliff of undulating stone with a roof of sculpted chimneys. He drew his forms from nature and his surfaces from trencadís, the mosaic of broken tile that is now shorthand for the city itself.
The Sagrada Família
From 1883 Gaudí took charge of the Basílica de la Sagrada Família, and it slowly consumed him. As the years passed he gave up other work, moved into his workshop on the site, and turned the design into a structural and religious summa — a forest of branching columns carrying towers he knew he would never see finished. Increasingly ascetic and devout, he treated the church less as a commission than as a vocation. It was still a building site at his death, and it remains one today.
Death
On 7 June 1926, walking as he did every evening from the Sagrada Família toward the church of Sant Felip Neri for his prayers, Gaudí was struck by a tram. Shabbily dressed and carrying no papers, he was taken for a pauper and given only basic care before he was recognised. He died three days later, on 10 June 1926, and was buried in the crypt of the Sagrada Família — one of the few parts of the church he had seen completed. His Barcelona works are today inscribed, in stages, on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
In the archive
Follow Antoni Gaudí across Cultural Heritage Online — the buildings he raised in and around Barcelona, and the anniversaries we mark:
- Sagrada Família, Barcelona — the basilica he devoted his last decades to, still unfinished.
- Casa Batlló, Barcelona — the bone-and-glass facade on the Passeig de Gràcia.
- Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona — the cliff of stone the city nicknamed «the quarry».
- Park Güell, Barcelona — the mosaic hillside park for his patron Eusebi Güell.
- Casa Vicens, Barcelona — his first major house, and a UNESCO site.
- Palau Güell, Barcelona — the town palace he built for the Güell family.
- Torre Bellesguard, Barcelona — his neo-Gothic house on a medieval royal site.
- Church of Colònia Güell — the crypt where he tested his structural ideas.
- Barcelona — Gaudí and the Catalan Modernisme — the movement in context.
- 25 June 1852 — the birth of Antoni Gaudí, in the CHO anniversary calendar.
- 10 June 1926 — the death of Antoni Gaudí.
