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Antoni Gaudí i Cornet [3] ( / ɡaʊˈdi / gow-DEE, / ˈɡaʊdi / GOW-dee, Catalan: [ənˈtɔni ɣəwˈði]; [4] 25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926) was a Catalan architect and designer from Spain, known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism. [5] Gaudí's works have a highly individualized, sui generis style. Most are located in Barcelona ...
- Architect
- 10 June 1926 (aged 73), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
- Overview
- Life
- Legacy
Antoni Gaudí was a Catalan architect whose distinctive style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous colour and texture, and organic unity. The close integration between the construction, form, and decoration of Gaudí’s buildings reveals his interest in nature and his belief that the structure of a natural object informs its shape and embellishment.
What is Antoni Gaudí famous for?
Much of Antoni Gaudí’s career was occupied with the construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. It was unfinished at his death in 1926. Other notable projects included Park Güell, Casa Milá, and Casa Batlló, all also in Barcelona.
How was Antoni Gaudí educated?
Showing an early interest in architecture, Antoni Gaudí went to study in Barcelona in 1869/70 and entered the Provincial School of Architecture in 1874. His studies were interrupted by military service and other intermittent activities, but he graduated in 1878.
What was Antoni Gaudí’s family like?
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.
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Artists, Painters, & Architects
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 Güell Estate and Güell 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 Güell Park (1900–14), in Barcelona, and in the Colonia Güell Church (1898–c. 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 with steel-beam veins. As was so often his practice, he designed the two buildings, in their shapes and surfaces, as metaphors of the mountainous and maritime character of Catalonia.
As an admired, if eccentric, architect, Gaudí was an important participant in the Renaixensa, an artistic revival of the arts and crafts combined with a political revival in the form of fervent anti-Castilian “Catalanism.” Both movements sought to reinvigorate the way of life in Catalonia that had long been suppressed by the Castilian-dominated and Madrid-centred government in Spain. The religious symbol of the Renaixensa in Barcelona was the Sagrada Família, a project that was to occupy Gaudí throughout his entire career. He was commissioned to build this church as early as 1883, but he did not live to see it finished. Working on it, he became increasingly pious. After 1910 he abandoned virtually all other work and even eventually secluded himself on its site and resided in its workshop. In 1926, while on his way to vespers, Gaudí was struck down by a trolley car, and he died from the injuries just a few weeks shy of his 74th birthday. After Gaudí’s death, work continued on the Sagrada Família well into the 21st century. In 2010 the uncompleted church was consecrated as a basilica by Pope Benedict XVI.
The architectural work of Gaudí is remarkable for its range of forms, textures, and polychromy and for the free, expressive way in which these elements of his art seem to be composed. The complex geometries of a Gaudí building so coincide with its architectural structure that the whole, including its surface, gives the appearance of being a natural...
Apr 2, 2014 · Antoni Gaudí was a Barcelona-based Spanish architect whose free-flowing works were greatly influenced by nature. Updated: Mar 31, 2021 Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Casa Vicens. The Casa Vicens, opened to the public for the first time in 2017, is often considered Gaudí's first significant work. Conveniently for Gaudí, the project was a residence for the tile and brick manufacturer Manuel Vicens i Montaner, who had just inherited the land from his mother-in-law when he hired Gaudí in 1877, though construction would not start until 1882.
- Catalan
- June 25, 1852
- Reus, Catalonia, Spain
- June 10, 1926
The Works of Antoni Gaudí is a serial property consisting of seven buildings by the architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) located in Barcelona and its surrounding areas. The property attests to the exceptional creative contribution of this architect to the development of architecture and construction technology in the 19th and early 20th ...
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Antoni Gaudí was born on 25 June 1852 in Reus, then the second-largest city in Catalonia. He went to primary school at Escoles Pies, where he excelled in geometry and arithmetic and received a traditional religious education in the humanities. The son of a potsmith, he began learning the trade in his father's workshop in 1860.
Antoni Gaudí was born on the 25th of June 1852 in Reus, according to some biographers, although others claim that he was born in Riudoms, a small village near Reus where his family spent their summers. He came from a family of boilermakers, a fact that allowed the young Gaudí to acquire a special skill for working with space and volume as he ...
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