Antoni Gaudi

 

The trees seemed rooted in a circle around the body, yearning upward into blue sky, surrounding him, protecting him. The man lay on his back, leaning against the smooth cellular bark of a giant Jacaranda. Crimson Bougainvillea twisted around the trunk and around his large, round head. Long sharp thorns pushed through his sweated hair and into his skin. A crown of blood and of Christ and of the womb of Holy Mother Mary ran down over a thick eyebrow, merged with his tears, flowed down the sad line cast between the large nose and cheek, disappeared into the dirty white and dark grey of his beard.

 
He tasted the earthy salt of forgiveness.

"Rosa", he thought he was calling out, "Rosa. Is father with you, here?"

The voice of his niece came from above the rustle of wind grinding bean pods. He searched for her face through dancing leaves, backlit filigree of shadow and light.

"I am here," rustled his father's voice, baritone, from beneath the twigs and leaves and crawling things. "Here, my good son, I am."

The man felt the earth push up against the weight of his body, limb after limb, lifting him, passing him tenderly from one branch to another, raising him higher and higher towards the light and Rosa's smile.

"Antoni," the voice, a breeze, called.

Antoni Placid Guillem Gaudi I Cornet, Antonio Gaudi, the architect, died a few days after being run over in Barcelona, Spain. As he lay on the small hospital bed, the blood on his lips cried, "O, mi familia. Sagrada Familia mia."

No person recognized the old man lying across the tracks of the tram at the intersection of Carrer de Bailen and the Gran Via, the intersection of dying and of living. His threadbare dusty black coat, too large now for the frail frame, his common, worn hard shoes, gave away nothing that Spain's favorite son, lay dying.

And I knew the man and I could not go to him. It is not my place to interfere. I watch and I wonder. This was his time and dear Antoni, this man among men, walked always in too much pain.

Like me, he came into this world and left this world, in the month of June, perfect summer June, his Catalonia summer June.

I remember watching him as a child in the fields of high mountain flowers. He studied everything. He touched everything. He felt too much, Antoni. Sometimes he would quietly cry as he listened to the music of living things dying and sometimes he would scream, in silence, angry at a world that would not live forever.

 

Come with me to the architect's home, Antoni's last home. It lies close to the cloisters of La Family Sagrada, his cathedral. 
Antoni considered this place, his greatest calling. He lived the architecture of La Sagrada Familia for forty three years. It was his passion, his "insuranza," his quest to merge with all things natural.

The stones like leaves, the columns, like trees, the wonder of his organic understanding, held the dome of his home, dematerialized, moving, thrusting, wanting God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come, please, come know the man's home. You will better understand the architect.

In the expanse of spaces of La Familia Sagrada, Antoni, at seventy, made his home.

The room was monkish. His small, hard bed sat quiet, tightly made, in a pointed arched niche. An old oak scribe's desk and stool sheltered the end of the bed from the rest of the room which was just large enough for a table, a dining chair, a worn overstuffed sofa and ottoman. The two walls opposite a round stained glass portal were papered with bookshelves and all manner of manuscript; Philosophy, History, Economics, Aesthetics, social works and political magazines, stacks of newspapers. Next to the scribe's desk, a bible stood on its own pedestal, imposing, stiff, open.

Everything had its place and everything was in its place. The room seemed subdued, grounded, foundational. From this small anchor the architect could release his will and creativity. The walls of his room seemed the empty cardboard coverings of a great book of living dreams, impossible forms and resplendent colors.

Antoni was anything but in his place during his studies at Provincial School and University. He did not, particularly, stand out. His grades were not splendid, except when he picked up his pencil or his pen, to draw. When he drew, he grew. It seemed he knew everything, as if he were the structure itself. He somehow understood the building in its entirety and how it would assemble itself. He drew as well, the essence and mood of the place.

Ha. I recall, in one of his first projects, he was asked to design the entry to a cemetery. Antoni drew from his childhood memory a hearse and sad people following, in black. He drew the sorrow and the pain and the dark unknown. He never designed the gate.

"This man is either a genius or he is insane," the professor posed, the drawing having moved him emotionally.

University passed him with highest honors. They were moved to do so, not yet for his technical skills but his ability to abstract pure emotion. Then, in 1879, February, when it came time for the director of the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura to grant Antoni the title of Architect, Gaudi told his friends, "I am an architect already. I have always been an architect. I will forever be an architect."

Some considered his statement boastful, prideful.

I do not. He simply knew what he was. He struggled, always, to know who he was but he was perfectly sure of what he was and what it was he was to do.

 
I tell you, if you had known dear Antoni in those days, ah, he was, algo raro, something rare. Antoni never married. I don't think he cared for the company of women or for that matter, men. His mistress was design. He loved her fiercely through the emotions of his forms, the poetry of space.

 
Antoni disconnected from the need of companionship after his mother passed. He seemed content, settling into a simple relationship with his father and niece, Rosa.

He loved Rosa most honorably. He read to her from gothic novels, he showed her the fantasies of the architecture called Gothic. Rosa loved her Uncle and his passion. She imagined him in gold and purple robes as he painted his passion for space, in words.

"Rosa," he stood with arms raised, "Gothic, Rosa, is space reaching, stretching, vaulting, pointing to the idea of God. Creator. The weight of structure, of things base, of things heavy, dematerializes into light and stained glass. Gravity is overcome. I can fly."

Arte Nouveau, the art of the common man, tearing from the rigidity of social structure, inspired Antoni to examine nature again, as he had as a child in the mountains, to copy nature, to let nature carve everything.

Antoni, the architect, was but ornament in the firmament of the heavens. His, filament, his light was founded always in nature. His visions honored God and creation, twisting, turning, proclamations of abandonment and worship. Through design, Antoni found forgiveness, of being human. The work allowed him to feel worthy. He worked hard his entire life, to be worthy. He had little patience for those around him who did not understand his passion.

"Gent de camp, gent de lamp," "People from the country are quick-tempered people."

Antoni often would not control his temper because he felt it dishonest. If a workman was negligent in his assignment, Antoni would chastise him and pick up the trowel and do the work himself. He could lay stone, apply plaster and sculpt it perfectly, instantly into hardened facsimiles of his drawings and he could do this often better than the workers. Yes, Antoni could be hard but he was also full of love for the people, the small ones. He enjoyed more than anything, seeing the awe and wonder in the people's eyes as they looked at his creations, God's creations, he honestly believed were delivered through him.

 
The people so loved Antoni.

Ha! I remember one day, so clearly. I listened from the balcony of a wealthy industrialist as he interviewed Antoni for one of his first commissions. The wealthy man considered himself an intellectual, one of the elite, the Bourgeoisie. He found Antoni dressed well, if not a bit dandily but noticed too, the old and scuffed shoes.

"Senor Gaudi," opened the industrialist, "I am considering extending a commission, a prestigious commission, mind you, to an architect who may have the mastery of this Arte Nouveau, an architect to design and build my castle."

Antoni barked, "Senor, you see my shoes. I do not forget where I came from and while I will never turn my back on the working class, those backs upon which you have built your wealth, I would consider it an honor, to you and to the people who have gifted you this privilege to retain my services, to design and build, as you demand, your castle."

Antoni built for Manuel Vicens, the ceramics mogul, a castle like no other castle and people were indeed honored, in that Antoni required hundreds of craftsmen, hundreds of the people, thousands of hours and the industrialist's money to produce the uniquely shaped stone and concrete and stucco and the seemingly unending colored ceramic tiles, cast in wonderful, organic, orgiastic sculpture.

 

But it seemed that God continually called Antoni back to the work of God. It was in the Work of God that dear Antoni truly disappeared into his work. The pain of losing first his mother then his father and finally, so sad for Antoni, the last of his family, Rosa, his  dear niece Rosa, whom he had sent away to school only to pass away, his pain tolerable only as he dove into his work with abandon.

 

Abandonment of precedence freed Antoni. Abandonment of collective reason liberated Antoni. Abandonment of the norm, the expected, the rhetoric, ripped the shackles of guilt off the wrists of Antoni and his hands could create, unabashedly, again forgiven.

 

The building authorities complained that his next projects, Palau Guell, Palacia de Astorga and a home located on the central square of Leon, appeared unstable, too monumental and medieval, too unlike everything else around it.
Ah, Antoni so enjoyed the fray.

And the fray propelled him. His commitment to expressing, without compromise, his joyous rapture found in Nature, God's creation, propelled him beyond the critics.

Commission after commission, homes and tombs for the wealthy, the Transatlantic Pavilion for the Barcelona World Fair in 1888, the Episcopal Palace, the School of the Theresians and still, Antoni felt he was looked down upon by official organizations. The City of Barcelona asked him to design only lampposts.

Dear Antoni turned inward, ever more inward as his expressions pushed further and further from the expected and normal.

He found a deep satisfaction in the act creation, especially when it was considered controversial. His work on Guell Park, a garden-city utopian model of social living, demonstrated how Antoni worshiped God through Nature. The land's natural shape was not altered, every existing tree became sacrosanct, none were felled.

Antoni believed in using local materials and workers. He enjoyed reusing things that might otherwise, be thrown away. His art often, incorporated discarded and broken ceramics. 
But when Church authorities removed Antoni from design of the Choir at the Cathedral in Palma de Mallorca, because they considered his work a betrayal of the church's original style, Antoni took the insult poorly. After all, this was God's work through him. He would never understand and he would never bend.

Instead, our Antoni, ventured even further on the thinning limb of his expression.

 

Balconies that moved in giant, mocking smiles, columns like giant, chiseled human bones, weighty stalactites of stone over entries, compressing to make humble, pilasters as trees randomly stretching upward into arching limbs, windows and skylights dragging the eyes every upward into the void, the chimneys, a crowd of stiff, smoking, humanity, his work was indeed a prayer in loud song.

 

His mother, his father, then his dearest Rosa, died. His most faithful collaborator, Francesco Berenguer Mestres, died. His confident, Doctor Torras I Bages, Archbishop of Vic, his confessor, died. His best client, made friend, Eusebi Guell died.  The Mila family sued him, feeling they had paid him too much to have a home entitled "insane" by the critics. Finally, the economic meltdown in 1914 stopped work on most of his work.

Antoni moved into the small, quiet room in his Familia Sagrada and for the rest of his life, here, he devoted his pain and grief and faith and forgiveness to his architecture's prayer, to his own and final dematerialization.

Antoni was ten days shy of seventy four when he tripped and fell across the tracks, a vagabond, unrecognized.

 

 

 

There are many who call him, "God's Architect." I understand why they would say this.

God is Architect and has called Antoni home. There, a chair in his honor is now filled.

I am Stonethrower. I travel through time and know the architects.
 

 

Next week, Stonethrower will introduce us to his first employer, the Egyptian doctor, scribe, high priest and architect, Imhotep.