The Thing about Gaudí

Physics and faith before fashion

On my introduction to Gaudí as a teen I couldn’t believe the name wasn’t a joke - that the author of this kitsch fantasy was basically called gaudy. Turns out that’s a co-incidence, and happily, for lovers of nominative determinism, gaudete means rejoice in Latin, and joy, or enjoyment in Catalan.

Gaudi’s work was presented as an isolated oddity, as separate from the Modernist art history trajectory of inevitable march towards minimalism. With perhaps a nod to the Surrealism of fellow Catalan Dalí. I made a note to investigate this Catalan context - not for nothing that Marxist art history education. Turns out he had contemporaries with similarities, that there was certainly a scene; that his world of nature, religion, colonialism and Catalanism does make some sense of his work, as much as there is sense to be made. In any case, the myth of the isolated, divinely inspired male genius is one celebrated, if not invented, by Modernism, so in a way as a person he fits in perfectly.

Casa Mila at night

Park Guell

And yet. And yet there is something unique about his work. There were others, more than is widely known, working the exuberant organic curls, the coloured mosaics, the ironwork, the Catalan symbolism. Gaudi makes use of them, but they’re not what makes him exceptional. Some of Gaudí’s most breath-taking work, the real pulse-quickening stuff, is simple, austere even.

The Teresian convent, the upstairs room at Bellesguard, have a limited pallet. They’re abstracted, restrained forms with an exquisite use of space and light, with no sign of the baroque excess for which he’s known. These are put together with an astonishing attention to detail. In his peers, attention to detail looks like gesantkunstwerk, or concern for the total design, in practice matching the cutlery to the chimney. While Gaudi certainly did this, designing the furniture for many of his buildings, more important to him is real life working detail, user experience, or experiential design, as my son would call it.

There are examples in every building. From that upstairs room at Bellesguard hosts can see guests arriving without being seen. The famously curly Park Guell bench encourages social interaction – you naturally face other sitters. Seat moulds were taken from builders’ bums to ensure comfort. Casa Batlló and Casa Mila have interior courtyards with graduated coloured tiles and murals that reflect light all the way down to their cavernous depths. The divine is in the detail, not the showy flourishes.

What makes Gaudí different isn’t use of flowery Modernista motifs, it’s his dedication to sheer invention. Although aware of both international developments and local style, especially in his earlier career, he wasn’t looking to his peers for inspiration. It’s often said that artists look to nature, in fact it’s been said about millions of artists since the beginning of time, so now sounds trite. However, I’ll go so far as to say you haven’t seen looking to nature until you’ve seen Gaudi. Where, say, William Morris, produced a stylised version of vines, Gaudi was studying the actual structure of a tree and the shapes and forces that held it up. Anyone who has visited the interior of the Sagrada Familia will find a man-made forest, featuring heads of broccoli, human bones and twisted tree trunks . Plants, gravity, trajectories, orbits, water fountains were his sourcebook- the physics and aesthetics of nature.

At Colonia Güell the structure reflects the natural environment rather than any existing buildings. Coloured glass windows are designed to illuminate the space during services and seating is moulded to body shape.

Colonia Guell crypt

His signature dish parabolic arch is a funicular shape (half an egg, not half a circle), resulting when a suspended cable is loaded uniformly across its span. We have photos of his gravity experiments – a series of small weights on a wire, photographed then the image inverted to achieve the perfectly balanced, load-bearing arch. He looked to the Catalan Gothic arch but was able to take it a step further. His parabolic arch is slightly wider at the base, sometimes asymmetric, with no need for buttresses.

Casa Mila roof exterior

Sometimes natural inspiration came from the underlying physics, and sometimes it was a straight visual copy. Gaudi’s trademark four-armed cross (so-called, but I’d say that’s five arms…) appears on Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Bellesguard, seems to have been directly taken from the Cypress tree cone, which grows in the garden of the latter. Famously much of the Sagrada Familia decoration is made up of life plaster casts of workers, animals, plants.

So what of Gaudi’s contemporaries, also making use of the playful modernista tropes - the grandstanding colours and curls and turrets? Less artfully thrown in the mix, the elements can come out as Disneyland. Delightful at first glimpse, but unsatisfying on closer inspection. Better at a distance, like a fairground – see the pretty mosaics of Casa Comalat.

Buildings like this do us the favour of illustrating by default what it is that makes Gaudí special. We come for the tiles and the swirls, but we stay for something more timeless and satisfying – for the sense of a structure at once both ground-breaking and ancient, for the way our progression through the building has been thought through to an extra degree, for the consideration of changing natural light. It’s the privilege of an architect unconcerned with limitations of time and money in the pursuit of the excellent, the original, the heavenly.  Elements of his work were fashionable, or at least contemporary, but this was always secondary to his joint muses of faith and nature.

Like all genuine eccentrics Gaudi didn’t imagine he was eccentric, or that his work was wacky. He wasn’t looking to another soul on earth for validation or inspiration, and in not doing so managed to create the genuinely unique and other-worldly.