ArtWay meditation: Antoni Gaudi

My latest meditation for ArtWay is on the work of Antoni Gaudi. In the meditation, I say:

Gaudi "described nature as ‘the Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read’ and thought that ‘everything structural or ornamental that an architect might imagine was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes or dry bones, in a beetle's shining wing case or the thrust of an ancient olive trunk’ ...  first and overall impressions of his work are ones of exuberance and abundance characterised by the sinuous, sensuous curves and colours of his works. Whether we are encountering the wavelike benches at Park Güell or the decorations on the roof of the Sagrada, Gaudí's work possesses an ecstatic sense of natural beauty."

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Van Morrison - Be Thou My Vision.

Josep Maria Subirachs RIP

The sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, who has died aged 87, is mainly associated with his controversial sculptures for the Passion Facade of Antoni Gaudí's famous Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona.

The Guardian's obituary states that he "recovered the human figure in the mid-1960s and developed his mature expressionist style of rough-surfaced, sharp-angled and anguished figures, such as can be seen in the Passion Facade" of the Sagrada Familia.

"Not counting the Passion Facade, he has an extraordinary 70 sculptures in Barcelona's public spaces." I saw some of these works last year, including the Monument to Macià (1991) in Barcelona's central square, the Plaça de Catalunya: "The truncated, upside-down staircase suggests the unfinished construction of Catalonia, while the solid chunks of travertine stone express the solidity of the stateless nation's foundations. Tiny writing on the history of Catalonia and on the life of Francesc Macià, the region's first modern president, covers the blocks of stone."

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Barcelona - Please Don't Go.

Antoni Gaudí - God's Architect

My latest travelogue piece for ArtWay concerns Antoni Gaudí and covers visits to the Sagrada Familia and Colonia Güell Crypt:

"Gaudí is the great sculptor who utilises natural form in his work both for utilitarian and aesthetic reasons. He described nature as ‘the Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read’ and, as [Robert] Hughes recognised, thought that ‘everything structural or ornamental that an architect might imagine was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes or dry bones, in a beetle's shining wing case or the thrust of an ancient olive trunk.’" 

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Duke Special - Why Does Anybody Love?

Gaudí and biomimetics

The National Geographic has an interesting article arguing that the Sagrada Família's nature-inspired design is ahead of its time:

'Gaudí based his buildings on a simple premise: If nature is the work of God, and if architectural forms are derived from nature, then the best way to honor God is to design buildings based on his work. As the Barcelona scholar Joan Bassegoda Nonell notes, "Gaudí's famous phrase, 'originality is returning to the origin,' means that the origin of all things is nature, created by God." Gaudí's faith was his own. But his belief in the beautiful efficiency of natural engineering clearly anticipated the modern science of biomimetics.'

Biomimetics involves applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields.

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Neil Young - Natural Beauty.

Colonia Güell and Gaudí's Crypt

The construction of Colonia Güell began in 1890 at the initiative of the entrepreneur Eusebi Güell in his textile estate of Santa Coloma de Cervelló. Construction of the factory began in 1890. A mere year later the first building was completed and the steam machine dedicated to spinning was started. Afterwards, the rest of the buildings, each aimed at drying, tinting, etc in order to complete cotton’s process of transformation. Each of the buildings that made up the factory had a different role in the process of transforming cotton into fabric. A set of rails and cartwheels were installed throughout the factory in order to facilitate the transportation of materials between the aforementioned buildings.

The factory of the Colonia Güell was its central nucleus and raison d’etre. Dedicated to the production of several types of cloths, its main difference with other textile factories of the time was that it used coal in lieu of hydraulic energy.
Industrial colonies where conceived as a socioeconomic organization whose main goal was industrial productivity. The mill took up most of the time of the men and women of the colony, for them it was the guarantee of having a regular income in times of economic scarcity. In contrast to most industrial colonies in Catalonia, Güell worked to improve the social conditions of his workers and applied his cultural patronage in the Colonia, providing it with cultural and religious facilities of a modernist design which were developed by different architects, most notably Antoni Gaudí to whom he entrusted in 1898 the building of the church.

Over the next few years, Gaudí carried out various preliminary studies which culminated in a model which was placed in a pavilion located in the hill were the building would later be erected. The construction of the temple began in 1908. However, the ambitious project which foresaw a church with two naves, lower and upper, topped by different towers and a 40 meters high central dome would remain unfinished. In 1914 the Güell family decided to stop financing the church and Gaudí abandoned the project. In November 1915 the bishop of Barcelona consecrated the lower nave, the only one to have been built, which made the church be popularly known as the crypt.

During the textile crisis of 1973 the mill ceased its production which had a big social impact in the Colonia. Over the next few years, the property was sold; the mill was divided and sold to different companies, the houses to their inhabitants and the facilities and land to the public institutions.
In 1990 the Colonia Güell was declared 'Heritage of Cultural Interest' by the Spanish government and the protection of some of its most relevant buildings was established. The Crypt was declared a  World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2005.

Visitors can still walk around the industrial Colonia and visit Gaudí's church, all the while observing beautiful, singular buildings created by modernist architects.

The Crypt of Colònia Güell is a culminating point in Gaudi's work including for the first time practically all of his architectural innovations. He stated that without the large-scale experiments he undertook there, he would not have dared apply those same geometries to the Sagrada Familia. It is the place where, according to Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, he ‘overcame all established limits regarding shapes.’

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Gungor - Beautiful Things. 

One of the world's most sublime architectural spaces

I've been re-watching Robert Hughes' Antoni Gaudi: God's Architect, from his Visions of Space series, in which he examines the legend of Antoni Gaudi, whose buildings have left an indelible mark on the city of Barcelona. Despite his austerely religious lifestyle, Gaudi's innovative genius created some of the most soulful and expressive buildings ever seen.

Hughes noted that the country round Tarragona, where Gaudi grew up, is archetypally Mediterranean, hard stony country where almond trees and olives flourish in the unforgiving soil:

'Growing up there, Gaudí developed a passionate curiosity about its plants, animals and geology. Nature, he said later, was "The Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read". Everything structural or ornamental that an architect might imagine was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes or dry bones, in a beetle's shining wing case or the thrust of an ancient olive trunk.

He never ceased to draw on nature. Each paving-block of Passeig de Gracia features a starfish and an octopus, originally designed for the Casa Batlló. Turtles and tortoises support the columns of the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Familia, which also has 30 different species of stone plant copied from the vegetation of Catalunya and the Holy Land. Mushrooms become domes, or columns of the Casa Calvet. Gaudí was particularly fond of mushrooms. Most Catalans are, yet Gaudí not only perceived in them a possible origin of the column and capital, but also used a fong, a poisonous amanita mushroom, for one of the ceramic entrance domes of the Parc Güell. The columns of his masterpiece the Güell Crypt are a grove of brick trunks, sending out branches - the ribbed vaults - that lace into one another.'

Similarly, Stephen Crittenden writes:

'"NOTHING IN the world has been invented," Gaudí once said. "The act of inventing consists in seeing what God has placed before the eyes of all humanity." In a small room in the Sagrada Familia's cloister, a permanent exhibition, Gaudí & Natura, offers a key to interpreting all this wonder by revealing the building's "deep structure."

The exhibition's curator, Jordi Cussó i Anglès, was for 50 years the head model-maker in the Sagrada Familia workshop. A naturalist who played a leading role in researching and restoring Gaudí's smashed plaster models, using superb graphics he shows how it was from Gaudí's intense study of the natural world, and especially the plants of his native Catalunya, that the architect distilled the complex geometrical shapes — paraboloids, hyperboloids and conoids — that he used in the church. The cone of the Mediterranean cypress becomes the distinctive five-armed cross Gaudí uses on top of many of his spires. Seashells inspire spiraling stairwells. An undulating rooftop imitates the curved surface of a leaf. The slender branching columns of the Sagrada Familia's nave imitate the cross-sections of tree-trunks and the patterns of plant growth.'

While Hughes considered that the Sagrada Familia (or, to give its full name, the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family) is beyond rival the best-known structure in Catalonia and 'is to Barcelona what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris or the Harbour Bridge to Sydney: a completely irreplaceable logo,' it was the Church of Colònia Güell that he considered to be Gaudi's true masterpiece. Gaudi 'started thinking about the design in 1898. The first stones were laid in 1908. Eusebi Güell died in 1918. By then, the crypt was almost finished, but there was not much above ground. What we have now is only a fragment of a dream. And yet its logic of construction, its sheer blazing inventiveness, removes it from the domain of fantasy and creates one of the world's most sublime architectural spaces.'

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Barcelona - Come Back When You Can.