Artist of the day: Artist of the day, October 20: Antoni Gaudí, Spanish architect (Modernisme)

Friday, October 20, 2017

Artist of the day, October 20: Antoni Gaudí, Spanish architect (Modernisme)

Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926) was an architect from Catalonia, Spain. He is the best known practitioner of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works have a highly individualized and distinctive style. Most are located in Barcelona, including his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família.

Gaudí's work was influenced by his passions in life: architecture, nature, and religion. He considered every detail of his creations and integrated into his architecture such crafts as ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork forging and carpentry. He also introduced new techniques in the treatment of materials, such as trencadís which used waste ceramic pieces.

Under the influence of neo-Gothic art and Oriental techniques, Gaudí became part of the Modernista movement which was reaching its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work transcended mainstream Modernisme, culminating in an organic style inspired by natural forms. Gaudí rarely drew detailed plans of his works, instead preferring to create them as three-dimensional scale models and moulding the details as he conceived them.

Gaudí's work enjoys global popularity and continuing admiration and study by architects. His masterpiece, the still-incomplete Sagrada Família, is the most-visited monument in Spain. Between 1984 and 2005, seven of his works were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

It is difficult for us today to believe that the most famous modern Spanish architect met his demise when, at age 73, he was run over by a tram and assumed to be an ordinary beggar for a full day before he was finally identified, too late to be nursed back to health. Yet Antoni Gaudí's pious Catholicism and devotion to a spartan regimen had come to define his character almost completely by the last decade of his life, which he devoted almost exclusively to the construction of his arguably most famous work, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona. Over Gaudí's nearly fifty years of independent practice, he concocted and realized some of the most imaginative architectural forms in history, all of them in his native Catalonia, which have since become synonymous with the region's identity. The best-known - and most individualistic - representative of Catalan Modernisme (Art Nouveau), Gaudí has fascinated and inspired generations of architects, designers, and even engineers. Today his work attracts a global following with some of the most distinctive, idiosyncratic, and recognizable designs of all time.

Gaudí's was highly innovative in terms of his explorations of structure, searching through a variety of regional styles before seizing on the parabolic, hyperbolic, and catenary masonry forms and inclined columns that he developed through weighted models in his workshop. These are often integrated with natural and highly symbolic religious imagery that encrust the structure with vibrant, colorful surfaces.

Gaudí's work is highly personal, in part due to his devout Catholicism, a faith that became increasingly fervent as his career progressed. In part because of this, his work contains many references to religious themes, and he increasingly led an ascetic existence towards the end of his life, even giving up all other commissions to focus on his designs for the church known as the Sagrada Família.

Gaudí often collaborated with several other Catalan designers, industrialists, artists, and craftsmen on his projects, most prominently Josep María Jujol, who was often responsible for the broken tilework that is common to much of Gaudí's buildings. This helps to explain why Gaudí's structures often feature such a wide variety of materials, used in inventive and clever ways.