Gaudi addicted to an ecstasy of modernismo

Antoni Gaudi. He was the great outsider of modern architecture. He was likely both an inspired freak and the creator of an emotional, organic style. A supreme artist. ….

The spread of the dates of his major works and the number of his unfinished projects are evidence of how wildly expensive his creations must have been, even at a time, and in a country, of cheap labor. Nevertheless, the sheer mass of his achievements is impressive. Granted that such architecture could be imagined by some isolated visionary, how in the world did it ever come to be financed and actually built.

Barcelona of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a brutal anarchic city in which assassination was common and bombing or arson was at any moment likely to become epidemic. During the 1907-08 salad days, some two thousand bombs exploded in the streets, and in 1909, twenty-two churches and thity-four convents were burned. It was a provincial capital struggling for power against the reactionary regime in Madrid and it was a growing city. Its port, its industry and its banking facilities were all helped by the opening of the Suez Canal  and a lot of enterprising Catalans were making big money very quickly. They were also ready to invest in the kind of prestige architecture that might serve to legitimate them as a new upper class.

These new men in Catalonia tended to be aristocrats making money or money makers hoping to become aristocrats. There was no value system as found in American capitalism and not much reality to the Spanish middle-class. Barcelona was dreaming of reviving the glory of its medieval era and , after 1900, investing more and more heavily in Modernismo, the Catalan form of Art Nouveau. Gaudi was not alone in his addiction to expensive fantasy; indeed several of his contemporaries in Barcelona frequently outdid him in catering to the desire of an opulent, somewhat unreal social class for an opulent somewhat unreal architecture. It was an architecture designed for amazement as much as for convenience and delight.

But Gaudi was certainly alone in his talent and in the fierce energy with which he turned the Catalan economic and social situation into an opportunity to develop and intensely personal, and eventually quite a historical, building style. He began by being strikingly original in his textures and ornamental details, and went on to become startlingly, or appallingly depending on viewpoint, original in his shapes, structures, interior spaces and religious symbolism.

An important source of inspiration for his system of decoration was the Islamic and Iberian tradition of ceramic facing, best known in the form of the glazed pottery tiles, or “azulejos” used on the exteriors and interiors of many Portuguese , Spanish and Latin American buildings. In later works, probably because of the need to make the facing follow curved forms, irregular fragments are used; they form abstract patterns and waves of shimmering color on facades, roofs, chimneys, and spires and sometimes appear as molecules of bright color in the mortar between bricks.

The climax is reached in the Park Guell, where the gatehouse roofs and terrace benches look like a cross between a Jackson Pollock and an animated cartoon and the ceiling of the many colored portico is a kind of protosurrealist or proto-Dadaist collage that incorporates a d

#8217;s head and pieces of broken plates, cups, bottles, glass, and miscellaneous china.

ADDENDUM:

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Surrealism brought about a revaluation of the work of the Art Nouveau architects, who had been either forgotten or discredited by the time Dali wrote his celebrated article on the ‘terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture’, ‘De la beaute terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture modern’ style’. Dali was seized with enthusiasm for Hector Guimard’s decorations on the Paris Metro station entrances, and had them photographed by Brassai to support his views. Above all, he revealed to his friends the originality of Antoni Gaudi , the greatest of the proto-surrealist architects after Ledoux. Gaudi worked in Barcelona; he wished to free himself of the conventions of previous styles and to draw directly on nature – animals and plants – for his decorative forms…. Read More: http://www.all-art.org/history580-3_Surrealist_Art10.html a

…It was not enough for him to reproduce the appearance of natural forms ; he studied their internal structure and the laws governing their organic development in order to improve his representation of them. In 1883 he started the church of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona; abandoning the flying buttresses of the Gothic Revival style, he substituted a new method of supporting the diagonal thrust: an inclined pillar. The Parque Guell (1900-14), on a hillside near Barcelona, is an amazing garden laid out in terraces winding along for several miles, with spiral-shaped seats decorated with ceramics, walls following the undulations of the hillside, and viaducts supported by trees carved from stone. Not only did Gaudi make masterly use of polychromy, but he also used architectural collage by incorporating real objects, such as bottles, cups or dolls, in some of his surfaces. The Casa Mila (1905-10), also in Barcelona, is a piece or genuine sculpture, both in its facade and in the details of the roof, chimneys and staircase exits, which are not visible from the street. Read More: http://www.all-art.org/history580-3_Surrealist_Art10.html