Observer Review: Gaudí By Gijs Van Hensbergen Essay, Research Paper

Catalan who got the creamGaudíGijs van HensbergenHarperCollins ?24.99, pp322A sensational building by an eccentric architect transforms a provincial Spanish capital. No, not Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. It happened long before in Barcelona when Antoni Gaudí built the astonishing church of La Sagrada Família. Yet ‘built’ is the wrong tense. La Sagrada Família, primary evidence of perverse genius, is still in effortful progress. There’s an old truth that says ‘you don’t finish a building, you start it’. Never was it more true than of the masterpiece by an architect who said that God was his patron and He was in no hurry. There have been art historical monographs on Gaudí before, too many, some might say, but Gijs van Hensbergen has written the first full biography. It is detailed, impassioned and fascinating.Although Gaudí worked on many architectural schemes, including an unbuilt hotel in New York and the restoration of the cathedral in Palma de Mallorca, his reputation is based on five projects in Barcelona : the church of La Sagrada Família (1882-), the Palau Güell (1885), Park Güell (1900), the Casa Batlló (1904) and the Casa Milá (1906-). The Palau Güell and Casa Batlló were private houses, while the Park Güell, to the west of the city, is all that was built of an intended garden suburb of fantastical utopian ambition.The Casa Milá was an apartment block inspired by the geology of Montserrat, with a rippling profile and sculptural forms on the roof which beggar description other than through ambitious metaphor. La Sagrada Família was a project Gaudí inherited and soon made his own.Magical worlds of spermatozoa and foetid vegetation, skulls and bones were Gaudí’s inspiration: he studied anatomy closely, but he also playfully mixed broken crockery and old toys into the fabric of his buildings. Each surges with vital energy and pulses with irreverence, but Gaudí was not a rebel: he was a devout Christian conservative of a very deep hue. Mies van der Rohe once said: ‘I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.’ In that tortured statement is all the high-minded morality and obstinacy of the modern movement.Gaudí was both interesting and good, although he divides the critics. It is odd to think that Mies and Evelyn Waugh were discovering Barcelona at exactly the same time, in 1929, just three years after Gaudí’s death. Waugh was astonished by Casa Milá and hoped a rich philanthropist would finish La Sagrada Família (although Gaudí’s intention was that it should be like a never-ending architectural game of consequences).Waugh, I think with approval, found Gaudí’s furniture designs ‘wholly untempered by considerations of tradition or good taste…’ and added ‘…it is not so much propriety that is outraged as one’s sense of probability’. George Orwell, dourly, regretted that the Republicans did not get around to blowing up La Sagrada Família. Gaudí has a certain place in architectural history, but no one can say exactly where. Picasso was dismissive. Nikolaus Pevsner, the apologist for strict observance functionalism, found it impossible to accommodate the off-message Gaudí into the deterministic methodology of his mightily influential book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) (later reissued in yet more influential form as Pioneers of Modern Design, 1966). However, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, admired him, as did Louis Sullivan. Memorably, in a 1933 edition of the surrealist journal Minotaure, Salvador Dalí, another Catalan oddity, said Gaudí’s architecture was edible, that it was ‘tapas art’. Pevsner eventually found a place for a Gaudí in his last substantial book, The Anti-Rationalists. That was in 1973.Gaudí was exceptional, but he was not alone. Travellers in Spain know that in most small towns there are whimsical architectural curiosities that defy categorisation. And his context was very specific too. Barcelona was being transformed and Catalan nationalism needed its symbols. The medieval walls were demolished in 1854 and four years later the great town planner, Ildefonso Cerda, created the Eixample (the Extension). His full stop in the middle of Paral.lel, the great avenue of Barcelona nightlife, is another example of incipient modernism. Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch were other architects who have a claim to recognition.But it was Gaudí who created the architectural reputation of Barcelona. For all his novelty, he disdained anti-clerical modernismo as inspiration. Instead, van Hensbergen writes persuasively about Gaudí’s engagement with the Baix Camp, the lowland around his home city of Reus. As a building designer, Gaudí was without many precedents and without any real successors. Conventional art historians, with their serial view of history, struggle to explain his work. The coachloads of Korean tourists require no such pedagogic instruction. Gaudí created a unique sense of place about Barcelona. Catalonia was once wretched. Richard Ford wrote that it is ‘no place for the man of pleasure, taste or literature’. It was, he thought, a place where ‘vice and discontent [are] bred’. Catalans are the ‘curse and weakness of Spain’. Gaudí’s contribution to the Catalan sense of identity changed that. He set a confident example that the authorities imitated with great success in the Nineties, using new buildings to create one of the most exciting, stylish and confident cities in the world. It’s a simple truth that bears repeating: great architecture makes great cities.A dishevelled and distracted Antoni Gaudí – dressed like a Franciscan – was run over by a tram on 7 June 1926. The driver assumed he was a tramp. By the time he died three days later he was being called an architect-saint. Gijs van Hensbergen has not written a hagiography, but an account of a solitary genius: inspired, unpredictable, improvident, unforgettable.