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Gaudi: Exploring Form

by John McGee

Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona (Photo: ©Lunwerg
Archives, ©Pere Vives i Ricard Pla, TRIANGLE POSTALS)

Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) was the kind of guy who could wear a plaid jacket, a striped shirt and gingham pants and somehow make it work. Inspired by past movements, the Catalonia native worked in a mixture of styles en route to developing his own. 

His first major building, the Mudejar (Spanish Arab)-influenced Casa Vicens (1883-8), lays ridged stripes of flowery and checkerboard ceramic tiles over boxes of rough red stone, and Moorish minarets sprout from the roof. In his Colegio Teresiano (1888-9) and Bishop's Palace in Astorga (started 1887), Gaudi explored Gothic elements—tall, skinny windows and internal arches. 

What he is best known for, however, are the curving, swirling, bulging organic forms of the subsequent years. If Art Nouveau was a delicate flower, Gaudi was a jungle. The crater-pocked facade of Casa Mila (1906-10) looks like the side of a termite nest. Guell Colony Crypt (1898-1917) is a stained glass-lit, Hobbit-y catacomb where rough-hewn stone pillars lean under ribbed brick vaults. In Park Guell (1900-14), bright mosaics of broken tile cover long, sinuous benches, and angled colonnades hold up rough stone porches curled like frozen waves. 

Full-scale models of the hyperbolic vaults, hanging vaults and double-twisted
columns used in Sagrada Familia (Photo: John McGee)

One reason Gaudi's buildings seem to be alive is that the designs evolved as the building went up—the architect never stopped tinkering. The building that best captures Gaudi's creative restlessness and synthesizes his shifting styles is Barcelona's landmark cathedral, the Sagrada Familia (started 1883), still under construction. 

This show is an expanded version of a 2002 exhibition held in Gaudi's beloved Barcelona (home of nearly all his work) to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. A photographic timeline of the architect's life and video slide shows of his buildings give an overview. Original drawings, from Gaudi's university entrance designs to mature works, plus furniture, doors and hardware from Casa Calvet and Casa Battlo, give the show some body. 

With Tokyo's endless appetite for paella and Picasso, and Spain now on every OL's (office lady) vacation dream checklist, this exhibition could have been just another well-appointed JTB catalogo del turismo. Instead, the second half of the exhibition turns science museum. Gaudi is outed as a brilliant engineer, his sumptuous surfaces flayed to reveal logical, ingeniously experimental bones. 

"I have the ability to see space," said this son of a coppersmith. A series of effective computer-graphics videos and display cases help layman do the same, illustrating and clearly explaining Gaudian forms like "conoids" and "intersections of paraboloids."

Furniture from Casa Calvet, Barcelona (Photo: John McGee)

For example, Gaudi sought a better solution for the flying buttress "crutches" of Gothic churches. He found that catenary arches (think of a free-hanging necklace or the Gateway Arch in St. Louis) placed inside could serve a similar structural function. Where architects these days use computer programs to determine complex curves, Gaudi used ropes, weighted bags and gravity. A network of chains hanging over a floor mirror illustrates how the architect first fine-tuned the catenary curves upside down, then inverted and enlarged them for construction. 

If this still sounds too complicated, visit the atrium gallery of the museum and stand under life-size models of the convex vaults, hyperbolic vaults, and double-twisted columns used in the Sagrada Familia. It's the closest you can get to Gaudi's masterpiece without boarding Iberia Airlines.

This exhibition was held Oct-Dec 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MoT) in Kiba, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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