The anniversary is a familiar one. At around six in the evening on 7 June 1926, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, God’s architect, was on his way to his daily mass in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri: a hidden nook in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter where the dwindling local community – embodied by the children from a nearby school playing in this makeshift courtyard – puts up resistance to the 26.1 million tourists who visit the city each year, many of them drawn by the legacy of Catalonia’s quintessential architect.
Fittingly, on the centenary of his death, Pope Leo XIV will be in Barcelona for the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus at the Sagrada Família, his greatest work, which has been under construction for more than 140 years.
Contemporary reports recount how, as the Tarragona native was crossing Gran Via between the chamfered corners of Bailèn and Girona streets, two trams on the line between Plaça de Tetuán and Passeig de Gràcia crossed paths. Gaudí stepped back to avoid one of them but was hit by the second. The scene of the accident lies roughly equidistant, about a 20-minute walk, from two of his most emblematic works: Casa Milà (better known as La Pedrera) and the Basilica of the Sagrada Família.
The accident caused a cerebral contusion and several broken ribs and he was taken first to a first-aid station in Sant Pere Més Alt (after the two passers-by who helped him failed to recognise him) and then to the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, where he died some 48 hours later, aged 74. He was buried in the Chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in the crypt of his best-known and still unfinished work.
Known for his Catholic devotion and claimed as a symbol by the pro-independence right, Jordi Pujol himself (who, like Gaudí, is inseparable from the identity of contemporary Catalonia) told Queen Sofía, now emeritus, at a commemorative event in 2002 that Gaudí was not just “a builder of buildings” but also “a shaper of Catalonia’s collective soul”, as reported at the time by Catalina Serra in her piece for El País.
It is no coincidence that Gaudí’s most prolific period unfolded in parallel with the Renaixença, the cultural movement that sparked a boom in Catalan literature, among other artistic disciplines, in the late 19th century. It formed part of the Romantic current that swept across the European continent (as in the case of the Galician Rexurdimento) in that century, sowing the seeds of many nationalist movements in the Old World.
The beginnings of the legend: from La Calderera to the Mataronense
Historian Josep Maria Tarragona explains how the frail young Antoni, the youngest of a modest family of coppersmiths raised, from 1852 onwards, between the city of Reus and the village of Riudoms (Tarragona), learned his father’s trade during frequent bouts of rheumatic fever that kept him from going to school.
Catalonia, cradle of Spain’s Industrial Revolution, was undergoing profound economic and urban transformation: two years after Gaudí’s birth the medieval walls of Barcelona were torn down and Ildefons Cerdà’s revolutionary Eixample grid was implemented, improving public hygiene and reuniting the old walled city with its outlying municipalities, such as Gràcia. Just four years earlier, in 1848, the state had inaugurated its first railway line, between Mataró and Barcelona.
The Gaudí i Cornet clan, Josep Maria Tarragona notes, did not want to miss that train and moved to Barcelona in 1868 to give their sons a university education, selling off several properties and mortgaging Mas de la Calderera, the farmhouse that several of the architect’s acquaintances insist was his birthplace.
Antoni, however, would not manage to enter the School of Architecture until 1874, because of the academic prerequisites and his limited financial means. By then he was working as a draughtsman and soon began to sign his first projects, such as the hydraulic system for the monumental waterfall in the Ciutadella park (1875) under the direction of Josep Fontserè.
The work was created for Barcelona’s 1888 Universal Exhibition and is one of the earliest examples of Catalan Modernisme, the architectural strand of the Renaixença characterised by exuberant, curving lines and forms inspired by nature, such as floral motifs. From the outset, then, his imprint would be bound up with Barcelona, right up to the present day.
A supporter of the Glorious Revolution that ushered in the Democratic Six Years and of the government of Juan Prim (also a native of Reus), Gaudí worked between 1878 and 1882 on another project with a distinctly political flavour: the Mataró Workers’ Cooperative.
It was conceived as a social headquarters made up of the factory itself and facilities to serve the workers (affordable housing, gardens and a services building) at the height of utopian socialism and the demands of the working class at the end of the 19th century. Gaudí even fell in love with one of the schoolteachers there, Pepeta Moreu, who turned him down on the grounds that she was already engaged.
With an impressive CV behind him and a capital that was beginning to treat him as a public figure, the architect and school director Elies Rogent declared, when he handed him his diploma in 1879: “I don’t know whether we’ve given this degree to a madman or a genius; time will tell.”
Work begins on the Sagrada Família
Gaudí was by now fully integrated into the bourgeois society of the burgeoning future metropolis: he took part in Renaixença associations such as the Catalanist Association for Scientific Excursions and mingled with contemporaries such as the poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer and the industrialist Eusebi Güell, who would become one of his closest patrons and friends.
In 1883 he was commissioned to continue work on the project of his life, the Sagrada Família. Gaudí chose to modify the initial design and develop a monumental work around the origin of the project, the crypt of the Catholic temple where he would end up buried, a building he would never see completed and which, even today, despite progress on the main tower, is still about a decade away from being finished in line with its creator’s wishes.
From that year until 1887 he also focused on the development of the Güell pavilions, commissioned by Eusebi. It was here that the architect, who was experimenting with Neo-Mudéjar elements, used for the first time the trencadís technique: one of his most recognisable inventions, consisting of mosaic cladding made from broken pieces of ceramic, glass or marble, usually in vivid colours.
Their design gives rise to another anecdote linked to the workshop of the ceramist Lluís Bru. In a fit of irritability or of ADHD, as he watched his colleague painstakingly placing the tiles one by one, Gaudí grabbed a tile and hurled it to the floor, allegedly exclaiming: “They have to be laid by the handful or we’ll never finish!”
That flash of anger is now reflected in many of the monuments that bear witness to this period and survive not only in his city but far beyond Barcelona. From this period dates, for example, Villa Quijano (“El Capricho”), in the Cantabrian town of Comillas, listed as a Site of Cultural Interest.
Maximalism and grief cubed: the final period
Gaudí would sharply accentuate the contrasts of colour on the façades of his creations, leaving an unmistakable imprint on some of his best-known works, such as Casa Calvet, Park Güell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. Nature asserts its presence through helicoidal forms and inclined columns, and this evolution would culminate in the project that obsessed him and absorbed his attention almost exclusively from 1915 onwards: the unfinished basilica.
The master suffered several losses (his niece Rosa; Francisco Berenguer, his main collaborator; his friends José Torras y Bages and the very Eusebi Güell) which deepened his religious fervour and his isolation as he sought to complete his life’s project. After the death of another of his collaborators, the sculptor and modeller Llorenç Matamala, in 1925, Gaudí moved into a small room in his workshop at the Sagrada Família and devoted himself entirely to his work.
Witnesses recall that, at the start of the afternoon of 7 June 1926, Gaudí was working on some lamps for the crypt and, at the end of the day, before heading off, as he did every day, to the church of Sant Felip Neri, he called over one of the workers assisting him: “Vicente, come early tomorrow; we’ll be doing some very beautiful things.” An unfinished beauty that Leo XIV himself will have the chance to see this Wednesday, 10 June, when he visits the building site that is also the home and tomb of the Catalan master.
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