PAGE 1
EDITORIAL
Gaudí year and the indispensable debate

The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Antoni Gaudí, commemorated in these pages, leads us to make two initial observations. The first is that, never before has a similar event given rise to so much support from so many different quarters, so much involvement, so many initiatives designed to bring the figure and the work of the person whose memory is being honoured to the notice of a wider public. The fact that the most significant of Gaudí's creations are in the street, in other words, within reach of the curiosity of an extremely diverse spectrum of people, goes a long way to explaining this magnificent, multiform outburst of interest in the great Catalan architect. Nevertheless, this in no way detracts from the merits of the organisers of the commemoration, the cultural managers, the specialists, the sponsors or the institutions involved in Gaudí 2002.

The second observation has to do with our magazine. Despite the plentiful output by publishers and the extraordinary amount of journalistic articles and criticism that Gaudí Year will have produced by the time it is over, it was "impossible" for our magazine not to make its own specific contribution to a cultural event that will be a major milestone in the history of Barcelona at the beginning of this century. If we have insisted on saying that B.MM aspires to becoming a "library of the urban culture" of our time, it would be absurd to think that anyone looking it up twenty-five years from now could fail to find anything in it about the events commemorating Gaudí in 2002.

The aim of the Central Notebook in this issue is not, of course, simply to prevent such a thing happening. Above all, it is to provide both regular and new readers of the magazine, as well as the numerous people visiting the publications section of Barcelona City Council's web site, with a service by offering a compendium of articles by acknowledged reliable specialists grouped together for the purpose of achieving a syncretic product in which each contributor is able to complement the others. As a result, we believe that seldom have so many different things been said about Antoni Gaudí in so few pages. At all events, in another section of the magazine, you can read the following: "We organise Gaudí Years and other things, but we are not as cosmopolitan as we thought".

This is the opinion of the sociologist Salvador Giner, who shares the interviews section with Salah Jamal, doctor and Palestinian historian. They both speak about immigration and enrich the debate taking place about this phenomenon with criteria and points of view that often differ from those held by the people with political, social and cultural responsibilities in this field.

Salah Jamal and Giner represent two standpoints that ought to be taken very much into account in diagnosing conflicts, whether real or fictitious, generated by the immigration "explosion", the attitudes it generates among the indigenous population and, above all, the simplifications and misunderstandings revolving around the concept of "integration". Implicitly, the ideas of multiculturalism and interculturalism are present in both interviews and are an interesting enlargement on, and/or confrontation with, those recently expressed by such outstanding personalities as Giovanni Sartori and Edgar Morin. Convinced that this is an essential debate, B.MM published a series of reports some time ago under the title of "Plural Barcelona" about various different communities of foreigners living in Barcelona. Salah Jamal and Salvador Giner offer us today a critical and analytical view of the new immigration and the often controversial responses triggered by this new reality.

PAGE 6
VERDAGUER'S CONSTANT DREAM.
BY Victor Batallé.
COMMISSIONER OF THE "VERDAGUER'S YEAR" EVENT.

In this year of tumular celebrations, the range of questions and emotions stirred up by Mossèn Verdaguer's personality is almost impossible to circumscribe. More particularly for me and for other people who, like myself, are working with no pretension other than to divulge, though not to disperse, his singular work. The catalogue of events and celebrations shows the confluence of passion, faith and love for the homeland in its most local and universal sense. It should be taken into account that the main objective of the whole programme of events is that people might choose the part of Verdaguer's work and personality they want to discover and know more about, because a thorough description of Verdaguer's values would be the subject of more than one doctoral thesis, and highlighting only one of them would be a serious fault. So, to acknowledge that Verdaguer's passion for his environment was actually a necessity seems to be the simplest way to start with the recounting of the details of his human adventure.

Verdaguer - the son of a peasant from the plain of Vic - developed a passion for poetry. Why ? Firstly, I think that if was for the sheer joy he felt when working on it. I am using the word "joy" according to the most Christian definition of this feeling. As well as "joy" seen as an approximation to the most abstract vision as regards the understanding of the world without its pomp and, certainly, independently of the circumstances. Secondly, because, for Verdaguer, poetry is a perfect form to be conquered, naturally through a painful process. Which is to say that the pain of creating is used as a natural instrument of self-improvement. Pain is accepted and understood as one of the ways of living in this world of which most human beings - despite their fleeting passage into it - wish to leave behind their personal interpretation. Is that biblical atavism ? Maybe, but there was pain when Verdaguer decided to give up that feeling of security which the environment he was born into gave him; and there was pain again in his departure to Barcelona so as to live closer to power - with the whole range of possibilities it opens up - and to the knowledge that only power has the capacity for altering everything. That pain which parallels his passion for poetry, in addition to his interaction with the men he admired and those who felt in turn impressed by him, appear as the keystone of our understanding of Verdaguer's human trajectory : he was born and lived to be a poet. Poetry used for seeing oneself reflected as well as for dazzling. Poetry also seen as a dictionary still to be written. His task is the clear-cut duty to collect words so as to either confer new uses upon them or rescue them from the blind oblivion brought on by progress. His instrument is the poem composed of words duly distributed within the celestial space in order to achieve the perfect form. And, in the process, he keeps the words themselves under his guard, because this is his way to free them from possession by restrictive definitions.

All critics agree on the fact that Verdaguer is a poet, even when he writes in prose. Academics, within the division that sustains them, are an essential part of this year's programme of events. There are many unwritten or unpublished pages in Verdaguer's life, and many written ones that require further explanations. Even though their credibility is overwhelming, it is still necessary to give reasons that would go beyond purely Catalan parameters and lead us to an universal vision. Verdaguer is a national poet, because he considers Catalonia as the homeland dear to his heart. This is a value which has often been - among Catalan people of all kinds - a cause for shame. For this reason, I think that this year, when people will have read his words anew, Verdaguer will individually rekindle that feeling of belonging in all those who live and work in our sweet land. (...)

Verdaguer's life, which was an eventful and troubled race punctuated with debts, exorcisms, "A divinis" sentences, fervour, fights for his royalties, rancour, and abandonment by both friends and enemies, was summed up in the apotheosis of his multitudinous funeral. A perfect way to bid farewell to a man who had lived to be acknowledged and loved.

Verdaguer's life expanded in direct proportion to his courage and his endeavour to be consistent with his own vision and art. I shall not document my perception that Verdaguer's faith is exemplary. Does he believe because he is a priest ? I don't think so. Verdaguer's faith stems from practice. He practises the possibility of knowing starting from ignorance and he does so with the humility of a man who believes in an inexplicable God because, at the same time, the adventures that shape his personal trajectory are inexplicable. Is God Life ? I have no certainty about that. Divinity, which escapes most mortals' understanding, is almost never revealed as an evidence. On the other hand, Verdaguer senses that his poems are manifestations of God's presence, he is aware of it and that it why, in a text with the title "Lo cornamusaire" (The bagpiper), he presents in an exceptionally brilliant way the thesis that a human being is nothing without his chosen instrument to define and assert himself. In Verdaguer's case, the instrument was poetry. Ours is reading.

In conclusion, let's underline the reviving strength of his discourse which is patriotic in the strictly ethymological sense of "patrimony" : Verdaguer does not imagine his homeland, he simply describes it as a basis for writing it anew later on. The feeling of belonging which Verdaguer preaches by setting an example is a space that reflects geographical irregularities as well as seasonal changes; it is a constant ground for uttering the Great Question about the meaning of Life that passes and escapes. Like Verdaguer, we have to make this journey in stages, pausing not so much to ascertain what the scenery looks like as to get to know the people who surround us, so that we might all together build up our idea of the homeland, which is to say the place from which it is possible to dream of improving what we already have and what we translate into the future.

PAGE 15
THE INTERVIEW
BY Carmen Luque
SALAH JAMAL
PALESTINIAN DOCTOR AND HISTORIAN

Salah Jamal may as well be heard singing the praises of couscous as discoursing upon the conflict between Palestine and Israel. A doctor-cum-historian and writer-cum-lecturer, a good conversationalist and habitué of social gatherings..., he came to Barcelona by chance more than thirty years ago and here he stayed. In a provocative though affable tone, he says that he never felt rejected. "But the fact is that I always dress in designers' clothes", he explains ironically. He also states that the immigrants' problem does not actually lie in the colour of their skins, it has more to do with how much money they have in their pockets. A case in point is that nobody cares if a Barça football player happens to have very dark skin. (...)

· Do you like the word "multiculturalism"?
I don't agree with the use of the word "multiculturalism", I agree with that of "interculturalism", I really like it better, which doesn't mean that my way of thinking is in line with Miguel Arzabbundi, who attacked multiculturalism, not at all! I am a supporter of interculturalism, of the mixture of cultures, of all cultures. Not the submission of one culture to another. Submittimg the weak's culture to that of the strong, this is called domination. So, what I really want is interculturalism and that, for instance, Catalan and Spanish people - I make no difference here - read books and get to know about African or Chinese culture, as well as the other way around. It is not only a question of going to a Chinese restaurant. Eating a spring roll is not a cultural deed, it is merely a way to have a good time. People go to restaurants thinking that they are learning about culture, but this is not culture, cooking is but one thousandth part of a culture. Culture is much more than a dish of falafel.

· Do you mean that you have to be cultured in order to become more cultured?
I think that the basis for interculturalism is every individual's own culture. If you are not cultured in terms of your own culture, you won't know how to be receive any other culture. To be cultured is a mechanism that makes you receptive to other cultures. People who are not cultured do not know anything about their own culture and therefore they will not be able to receive other cultures because they lack the proper instruments for it.

· What do the words "integration" and "assimilation" mean to you?
I am not in favour of assimilation, I am more in favour of integration. However, I would also like to see the native's integration into the newcomer's culture. We have to reach a state of interculturalism, the total integration of both native-born citizens and new citizens into a new society. All together, we ought to create a new society that will have to be multicultural because many cultures coexist within it. But all citizens should be part of that society whereas, at present, many Barcelona residents do not seem aware of the fact that thousands of immigrants are living in their city. In the upper section of the city, above Diagonal avenue, people are largely ignorant of what is going on down below Diagonal avenue. So these people are not really integrated into Catalan society either. It's true, because they never take part in popular festivities, they are not integrated. That is why it makes me smile when I hear how those people, who are not integrated themselves, are now insisting upon the immigrants' integration. Really, I would like to know how many of them can dance a "sardana", for instance...

· Do you think that what you propose can actually be achieved?
Yes, I do, but if what they want to achieve is submission camouflaged under the pretty word of integration, that is a fraud. Integration should make people feel useful to the society they live in. When people do not feel useful to society, no matter where they come from, they are de facto excluded and they cannot become integrated. Many Barcelona residents are currently sleeping out in the open on carrer Palai; can they be considered integrated?

· How are native-born citizens helping imigrants to become integrated?
There is goodwill, let's not be mistaken about it. But it does not lead to real action. There is fear too, above all in the party that is currently governing Catalonia, and if we pay closer attention to the situation in Catalonia, there is a kind of fear which is being manipulated by demagogues. In this respect, Pujol's attitude and his government's position are confounding everyone because they are constantly alternating between intransigence and humanistic behaviour.
· Could you give me an example of intransigence and one of humanism?

An example of intransigence is when they state that, in Catalonia, it is hard for a Muslim to become integrated just because he is a Muslim, or when Marta Ferrusola spoke up in defence of Cristian churches. Then, at other times, they get into a more humanistic mood, as when Pujol went to Osona and said that people had to give immigrants support because they had suffered hardships and, over time, they would eventually become integrated,... At bottom, what's going on is that Pujol and his comrades are thoroughly knowledgeable about the backstage economic and political realities connected with the phenomenon of immigration. They know that Catalonia and Europe as a whole are ageing societies that need immigrants. They are perfectly aware of that fact, but they lack the necessary courage to acknowledge and explain the situation accurately and truthfully, because they know that it would make their vote decrease.

· What ought to be done then?
The only solution is to bring the exploitation of the Third World to an end - no more, no less - and to stop supporting all the corrupt and fascist groups and governments that rule in the Third World, and to introduce and spread the universal values and civil rights honoured in the countries of the North. This way, there would at least be some hope of political and social improvement in those countries and no further need for immigration. Because nobody chooses to emigrate out of sheer caprice.

· I'm afraid that Western governments are not really up to taking steps in that direction.
Of course they are not! Because they have vested interests and there's a good flow of money coming in anyway. But, if they're not up to taking steps now, they'll have to take the consequences. If they are willing to have immigrants coming in, then they have to be consistant, because it's a situation that stems from both Western exploitation and bad native government. I don't lay all the blame on the West, corrupt rulers are also partly responsible, but, please, let's face it, who is protecting those corrupt rulers? Who is sending them armaments so that they might remain in power?

· Is there any future?
I am fairly hopeful. The phenomenon of immigration is like an earthquake. The earthquake is passing, but there will be an aftershock, then weaker tremors and, later on, the situation will stabilize. However, another economic crisis will eventually arise and there will be another similar earthquake and immigrants will again carry the can. That's how it goes.


SALVADOR GINER
SOCIOLOGIST

Salvador Giner, who has given lectures in many parts of the world, is the author of several renowned works as well as an internationally recognized authority in the sphere of sociology. He affirms that optimism is a form of stupidity. And that the same can be said of pessimism. Therefore, what this Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona intends to be is purely and simply intelligent, which, in his opinion, consists in adopting a critical attitude towards his times. Even though his profession obliges him to criticize the society he lives in, he assures that we have never lived as well as we do today and that, one day, when the world will have become a worse place to be in, we shall look back with nostalgia to those times in which we used to enjoy ourselves visiting leisure parks and felt threatened by a handful of wretched black people who had arrived on our shores in small, unsafe boats. He does not mince words when he swiftly cuts short the discussion about immigration. We need immigrants very badly, - he says - without them, our economy and our "welfare society" would fall to pieces. So, all things considered, our only option is to welcome them.

· What is your appraisal of the latest immigrant movements?
Well, which type of immigration are you talking about? Which kind of people are you referring to? Oh! You must be referring to "Moors" and "Negroes"...

· Why do we use euphemisms?
Because hypocrisy has become part of our social life. And this is, purely and simply, a question of hypocrisy. Because we never call things by their names, we use other names. We are nothing but a lot of hypocrites. The journalist who uses the word "Sub-saharian" is a hypocrite because he writes "Sub-saharian", but he says "Negro".

· Perhaps because this is the politically correct thing to do?
But the politically correct thing to do is dreadful. What does "politically correct" mean anyway? Correct for whom? For Aznar, for Pujol... for whom? Political correctness does not actually exist. There are as many forms of political correctness as individuals.

· But the ordinary man in the street has the sensation that more and more immigrants are coming into our country, as if it were an avalanche.
This is not true; there is no such avalanche of immigants. There are very few of them, actually. Besides, the first "Moors" to come into Catalonia were Moroccans who had been hired to build the Maresme motorway in the nineteen sixties. Some years later, others came to work picking strawberries and flowers. And those first immigrants came at the Catalan peasants' request. They were brought by the Maresme farmers. It's about time to start explaining things as they are! Afterwards, other people who were needed to do certain jobs started to come. Nowadays, Equatorians and Peruvians are coming mainly to look after old and sick persons. And what would our hospitals do without these immigrants? They would collapse, probably.

· Is there a shortage of native-born manpower?
The problem is that we Catalans have such a marked tendency towards chastity that, over the last fifteen or sixteen years, there has been no native population growth, so that we really need those people now. In earlier years, there was an influx of people from other parts of Spain: Andalusians, Aragoneses, Murcians, etc... They all came to work here and, thanks to those people, our country's economic growth rate increased spectacularly, as we all know. Incidentally, it also brought benefits to the rest of Spain, given that those people used to send money to their families back home. Today, people are starting to come from abroad. But we still need many of them.

· But this is not precisely the kind of reasoning they are trying to sell people on...
Well, I would like to know which ideas are being sold, by whom and to whom. Politicians want to be correct and they are not willing to say those things in public. We are living in a transparent or, rather, pseudo-transparent society where there are microphones everywhere, so that you cannot do anything, you cannot even cough privately. They're waiting for you to scratch your nose to take a picture of you.

· What is integration?
I'm going to get somewhat technical now. Sociologists usually make a distinction between systemic integration and social integration. For instance, a black man from Cameroon arrives here; he does not know a single word of Spanish but, the very day after his arrival, he finds work as a stevedore at the wharves, which is to say that he becomes integrated into the work and production system. He may not have any official document, but he is systemically integrated. There might even be a more extreme situation: that same man does not find work, but the Sisters of Charity, or any other NGO, take him in. This man is integrated into the system, even though he is not socially integrated. That distinction which sociologists draw between systemic integration and social integration is a very important concept in sociology and I would like journalists to make that same distinction. But let's proceed stage by stage. Integration is not such a good thing anyway. In the early nineteen sixties, I went to Chicago to take my doctorate. There were many Puerto Ricans and Mexicans there and they had no wish to become integrated. They wanted to carry on with their "mariachis" and their own celebrations, and they wanted to continue speaking Spanish.

· So people do not want to become integrated?
Anyway, what does it mean, really, for immigrants to "become integrated"? To become Catalans? But what's wrong about being just what you are? Please! Everybody should visit the Turkish Quarter in Berlin. It's really beautiful! Why should they become integrated? The Gypsies from the Gracia district in Barcelona are native-born, they speak Catalan, they dance the "rumba"; however, are they truly integrated? Well, I don't know for a fact that they are, but it's clear that they are very much part of the neighbourhood's life and that they contribute to the peculiar charm of the Gracia district. So, hurrah for differences! (...)

· Do you think that we're not prepared to accept differences?
What we like best is our own little world. I would say that Catalans do not show much curiosity. Look, we are not even interested in knowing more about ourselves. We are afraid of the unknown because there might be potential ennemies out there. Then let's immunize ourselves against danger!

- What can we do?
- We ought to be more modest, more curious, more efficient, more truly cosmopolitan... Less nationalistic and more patriotic. (...)

PAGE 24
FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BARCELONA, PRESENT-DAY
BARCELONA: A CENTURY APART, BUT THE DRIVING FORCE IS BACK.
BY Joan Clos.
MAYOR OF BARCELONA

We are what we have been and we are what we think of this past and, above all, we are what we think of the future. Gaudí Year, the celebration of one of the most extraordinary geniuses to have ever left their mark on Barcelona, forces us to project ourselves into the future and out into the world through the architect's universal work, which drew heavily on the city emerging at the end of the 19th century. Barcelona is a peculiar city that has not always had such a good deal from history. When the wind is blowing in its favour, Barcelona is exultant. And then it seems as though there is a glut of geniuses, that they are springing up all over the place. The city opens itself up to the world, creativity bursts forth, Barcelona sets the trend. One of these expansive cycles is conventionally regarded as having begun with the Universal Exhibition of 1888, when a handful of men, for whatever reason, launched an initiative and unleashed an unstoppable force, which means that the groundwork for this had already been laid. In other words, the existence of a powerful industrial base, which provided the critical mass necessary for culture and politics and urban life to flourish around it. This cycle extended almost right up to the catastrophe of the Civil War that broke out in 1936, with the slight slump -although I am not sure whether this was actually the case as far as culture was concerned- of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. This was a marvellous Barcelona: the Modern Style city, that was at the same time a modern city, the two things going together, which was no mere coincidence.

There was a cultural revolution. Things were seen differently. The walls of Barcelona, hitherto a prisoner of overcrowding and epidemics, started to come down in the middle of the 19th century and La Ciutadella was designed as a public park - parks are to cities what the lungs are to the human body, wrote Fontserè in his report on the project. The hygienists linked living conditions with health, which meant that people began to think in terms of public health, and it was Dr. Robert, who was, if only briefly, to become mayor, who took these ideas into the City Council. At the same time, the city, spurred on by ambition, realised that it had to make a qualitative leap forward and set about annexing some of the surrounding independent municipal districts so as to reach its natural boundaries.

This was a controversial operation, as the other municipalities on the plain of Barcelona would not agree to it at first. However, the case for taking this step was unanswerable: the city needed to grow if it was to be anything in the world, and Barcelona wanted to be something. Why? Because history was driving it in this direction, culture was stimulating its inhabitants, the economy required it and the intellectuals proclaimed it; that is, a mixture of the demands of civil society and a strategic plan added to the necessary political skill to ensure that the goal was actually achieved. The inhabitants of Barcelona at that time were extremely ambitious, seeing clearly that they needed the territory of a great city, when this was nothing but a dream. The Madrid government sanctioned the operation by issuing a royal decree, which is not the best way of going about things, but showed that it was much more permeable to Barcelona's requirements.

It was then that work started on the Eixample, the extension to the city, based on the extraordinary grid plan by Ildefons Cerdà. It was the biggest enlargement of any city, and certainly the most central, in Europe at that time and laid the basis for town planning as an (almost) exact science. The process is well known. Cerdà made a statistical study of the working class that circulated throughout Europe and served as inspiration for no less a figure than Mr. Marx himself. Cerdà drew conclusions from the facts, and acted accordingly, whereas the architects bidding to win the commissions plotted a city of axes and perspectives: a comprehensible, but essentially conventional, city. Cerdà wanted, as all great town planners do, to design the city of the future, while his contemporaries wanted the same old city as ever. The Cerdà Plan won out, against the general opinion of the inhabitants of Barcelona. This decision was influenced by other factors, including the age-old rivalry between architects and engineers, but the city benefited by it, as the Eixample ended up by characterising Barcelona, and this was seen right away even by its staunchest critics. Such a powerful structure is bound to determine a city.

Nevertheless, late 19th century Barcelona was far from being an idyllic, creative metropolis full of intellectual and artistic circles and projects. We are now in a position to recall the impulse provided by the Modern Style movement, with intellectuals who were aware that they were constructing a European-standard culture, architects pulling out all the stops, craftsmen contributing their traditional skills which we still astonish us. But in fin-de-siècle Barcelona there were impoverished workers, an intransigent bourgeoisie that in the face of disturbances called for the army to step in, a city shot through with religious charity, and a corrupt and decadent political system. Once again it was Dr. Robert who performed the drastic surgery, removing from office, the very same day he was appointed mayor, all the "district mayors", of whom there were about a hundred, as it was they who did as they pleased with the electoral register and the privileges they controlled and thus provided the basis for local political despotism.

At the same time, there existed a hyper-politicised Barcelona that expanded the press as a system for relaying the ideologies that were beginning to gel, as a means of agitation -alongside meetings and speeches- but also as a means of commitment. And there was likewise the Barcelona of workers' culture as an attempt to build a different world, because the world in which the workers lived failed to take them into account at all, through a welter of contradictory and idealistic movements: the fraternity of Esperanto, the equality of feminism, health - that their circumstances denied them- with naturism, social struggle with anarchism, culture with the network of cultural clubs, the negation of religion with spiritualism. But although they were minority movements, this did not mean that their scope and influence was small; for instance, Barcelona organised a world Esperanto conference in 1909! Did all that go against the established order? Yes, it did. It was the seed of inescapable changes, while the bourgeoisie went about building its first luxurious mansions in the Eixample (and, right beside the mansions, wall to wall, the blocks of anonymous rented flats).

There is little doubt that Barcelona has seldom been so divided and so multiple, so -if you will pardon the metaphor- adolescent. It required almost a whole century to knead itself into a single, cohesive reality. Cities, as we well know, are built up bit by bit, with successive layers being added on, each one contributing a richness that completes and complements previous contributions. In this context, Gaudí was an anecdote, as marvellous as he was eccentric. A man who must have felt the driving force of the city as a wind propelling him forward, but who did not, in my opinion, think in terms of city, but probably in terms of country and certainly in terms of universe, although I do not know whether it was a global universe or an individual universe. Gaudí kept working away, in this context, and today we have a Gaudian presence which is unique in the world. But was Gaudí aware of the Barcelona he was making? What did the young Picasso of Els Quatre Gats think of the architect protected by Count Güell? And what did the gypsy women painted by Nonell know of him?

This magma of citizens fills me with enthusiasm, as Barcelona, is once again, a century later, multiple and diverse, with comparable creative (but not social) tensions. Immersed in a more world context that is far more complex -although Europe was then slowly heading towards the first world war of the 20th century- as the globalised world makes some very heavy demands. But Barcelona is again keen to have its say and once more has consolidated its presence within the framework of the world's great cities. The fact of the matter is that the city functions when it is permeable and welcoming, when culture and drive, solidarity and ambition operate hand in hand. When the city is able to reflect on what it is about and create itself. Barcelona is again reinventing itself, this time as a metropolitan area, so that it no longer needs to grow in size, but in depth. The Gaudí who arrived from Reus, like so many people of that period driven out of the countryside or attracted by the opportunities of the city, are today the migrants, similarly full of hope, coming from imbalances and injustice.

And Barcelona, now more mature, is considering a cultural dialogue with the whole world, based on intellectual thought and concern, and shared festivities and everyone's creativity. The Barcelona of the 2004 Forum. The Barcelona of Gaudí Year. History, present and future. In other words, Barcelona.

PAGE 27
GAUDÍ: THE REVOLUTION OF SHAPES.

Barcelona, the Gaudí city par excellence, is staging a series of events this year to pay tribute to the architect on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. These events will allow people to learn more about the life and work of the most outstanding figure to emerge from the Modern Style movement in the latter part of the 19th century.
Antoni Gaudí is unique in many ways: for his visionary genius, capable of the most daring and original designs with regard to construction as well as wood and wrought iron work, and also because of his controversial personality, that does not fit in easily with commonly held ideas about avant-garde creators.
All these features are present in the different articles that B.MM has brought together in this Central Notebook. Leading Gaudí specialists and scholars explain, often employing previously unpublished approaches, his contribution to architecture and the arts by examining his main works and how they have influenced the art of our times. They also describe his personal development from his early childhood in Reus, where he was born, to his accidental death in Barcelona, and in between his education, his first commissions, the great works of his mature period and his relationship with his clients and the society of his time.
The Notebook ends with a chronology and a basic bibliography on Gaudí followed by a calendar of the main events that are being organised in Barcelona during the rest of the year the year.

THE COMPLEX WORLD OF AN OBSTINATE CREATOR
By Santi Barjau

It is far from easy to describe a personality such as Antonio Gaudí's, about whom so many books, articles and features have been written, and feel as though you have been able to say something new about him.
In fact, however, in spite of having been studied to such an extent, there are still many particular facets to be researched and tangible details to be provided about his life and what he did. At the same time, it is necessary to do away with certain unfounded lucubrations that have been attributed to Gaudí, who is not very well known as a whole and whose work has suffered from neglect for many years. Luckily, as time has worn on, the scope of Gaudían studies has gradually broadened out. It is not just Catalan scholars who profitably devote themselves to this pursuit. There is a growing number of specialists from elsewhere who bring with them new points of view, although a supplementary effort might be asked of them to acquire an accurate knowledge of all aspects of Catalan reality. However, it also has to be said that, paradoxically, the best graphic repertory of the architect's work is that gathered together by a Japanese and that Dutch and Australian specialists have made a rigorous study of Gaudí's geometric structures. Slowly but surely, both Catalan and foreign scholars have been sketching detailed views that explain partial aspects but which still need to be brought together into a comprehensive synthesis. With all this help, Gaudí has become without doubt the best ambassador for the real Catalonia, with its good and bad points, to the world.

At all events, the complexity of Gaudí's world seems to force us to take sides either for or against certain facets of his contribution. Laying greater emphasis on one aspect or another (construction, ornamentation, religion, nationalism) is itself a way of defining his entire figure. In this context, the place accorded to the Temple of the Holy Family, the Sagrada Família, within his work as a whole, is a defining trait. Is it seen as his final work, the culmination and compendium of his production or, on the other hand, situating it right at the beginning of his career, is it regarded as a very early work that, by accident, stretches out over a long period of time, while more modern buildings, such as La Pedrera or the provisional school buildings, are deemed to be the crowning glory of his catalogue?

In any case, a mythology has grown up around Gaudí describing him as a saint, a genius or a madman - terms which are not mutually exclusive. Although he did not put his thoughts down on paper, his disciples faithfully recorded his words and, with evident exaggeration, it has been said that it was as though these were the teachings of an ancient prophet. As sources of his thought, they present a problem, since, although they are only indirect, they are usually quoted as though they bore his full authority and may well have contributed to the persistence of certain myths surrounding Gaudí. Architecture, religion and Catalanism were the focuses of his life and it is within these parameters that his legacy can be understood.

The campaign to have him canonised as Saint Antoni Gaudí, God's architect, can be analysed in this context. It seems as though certain circles find the existence of an anticlerical young Gaudí rather uncomfortable, despite the fact that this was never denied by his closest disciples. In reality, one of the most highly valued aspects of the lives of the saints (from Paul of Tarsus to Ignacio de Loyola and so many more) is their conversion, which adds an extra element of sacrifice to their attitude and also indicates a convulsive process of rethinking the great themes of existence instead of uncritically accepting dogmas. This attitude could perhaps also be applied to Gaudí's free vision of art and architecture.
When Flaubert said that "the man is nothing; the work is everything", it was as though he was speaking of Gaudí, the artist entirely devoted to his task, which he does not share with any other public activity. But, in fact, the architect also created a personality, replete with anecdotes and bits of nonsense, which became superimposed on his work and which is certainly another of his creations. This star status is one of the things that many later architects and artists, from Dalí to Warhol, have inherited from him.

If it is true that everyone's homeland is their childhood, the doubts surrounding the actual birthplace of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet are simply a matter of local pride and of no great, importance since, as Jodep Pla recalled, it is only an hour's walk from Reus to Riudoms. At that time, Reus was the second largest city in Catalonia. The future architect was born on 25 June 1852, the son of Francesc Gaudí i Serra, a Riudoms coppersmith, and Antònia Cornet i Bertran. He was baptised the following day in the church of Sant Pere in Reus. At all events, the pains he suffered in his joints since he was a small child forced him to spend long spells in the country, at Mas de la Calderera (Coppersmith's Wife's House) in Riudoms, which he himself regarded as the source of his knowledge and direct experience of nature.

After a period at the Rafael Palau school, about very few details are available, it is known that between 1860 and 1862 he attended the Berenguer primary school in Reus. It has been pointed out more than once that there he is likely to have met Francesc Berenguer (1866-1914), the schoolmaster's son, who was later to become one of his best friends and to work with him on a number of architectural projects. But perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the fact that there was a fourteen year gap between them (assuming there is no mistake in the sources) and, therefore, it does not seem right to speak of two individuals with such a difference in their ages as having been fellow students at primary school. This does not gainsay the fact that Gaudí's relationship with the schoolmaster facilitated his friendship with the latter's son and that, several years later, the Gaudí family took in the young Francesc Berenguer when he moved to Barcelona, also to study architecture.

Someone Gaudí did coincide with at primary school was Eduard Toda, with whom he continued to study the baccalaureate (1863-68) in the Col·legi dels Escolapis in Reus, a Piarist establishment that acted as a secondary school. Around that time Toda planned an ideal restoration of the monastery of Poblet with a view to converting it into a co-operative community of artisans, artists and cultivators of the arts and sciences. Gaudí's involvement in this youthful project has been mythologised and was no doubt less than people thought. All the same, it reveals an early interest in architecture and the history of Catalonia.
His performance at secondary school was not brilliant, but improved gradually as time went on. In the year 1868-69 he completed the baccalaureate, having enrolled as an independent pupil at the Institut in Barcelona, where he lived with his brother, a medical student.

In Barcelona, to which the whole family soon moved, Gaudí studied the subjects required for admission to the school of architecture (1869-73). To pay for this, his father sold up the family properties in Reus. In October 1873, Antoni Gaudí begun studying architecture at the School of Fine Arts (La Llotja), which in 1875 became part of the reconstituted University of Barcelona and was thereafter known as the Barcelona School of Architecture. During his time as an undergraduate, in addition to doing his military service, he also did several jobs to earn some money. He worked as a machinery draughtsman in the Padrós & Borràs workshops, with the architect F. de P. Villar on the plans for the alcove of Montserrat, and with the master builder Josep Fontserré on various items for Parc de la Ciutadella. Some of the plans he drew up as a student have also been preserved. His dedication to his studies was not regular and he often skipped classes. On the other hand, he made a detailed analysis of the photographic repertories of monuments from all over the world that were kept in the School's library.

In 1876, his brother Francesc, who had just graduated as a doctor, and his mother died within a couple of months of each other. This no doubt triggered off a personal crisis in him that was to influence his ideological and artistic evolution.
On 15 March 1878 he completed his studies and obtained his degree in architecture with the plans for an assembly hall. His first year as a professional architect is important for the acquaintances he made that would play an essential part in his life and work. He designed some lampposts for Barcelona, of which the six-armed type were installed in Plaça Reial, while those with three arms were put up in Pla de Palau. While he was working on this at Eduald Puntí's studio in Carrer de la Cera, he met a glove merchant by the name of Esteve Comella, for whom he designed a showcase in which to display his products at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The magnate Eusebi Güell saw the showcase and took an interest in Gaudí's work, so Comella introduced them. Güell, who was to become the architect's greatest protector, client and friend, commissioned him to make the liturgical furniture (armchair, bench and prie-dieu) for the chapel and family vault attached to the Palacio Sobrellano in Comillas for his father-in-law, Antoni López. Eudald Puntí finished the furniture around 1880. This was to be the start of a fruitful relationship between Güell and Gaudí that would last for almost forty years, until the patron's death in 1918.

In 1878 he also drew up plans for a reliquary, the drawing of which is in the Reus Museum; designed his own work desk, which Eudald Puntí made for him; and made the model of the Girossi bandstand, of cast iron, with public urinals, a flower stall, hoardings and a calendar clock, but the developer went bankrupt and the project was shelved. He also began work on the plans for the premises of the co-operative society La Obrera Mataronense, including an enclosure, plans for workers' houses and, especially, the alterations to the co-operative's social club, of which there is a water colour sketch that was shown at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878. Subsequent to this, he designed a number of other elements, including an industrial workshop roofed with parabolic wooden arches (1883). This and a small block of toilets are all that remains standing today. The workers' co-operative period, during which the only -unsuccessful- amorous episode of his life is thought to have occurred, is perhaps when he came closest to progressive ideological positions, which he shared with many of his friends of that time, although he was eventually to discard them in favour of a Catholic world-view.

In 1879 Gaudí joined the Associació Catalanista d'Excursions Científiques (Catalanist Scientific Rambling Association). He sat on its management committee until 1882 and was curator of its archaeological museum. He took part with the other members in the patriotic and scientific activities of the organisation, which at that time served as a vehicle for the concerns of those who wanted to get to know their country in order to completely reconstruct it, who admired past glories and the beauty of nature, but simultaneously sought to modernise it. It was in 1879 that he made the drawings for an allegorical cavalcade as a tribute to the poet Vicens Garcia, the parish priest of Villafogona, although the event never actually happened.

Upon the death of his sister Rosa in that same year, he took charge of his niece, Rosita Egea Gaudí, and sent her to a school run by the nuns of the Order of Jesus and Mary in Tarragona, for whose chapel the architect designed the altar around 1880-82. This was how he came to meet the vicar-general of the archdiocese of Tarragona and future bishop of Astorga, Joan B. Grau Vallespinós. Later on, Rosita went to live with her uncle, Antoni Gaudí, and her grandfather, the architect's father.

The plans he made in 1880 for some large lampposts to light up La Muralla de Mar in Barcelona never made it off the drawing board, as happened with many of his early works. The lampposts he designed were tall and bore the names of medieval Catalan admirals. In February 1881, he published his only known article, in La Renaixensa, on the exhibition of industrial arts organised by Foment del Treball Nacional. He also designed a bandstand to be set up in Comillas on the occasion of the visit by Alfonso XII. It was made in the Puntí workshop, but was taken to the Güell estate, or Torre Satalia, and eventually disappeared.

Around 1882 he worked as an assistant in the studio of the architect Joan Martorell, for whom he drew the plans of a new façade for Barcelona Cathedral that was never to be built. He also helped him on the plans for the churches of the Jesuits and the Salesians, both in Barcelona. For his part, Gaudí planned a hunting lodge in El Garraf for Eusebi Güell that was never actually built either.

In 1883 he went with the Associació Catalana d'Excursions Científiques on a trip to Banyuls de la Marenda, Perpinyà (Perpignan) and Elna to foster fellowship between Catalanists from both sides of the border and also visited Carcassonne. This was an important year for him, as it was the start of his first major works. The building of El Capricho in Comillas began, with Cristòfol Cascante as site manager, and was completed in 1885. It is a brick and ceramic building with a slender tower, decorated with elements of great originality. That year he also started work on Casa Vicens, in the Barcelona district of Gràcia, which he finished in 1888. This is a family house decorated with tiles whose exterior and interior both have an Arabic air about them, although Gaudí did not imitate any particular model.

And, finally, on 3 November 1883, on the recommendation of Joan Martorell, Gaudí took over the works of the Sagrada Família from Francisco del Villar, the diocesan architect, who had started them the year before. This famous work, which was to occupy him for over forty years, gradually evolved in line with his own existence, with Gaudí incorporating various decorative and structural elements into it as he went along. His great contribution in the years prior to the turn of the century were the doorways of the Nativity Façade with a huge torrent of decoration.

Between 1884 and 1887, he carried out alterations on the Güell estate, or Torre Satalia, in Les Corts, of which the outhouses and the dragon grille have been conserved. This is an important work, as it is where he used broken tile decoration, parabolic arches and hyperboloid vaults for the first time. For the same owner, between 1886 and 1888, he constructed Palau Güell in Carrer Nou de la Rambla, a sumptuous, richly decorated residence where he made the most sophisticated use of the scant space available.

In 1887, Antoni Gaudí erected a building, on the corner of Carrer de la Sardenya and Carrer de Provença, to serve as the rector's house of the Sagrada Família. It was on the upper floor of this building that Gaudí set up his workshop and where he did most of his work, adding various rooms according to his needs. It is also here that the architect spent the last months of his life. Following a fire in 1936, only a damaged part of it remains standing.

In 1888 he drew plans for decorating the Saló de Cent and the honour staircase of Barcelona Town Hall, although the project was never implemented. He also designed an armchair for the queen regent on the occasion of her visit to the city to inaugurate the Universal Exhibition. For this exhibition, he adapted and enlarged a pavilion of the Compañía Transatlántica from a maritime exhibition in Cádiz and exhibited it in the architecture section.
In 1889 he took charge of finishing the convent school of the Company of Santa Teresa de Jesús in Sant Gervasi. This is a humble work, but the architect made the most of the material used in it and by means of courtyards and arcades ensured that daylight reached every last corner of the building.

Between 1889 and 1893, Antoni Gaudí made several trips to Astorga, to supervise the construction of the Episcopal Palace there, and to León, where he built Casa de los Botines (1892-93). These are two outstanding Neo-Gothic buildings employing local granite. The bishop of Astorga, Joan B. Grau, who came from Reus, was to exert a big influence during those years on Gaudí's religiosity. The bishop's death in 1893 brought work on the Palace to a halt.
In 1892, the architect visited Tangiers to work on the plans (never implemented) of the Franciscans' Catholic Missions in Africa. These plans, regarded as the forerunners of his most daring structural solutions, absorbed him to such an extent that they seemed to dominate his activity between 1893 and 1898.

In the middle of this process, a strange thing happened. In 1894, Gaudí undertook a severe Lenten fast that went as far as threatening his life. The clergyman and future bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bages, persuaded him not to go on with it. This fast was apparently the outward manifestation of a religious crisis in Gaudí that may have had something to do with the death of his friend, Bishop Grau, the year before.

In 1895 he drew the plans for the Güell wine cellar in El Garraf, which was built later -some time around 1901- in a different way, perhaps in collaboration with Francesc Berenguer.
Between 1898 and 1900, he built Casa Calvet, for which he won the prize in the first competition of this kind organised by Barcelona City Council with a view to promoting the artistic quality of buildings in the public domain. In 1898 he also made the preliminary studies for the Colònia Güell church, work on which started in 1908.

In 1899 he became a member of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc (Artistic Circle of Saint Luke) a Catholic organisation, founded in 1893 by the Llimona brothers, whose ideological definition was put in the hands of the already mentioned Torras i Bages. He also joined the Lliga Espiritual de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat (Spiritual League of the Virgin of Montserrat) which grouped together the Catholic wing of Catalanism under the inspiration of the same Bishop Torras. In this period his identification with the principles of Catholic Catalanism became clearly consolidated. If perhaps he had previously displayed a certain proximity to the secular workers' movement, by now he was plainly in the conservative camp, and that is in fact how those in the workers' movement saw it. In this connection, I would like to mention what would appear to be a hitherto unpublished anecdote that may help to capture how Gaudí came to be seen by this side.

Around 1902-06, a group of printers decided to set up a co-operative press where they wanted to put their communist ideals into practice, with the profits going to the unemployed or being used to set up new co-operatives. In order to collect funds for their project, they visited some seventy personalities representing the intellectual, business and political élite. In a hand-written notebook, Impressions instantáneas de les visites fetes als diguemne futurs protectors de La Neotípia (Snapshots of the Visits to the let us call them Future Protectors of La Neotípia), which I was able to consult in the old Bergnes library, they noted down the replies of each of the people they interviewed. The visit to Gaudí was arranged in virtue of the architect's involvement with the workers' co-operative in Mataró, but it apparently turned out to be an absolute failure as a result of their mutual incomprehension. This is how the printers tell the story: "Mr. Gaudí is a pretentious man full of drivel who minces his words and explains concepts like someone who fancies himself as a schoolmaster, telling us he was an enemy of parliamentarianism, he kept us hanging on his very word [italicised and in Castilian in the original, the rest of which is in Catalan] from a quarter to nine to a quarter to twelve at night. The overall impression we got is that he is a reactionary per se and per accidens". Of course this is not an objective description of Gaudí, but how they saw him from their self-interested standpoint clouded by their disappointment.

In 1900, work began on the first glorious mystery in the monumental rosary of Montserrat, designed by Gaudí with sculptures by Josep Llimona, promoted by the Lliga Espiritual de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat. It remained unfinished, but was later completed by Jeroni Martorell. Between 1900 and 1903 he put up the villa of Bellesguard in Barcelona, recreating a former palace of the kings and queens of the crown of Catalonia and Aragon. During the same period (1901-04) he designed the decoration (now disappeared) for the home of Eusebi Güell's daughter, the Marchioness of Castelldosrius, in Barcelona. And, most importantly, he began work on Park Güell, which he left unfinished in 1914. This unsuccessful attempt to create a garden city has been regarded by many as an ideal vision of the landscape and essence of Catalonia.
Outside of work, Gaudí's life was marked by routine. We know that every day he went to mass in the church of Sant Felip Neri, very near to the Cathedral. It was there he was portrayed by Joan Llimona in 1901, one of the great pictures of the life of the saint.

In 1902, Gaudí made the front gate to Finca Miralles, in Passeig de Manuel Girona, Barcelona. For the industrial printer Hermenegild Miralles he also designed some small papier mâché relief slabs that were used in decorating the Torino establishment in Passeig de Gràcia.
In 1902, Antoni Gaudí began a series of trips to Majorca where he worked on restoring the liturgical elements of Palma Cathedral: moving the choir, installing new daises and pulpits, arranging the chapel of the Trinity and erecting a suspended canopy. In Gaudí's absence, the work was directed by Joan Rubió. Jujol saw to the pictorial decoration of the choir stalls and some three-coloured stained glass windows designed by Joaquim Torres-Garcia, Iu Pascual and Jaume Llongueres were put in. The project was cut short in 1914.

In 1904, Antoni Gaudí designed and started to construct a chalet for the painter Lluís Graner, but it was to remain unfinished. Only the gate in the wall was made, but it has not survived. For the same client, he decorated Sala Mercè, a cinema in La Rambla in Barcelona, which has also since disappeared.

Gaudí's two best known civil works are quite close to each other in Passeig de Gràcia and were built one after the other. In 1904 he started refurbishing and altering Casa Batlló, a job that was finished in 1906. The result was a totally new building evoking undersea worlds whose sparkling appearance was achieved using the most humble materials, such as broken glass and tiles. From 1905 to 1910, he devoted himself to constructing Casa Milà, more commonly known as La Pedrera (The Quarry). Its impressive, undulating mass, perforated by windows and with strange-looking wrought-iron railings, and the highly original chimneys on the roof make it an extremely noble creation. It could be a mountain with perpetual snow, perhaps calling to mind El Canigó, the mountain in North Catalonia whose name crops up in popular songs and which the epic poem by Verdaguer had transformed into a symbol of the country's personality. It is during this time that Josep M. Jujol began working with Gaudí.

By 1906 the architect had moved to Park Güell with his father and his niece Rosita. Eusebi Güell also went to live then in the main building in the park. Gaudí's father died on 29 October. It is probably around this time that Gaudí presented his ideas for refurbishing La Misericòrdia in Reus, but they came to nothing.

According to Joan Matamala, in 1908, some North Americans commissioned Gaudí to draw up plans for a skyscraper in New York. However, not all scholars accept this hypothetical commission as a fact. That same year he started building the Colònia Güell church in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. After experimenting for ten years with some models he had invented himself, Gaudí eventually found a structure integrating inclined supports and roofs into a single unit using traditional materials such as stone and brick. Its plastic richness and constructive daring have led it to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century architecture, in spite of its remaining unfinished.

The last work Gaudí started were the buildings for the Sagrada Família parish school, constructed in 1909. Although they had a humble brick structure, Gaudí experimented with the material's constructive possibilities on the interesting undulating roof. The following year he took part in the exhibition at the Société Nationale de Beaux Arts in Paris and went to Vic to recover from a bout of anaemia. On this occasion, coinciding with the centenary of the philosopher Jaume Balmes, he designed, with the assistance of Jujol and Canaleta, two lampposts of basalt and wrought iron for Vic's Plaça Major which disappeared in 1924.

In 1911, as he was suffering from Malta fever, he went to Puigcerdà with his friend Pere Santaló, who was a doctor. In view of the seriousness of his illness, he made a will. The following year his niece, Rosita Egea, died.

The death in 1914 of his assistant and friend from Reus, Francesc Berenguer, was a painful loss for Gaudí. The part played by the people who worked with Antoni Gaudí's on his architectural projects is essential for a thorough knowledge of his work, but it has still not been given its full due. This does not mean that we have to downgrade our assessment of the master. On the contrary, it makes Gaudí a precursor of teamwork and shows that he was able to gather round him some excellent assistants who agreed to be led by the undisputed master, someone who had a clear idea of the ultimate goal and co-ordinated the different contributions.

At that time Gaudí turned down all other projects in order to focus exclusively on the work of the Sagrada Família. Aware that he would not be able to complete it himself, he concentrated on preparing the fairly detailed plaster models that show the project's overall lines and, in particular, the innovative structural solutions he proposed for the temple's naves and aisles employing inclined columns with a geometric module, vaults formed by hyperbolic paraboloids and ingenious solutions of details, all designed to evoke a forest.

During the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Gaudí had once more occasion to manifest his views on the Catalan question. In spite of his advanced age, on 11 September 1924 he was arrested on his way to a mass for the Catalans who had fallen in the defence of Barcelona in 1714.

Gaudí lived frugally, as can be seen from the taxes he paid as an architect. In the list of the industrial tax bands for 1924, his name appears in the seventh and last tax category whereas, to mention a couple examples at the other end of the scale, Enric Sagnier and Puig i Cadafalch were in the first category, according to the records of the Boletín de la Asociación de Arquitectos de Cataluña (Newsletter of the Association of Architects of Catalonia), III, 1924, p. 4.
In 1925 he went to live on the site of the Sagrada Família to avoid the inconvenience of living away from his exclusive work. Antoni Gaudí died in Barcelona on 10 June 1926, three days after being hit by a tram.

GAUDÍ IN HIS SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
BY Mireia Freixa i Serra

Barcelona University library conserves a hand-written document by the young Gaudí addressed to the vice-chancellor of the university. Composed in Spanish when he was just 17, it says: "Since I wish to study at this Literary University the subjects listed in the margin in order to accede to the Architecture Degree course; and since I was unable to present myself at the appointed time for enrolment due to the fact that the political circumstances have not allowed me to set out earlier…". In the next paragraph he requests that he be permitted to enrol even though the stipulated period for doing so has expired. The reason for his delay was the revolution of September 1868, which led to the dethronement of Queen Isabel II and the proclamation of the First Republic. Reus, where Gaudí lived, had set up a Revolutionary Junta and the town was in the midst of a tremendous upheaval.

This note is of no great importance in itself, but it does provide a convenient starting point from which to approach the subject of this article. Gaudí is not an isolated personality who lived secluded in his own little world. He was a person of his time, affected by both the political convulsions of the period and the religious and ideological beliefs of the moment. The following pages are an attempt to sketch the context in which Gaudí's great personality developed, focusing especially on the cultural framework within which he moved.

Antoni Gaudí received his primary and secondary education in Reus, the town where he was born. At that time, Reus was in the middle of a period of growth. Agriculture, having managed to overcome the phylloxera crisis, was flourishing and local industry was also strong. Liberal ideas were deeply rooted in the town and during the six years from 1868 to 1874 it was in the hands of the Republicans. During this same period, the trade union organisation AIT (International Workingmen's Association) came to the fore and had a large membership among the working class and artisans. During his childhood, Gaudí was no doubt affected by the political and social situation that preceded the September revolution.

His links with the liberal movements were probably stronger than might appear at first sight. At secondary school -Col·legi de les Escoles Pies- Gaudí met Eudard Toda i Güell (1855-941) who was later to become a leading diplomat and played an important role in restoring the monastery of Escornalbou. Despite the three-year gap in their ages, they established a life-long friendship. Toda, Gaudí and Josep Ribera i Sans (1852-1912), the son of the primary schoolteacher in L'Espluga de Francolí, who was later to become a well-known professor in the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid, formed a group of friends who, in 1870, just after completing secondary school, wrote a report on the restoration of Poblet. However, if I mention this fact, it is because the report was written on the back of leaflets on the front of which was printed the revolutionary proclamation signed by the Federal Republican Democratic Committee of Reus. The Committee's chairperson was Josep Güell Mercader, Toda's maternal uncle and prime mover of the newspaper La Redención del Pueblo, The People's Redemption, whose name speaks for itself.

Gaudí's biographers fail to agree on the exact date, but it was probably following the death of his older brother Francesc, not long after graduating as a doctor, and of his mother, Antònia Cornet i Beltrán, soon after each other in 1876, that his father closed his coppersmith's workshop and moved with Antoni to Barcelona. At that time Gaudí's father, Francesc Gaudí Serra (1813-1906) was sixty-three, by no means young, but not so old as to have to close down his business. This therefore raises the question as to whether there was something else behind his decision to move away from Reus, such as political matters to do with the social changes imposed by the Bourbon restoration which, as is well known, engaged in fierce repression against the trade union movement. The existence of such a link might suggest that the young Gaudí was interested in the trade union cause and would also explain his interest in carrying out an ambitious project for a co-operative society, La Obrera Mataronense. The juicy anecdote of the visit paid to Gaudí by the printers from La Neotípia, which is recounted by Santi Barjau in another article, reinforces the hypothesis that Gaudí was close to the socialist cause.
On the other hand, Gaudí always had a distant relationship with his home town. In 1925 he set up a religious foundation there in honour of his mother, but he did not do any of his work there, aside from designing a façade for the Santuari de la Misericòrdia in 1903, which in any case was never actually built, despite the plans' having been approved. In contrast, someone who did have a fruitful relationship with Reus was Lluís Domènech i Montaner, an architect who had had his differences with Gaudí, leaving the town with such representative buildings as Casa Navàs and the Institut Pere Mata. It was the bibliophile and politician Pau Font de Rubinat (1860-1948), a personal friend of Domènech's, who introduced him to the town.

Be that as it may, both the Cornets of Reus, on his mother's side, and the Gaudís of Riudoms, on his father's side, came from a long line of coppersmiths, an example of the layer of Catalan artisans who managed to earn a relatively good living through hard work and were thus able to set their children up in liberal professions. In this case the elder son became a doctor and the younger son an architect.

Once in Barcelona, Gaudí completed the final year of his secondary education at the Institut Provincial before going on to the Faculty of Sciences and the recently created Barcelona Provincial School of Architecture. The School set itself the goal of giving its students a solid technical background together with a theoretical grounding and a knowledge of the history of art and architecture which would make all-round professionals of them. But before going any further into the course contents, let us take a look at some of its most influential teachers. Josep Torras Guardiola, who promoted the use of iron in architecture in Catalonia, lectured on the resistance of materials, while L. Serrallach Mas taught the application of materials to building. These subjects, as well as those taught at the Faculty of Sciences, such as general and descriptive geometry and trigonometry, ensured that Gaudí would have a good knowledge of the new materials -cast iron, steel and reinforced concrete- as well as the possibilities of traditional architecture. The intelligent use of the flat brick arch or Catalan vault, for example, enabled Gaudí to employ wall and roof facings with sinuous shapes to extremely expressive effect. The advances in the strength of materials meant that the exact pressure they would exert on the structure of a building could be determined with mathematical accuracy, something without which it would have been impossible to make the necessary calculations for the viaducts in Park Güell.

The theory and history of art and architecture were also accorded great importance. A study of these subjects was in keeping with a more humanistic profession that clearly distinguished architects from engineers or master builders. The head of the School, Elies Rogent, played a key role in designing these subjects. He was a lecturer in the "Theory and History of Architecture", whose syllabus we know in full detail, as it has been published by Pere Hereu. In his notes, we can see how history and more theoretical considerations are woven together into a common process aimed both at the practice and study of architecture. These lessons, which he taught with another professor, J. Artigas Ramoneda, consolidated the study of the history of art that had begun several years previously at the Academy of Fine Arts, popularly known as Escola de Llotja.

Nevertheless, the subject that was the bedrock of the architecture course was drawing - studying it and doing it. In a study of the origins of the School of Architecture, Ignasi de Solà Morales stated that "Mastering the different (drawing) techniques was not due… to a whim or demonstrations of purely pictorial skill, but is explained by the procedures for acquiring knowledge inherent in the discipline itself" (Exposició Commemorativa del Centenari de l'Escola d'Arquitectura de Barcelona 1975-1876 / 1975-1976; Barcelona: Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, 1977, p. 51). Over half the subjects taught were based on graphic representation and the systems used for drawing architecture had an analytical and practical foundation that had never been seen in the schools of fine arts. The history of art and architecture was also studied through the practice of drawing, which gave the architects a great facility for "re-interpreting" their models and adapting them to modern systems of composition. The Modern Style's great freedom in creating -or, perhaps better, conceiving- shapes rests on this fact.

Gaudí graduated five years after Domènech i Montaner and Josep Vilaseca, to mention just two of the most representative architects who took their degrees at the School of Architecture in Madrid. However, he is still part of the first generation of Modern Style architects if we compare him with Josep Puig i Cadafalch, who graduated in 1891, or Joan Rubió i Bellver, who did so in 1893. Gaudí and the architects who were practising in the years leading up to the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1888 played a role that is often underestimated by modern-day critics. They took Elies Rogent's archaeologistic eclecticism forward towards a type of architecture that was equally eclectic, but technically much more progressive. And it was they too who formulated a new way of integrating art, architecture and technique that overcame the gap between these three concepts that had opened up during the first half of the 19th century. Architecture was conceived of as a synthesis of all the arts, that is to say, it was to encompass painting and sculpture as well as what were known as the applied arts, which, in the hands of these architects, underwent a complete transformation.

The pitiful state of Catalonia's medieval heritage following disentailment had already produced a response by the members of the Romantic generation who had started publishing a series of works aimed at raising public awareness and obtaining grants for restoring certain major monuments such as the Monastery of Ripoll. In the 1860s, however, the cultural climate was quite different. The reverberations of the positivist theories, which sought the foundations of science and technical progress in experimentation and the strict knowledge of reality, had reached Catalonia. One of the consequences of this was the birth of rambling with a scientific purpose, a movement that proposed getting to know the natural environment and the country's heritage from a strictly scientific viewpoint. Within this ambit, the goal of historical or archaeological research was no longer simply the recovery of a vanished moment in history, but the definition of the scientific bases for its study.
The main objective of the Associació Catalanista d'Excursions Científiques (Catalanist Association of Scientific Rambling), which had been founded in Barcelona in 1876, was to get to know and protect the country's heritage. From January 1878, the organisation was based in a rented flat at number 10, Carrer del Paradís, where the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya is today. With contributions from its members, it organised a tiny archaeological museum in the room that hid the capitals of the temple of Hercules. Not long after this, a group split off from the Association to set up the Associació d'Excursions Catalana (Catalan Rambling Association), leading to fierce rivalry between the "La Catalanista" and "La Catalana", although they eventually merged again in 1890 to create the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (Rambling Centre of Catalonia). Gaudí was a member of the management committee and curator of the small museum of "La Catalanista", but, according to Joan Bassegoda, he also took part in a number of expeditions arranged by "La Catalana". There is documentary evidence of his involvement in scientific trips to Granollers (1879), Vilafranca and Olesa de Bonesvalls (1880), Poblet (1882), El Rosselló (1883) and Girona and Sant Feliu de Guíxols (1889). It cannot be said that he was particularly active in the ramblers' movement, but he certainly showed sympathy for the cause, an attitude that he shared with many other intellectuals of that time. By the 1890s, his name is no longer to be found in the annals of either of these two associations. One gets the impression that he turned his back on civic organisations at the very moment when his religiousness took a decisive turn.

In the early 1880s, Gaudí had started to work with the architect Joan Martorell (1833-1906) as a draughtsman on the plans for the façade of Barcelona Cathedral. Martorell exerted a profound influence on his work and the way he understood architecture and Gaudí always regarded him as his master. "He was a wise man and a saint!!!" he told Isidre Boada, one of his collaborators. A man of deeply held religious convictions, he conceived the practice of architecture as a form of ministry. From a strictly architectural point of view, he was one of those architects who gave a decisive stimulus to the Neo-Gothic style which, in his opinion, was the clearest way of reviving the spirit of the Middle Ages. However, one of the most important things he did was to put forward Gaudí's name to take over as architect of the Sagrada Família when, in 1883, differences arose between Francesc de Paula del Villar, the architect who had begun the project, and the board of works.
According to Joan Francesc Ràfols, Gaudí's first biographer, another essential factor in this "conversion" was his acquaintance with the vicar-general of Tarragona, Joan Baptista Grau, whom he met around 1880, when he was working on the plans for a chapel for the nuns of the Order of Jesus and Mary in Tarragona. Grau was originally from Reus, just like Gaudí, and became his friend and spiritual guide. When he was appointed bishop of Astorga, he charged Gaudí with designing the new episcopal palace. Grau died at the age of sixty in 1893. Gaudí left the work in Astorga and went into a profound religious crisis. At this delicate moment in his life, he came into contact with the future bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bages (1846-1916), whose thought was decisive in formulating the conservative Catalan ideology in the period spanning the modernista and noucentista movements.

One of the best known pictures of Antoni Gaudí is of him coming out of Barcelona Cathedral in the Corpus Christi procession with the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, which he joined in 1899 and of which he remained a member until the latter years of his life. It was in this group of artists that Gaudí found the ideological shelter he needed, at least until his religiousness became more extreme.

The Circle was founded by a number of artists headed by Joan and Josep Llimona, Dionis Baixeras, Antoni Utrillo, Alexandre de Riquer and others who split off from the Círculo Artístico, in which there were goings on they considered were at odds with Catholic morals. They set up the new organisation on denominational and Catalanist lines and dedicated it to Sant Lluc. Moreover, above the management committee, there always had to stand the authority of a counsellor, a clergyman appointed by the bishop. This is how Josep Torras i Bages joined the group and ended up by becoming very much appreciated by its members. Apart from this, it was little different from other artists' associations in having workshops where artists could work, arranging talks and seeing its ultimate objective as encouraging the artistic production of its members. It brought together all sorts of artists, painters and sculptors, but also architects. Among the latter we might mention Enric Sagnier, who was a member of the management committee, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Bonaventura Bassegoda. Those closest to Gaudí included Joan Rubió i Bellver, César Martinell and, later on, Josep F. Ràfols and Joan Bergós. On the other hand, Lluís Domènech i Montaner was not one of them, as he belonged to a much more leftward-leaning faction of Catalanism.

Probably also through Torras i Bages, Gaudí came into contact with another religious organisation, the Lliga Espiritual de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat (Spiritual League of the Virgin of Montserrat), which had been founded in 1899 and which made a big impact on the Catalan society of that time, as Jaume Aulet has pointed out. It had many points of contact with the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and many Circle members were also members of the Spiritual League. Their presence in the League led it to promote the Monumental Rosary of Montserrat, which was to become a meeting point for Catholic artists, including Gaudí. However, it should be pointed out that it was in this organisation that Gaudí came into contact with younger intellectuals, such as the poet Jaume Carner, who dedicated a poem to him -En Gaudí- in his Primer llibre de sonets (First Book of Sonnets). It is certainly no strange thing that a noucentista poet should take a liking to a modernista architect. After all, the Catholic religion and Catalanism are also the pillars underpinning the ideology of Noucentisme.
Following the death of his father in 1906 and that of his niece, who had been living with him, in 1912, Gaudí stopped taking on any more private work. He threw himself heart and soul into this work and entered a process of increasing identification with it. The Sagrada Família workshop, where he met those working with him, defined his world. He spent his time either working on the Temple or collecting alms with which to pay for its construction. There are many people who have left us a written record of that period, although some are not at all trustworthy on account of the passion which our architect generated in those who worked with him. Francesc de P. Quintana, Domènech Sugrañes, César Martinell, Joan Bergós, Josep Francesc Ràfols and Isidre Puig Boada among the architects, and the sculptor Joan Matamala, left many records of the last years of Gaudí's life. They helped to create an idealised picture of Gaudí, but the old architect, who lived frugally in the service of his work, already had all the makings of a popular figure in every sense of the term. The expressions of grief at his death bear eloquent witness to this.

His old friends continued to disappear. His collaborator Francesc Berengues in 1914, the bishop Torras i Bages in 1916 and Eusebi Güell in 1918. Following the death of the bishop, another clergyman had a strong influence on him, the Jesuit priest Ignasi Casanovas (1872-1936), a scholar of Jaume Balmes and a great apologist of Christian doctrine. Gaudí regularly attended his talks which had such significant titles as "Natural Religion", The Theory of Revelation" and "The Fact of Revelation". But Gaudí's world during his final years was above all the Temple and the association which supported it, the Asociación Espiritual de los Devotos a San José (Spiritual Association of the Devotees of Saint Joseph) that published a magazine El propagador de la devoción a San José (The Propagator of the Devotion to Saint Joseph), which is an essential source for the study of the monument.

However, by now, Gaudí had become a tormented person. Immersed in a tragic vision of religion practised with ascesis and sacrifice and, it appears, with a great sense of guilt. Joan Maragall recounted, in a letter to Josep Pijoan, how much a conversation during a visit to Park Güell had upset him. After praising the park's "southern" beauty, he went on to say, "But then, as we delved deeper and deeper, we reached a point where there was no way we could understand each other. In work, in struggle, in the matter for making the idea, he sees the law of punishment, and he revels in it. I was unable to conceal my repugnance for such a negative sense of life, and we argued a bit, very little, as I saw straight away that we would not be able to understand each other." And he added, "I realised that the dogmatic Catholic tradition was represented by him…" This is certainly a dramatic view of Gaudí in his later years which raises many doubts about the things he did towards the end of his life and paints us an even more complex picture of the ideological and culture environment in which he moved.

THE AVANT-GARDISM OF A TRADITIONALIST
By Francesc Fontbona

Antoni Gaudí is a part -and a major part- of one of the most brilliant periods in the history of western art of all times. His youth runs parallel to the development of Impressionism in France, the current that revolutionised modern painting. And that hard-to-pin-down, yet solid, cultural movement known as Symbolism, which spread throughout the western world, also produced the majority of its best artistic achievements while Gaudí was in his youth and in his prime: from The Apparition, by de Gustave Moreau (1874-76), and Salomé, by Gustav Klimt (1909), to Island of the Dead, by Arnold Böcklin (1880), and The Poor Fisherman by Puvis de Chavannes (1881).

When Gaudí began building the house known as "El Capricho" (The Whim) in Comillas or Casa Vicens in Barcelona (1883), his first great works, but already displaying surprising originality, Brahms' Third Symphony was having its first performance in Vienna and Whistler was painting his famous portrait of his mother's profile. The start of work on Gaudí's Col·legi de les Teresianes, a convent school belonging to the Company of Saint Teresa in Barcelona (1888), coincided with Rodin's sculpture The Bourgeois of Calais and Ensor's great painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels. Most of the masterpieces painted by Van Gogh, who was barely a few months younger than Gaudí, although he died before the latter had carried out some of his best work, were concentrated into the period between 1887 and 1890, which was when Gaudí was building the Palau Güell in Barcelona (1886-89), the Episcopal Palace in Astorga (1887-93) and the convent school in Barcelona (1888-90). And during these same years, Gauguin and Cézanne were going through one of their best creative phases, giving life to what was later to become vaguely known as Post-Impressionism.

If we move on a little in time, The Scream by Edvard Munch is absolutely contemporaneous with the beginning of work on the façade of the Nativity of the Sagrada Família. The first films by the Lumière brothers were shown a little later, in 1895, and, while Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème and Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony (1896) were being performed for the first time, Gaudí, as well as continuing work on the temple of the Sagrada Família, was engaged in constructing the Güell wine cellars in El Garraf. In 1898, when the Catalan architect started work on Casa Calvet in Barcelona, Auguste Rodin was making his Balzac and Georges Minne his outstanding fountain with the kneeling adolescents.
With the advent of the new century, Gaudí created some of his most original works. The beginnings of Parc Güell (1901-04) ran parallel to the popular triumph of Art Nouveau following the great Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900 and the emblematic sculpture The Mediterranean (1902) by Arístides Maillol. While the Fauves were causing a sensation at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905, Gaudí was busy constructing Casa Batlló in Barcelona (1904-06). La Pedrera (1906-10), on the other hand, is contemporary with the structuring of the new German Expressionism around the group known as Die Brücke (founded in 1905) and the early, and most interesting, period of Cubism. Later on, the Colònia Güell crypt, built between 1908 and 1915, shared the same time frame as the emergence of Italian Futurism (1909), the official invention of abstract painting by Kandinsky (1910), with all its offshoots, and the beginnings of Dadaism (1913).

From then on, Gaudí concentrated one hundred per cent on his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família, on which he had been working since he was quite young. This means that from 1915-16 until his death in 1926, practically all his creative effort went into that project. This period coincided internationally with the formation of the Surrealist group, whose manifesto appeared in 1924.

If we confine ourselves to architecture, the field in which Gaudí played a leading international role without either his realising it or anyone outside Catalonia being properly aware of it, that whole period was marked by the great feats of engineering employing iron (the Garabit viaduct by Eiffel, 1880-84; Edinburgh bridge, by Fowler & Baker, 1881-87); the pragmatism of Sullivan, which, however, was compatible with the decorativism later known as art nouveau (Chicago Auditorium, by Burnham & Root, 1886-89); the first North American skyscrapers (the Reliance building in Chicago, by Burnham & Root, 1890-94); and the first buildings made of concrete (the church of St. Jean de Montmartre, by A. de Baudot, 1894-97). The great renovating European architects such as Otto Wagner -eleven years older than Gaudí-, Domènech i Montaner, Berlage, Horta, Guimard and Perret had their moment at the turn of the century when the Catalan architect was also showing himself to be an extraordinary artist. And later on, in the early years of the 20th century, Gaudí's work co-existed in time with part of that by Wright, Hoffmann and Loos and even Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.
A great many artistic creations were being produced in the world while Gaudí was busy at work in Catalonia also doing architecture of world-wide scope. Actually there are many more than I have mentioned here, as I have given just a selection of those that the general public is likely to have heard of, so that the trees do not stop us from seeing the wood. The fact of the matter is that Gaudí lived during the extremely rich fin-de-siècle era that will no doubt come to be seen, when there is sufficient historical perspective, as a period whose cultural contribution was of a similar quality to that made, in another time, by the Renaissance. And in addition to this, he also lived for many years, when he was at the height of his productiveness and powers of innovation, at the time of the most spectacular development in early 20th century European art: the so-called avant-garde movements.

Gaudí's name is not usually identified with these avant-garde currents, since we always think of him as the old misanthrope who used to take part in religious processions with a candle in his hand, as he appears in the most commonly reproduced photo of him. Obviously a man with such an image and the transgressing games of avant-gardism are poles apart. Nevertheless, Gaudí had a complex personality that did not fit neatly into many of the usual pigeonholes and some of the leading avant-gardists, far removed from his particular way of thinking, did take notice of his work and were so deeply affected by it that they tried to make it better known and even attempted to assimilate it into their organised movements.
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was also an art critic and one of the theoreticians of the early avant-gardes, was contemptuous of Gaudí when he exhibited at the Salon de la Societé Nationale in Paris in 1910, probably because that salon was a contemptible setting for a proper avant-gardist. However, four years later, he eventually realised the magnitude of the architect's worth, especially as a result of seeing La Pedrera, and he then unsuccessfully attempted to get the Salon d'Automne to exhibit his work in the same way as it was planning to show that of Adolf Loos.

Another of the holy fathers of avant-gardism, the poet and theoretician André Breton, was also attracted by Gaudí's work, particularly the Sagrada Família, of which he remarked that he did not dislike it, if he forgot that it was a church. This is what Breton said in 1922 in a talk he gave in connection with an exhibition by Francis Picabia in Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona. He must have been very interested in Gaudí's work, since there was very little of the temple to be seen then, as though it were a stunted ruin, without a single one of its characteristic belfries yet completed.

Several years later, another poet and art theoretician, Paul Eluard, one of the defining voices of Surrealism, urged, together with André Breton, the photographer Man Ray to go to Barcelona to photograph various works by Gaudí. As a result of that trip, which took place in September 1933, an article by Salvador Dalí was published in the Paris magazine Minotaure under the title "De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l'architecture Modern Style", with the photographs taken by Man Ray of La Pedrera, Park Güell and Adolf Ruiz Casamitjana's La Rotonda.

In this article Gaudí, who was now dead, was praised as a veritable co-thinker and, subsequently, Eluard openly stated, in a lecture he gave at the Ateneu Enciclopèdic in Barcelona in January 1936, that La Pedrera was a "thoroughly Surrealist" work.

The Spanish Civil War and the Second World War caused the links between Gaudí's art and the avant-garde to be forgotten, but the truth is that during his lifetime he was far removed from the circles promoting this current and he would certainly not have wanted to be part of it. Avant-garde art was not simply a particular artistic product, but the result -not always very sound- of a certain aesthetic and moral attitude. The avant-gardes did not attach great importance to their works, but rather to the position of the artist who created them. Being avant-garde was like belonging to a kind of select core of the chosen few with special artistic ideals. The avant-gardists, especially the Futurists, drafted manifestos that ended up becoming the definition of alternative orthodoxies. Gaudí, on the other hand, cared much more about the work than any presupposition that would condition it. Moreover, Gaudí would have been left completely cold -and, in all probability, scandalised- by all the new intellectual orthodoxies, as he was firmly attached to the strongest orthodoxy of our civilisation, the Catholic religion.

That is why, even though Gaudí created magnificently unconventional works, formally identifiable with Surrealism and doubtless born of a mental impulse as rich as that which generated the best avant-garde productions, he personally would never have entered the avant-garde fold. In the first place out of individualism -he would have found it quite unnecessary- but secondly -he was part of a completely different world- due to their utter ideological incompatibility. Incompatibility as regards content, not form.

Culturally, too, Gaudí was far removed from the established avant-gardes, as indeed he was from all of the 19th century European trends I mentioned earlier by way of chronological comparisons with his work. Gaudí was a genuine product of the Catalan Renaixença, of a kind of Romanticism that had raised the issue of the national personality of the particular historical communities, such as Catalonia.

In accordance with the law if the pendulum that tends to govern historical developments, following a uniformitarian period, marked in this case by Neo-Classicism, a particularist period, that of Romanticism, came to prevail. With Neo-Classicism or, rather, the culture dominated by the Academy, the art of all the countries of Europe and that part of America influenced by them tended to be unified from above, not without a certain unitarian good will behind the process, but with depersonalising results. Subsequently, however, Romanticism had corrected that intentionally supranational aesthetic depersonalisation and had opened up the way for the natural richness of each human community to express itself. The emerging Catalanism was simply the form this dynamic took on in Catalonia, and Gaudí who was educated in this context, became a committed Catalanist.

The Catalanists of the Renaixença were concerned only with revitalising Catalonia's national characteristics. However, as the end the century approached, the Catalanists of the intellectual and artistic world, the members of a new generation of children of the Renaixença, were increasingly concerned with blending this revitalisation with modernity. It was not sufficient to implement Catalanitat; it had to be modern. And the combination of the two factors, which was specific to the generation that dominated the last fifteen years of the 19th century in Catalonia, gave rise to a movement that become known as Modernisme, or Modern Style, although I always say it was not so much a style as an attitude.
There has been a lot of argument as to whether Gaudí was or was not a Modernista. To begin with, the concept of Modern Style has never been absolutely clear. To the first group who proclaimed themselves as Modernistes, it meant one thing; to those who looked on the phenomenon from the outside, it meant another. Moreover, as the word caught on, it was soon the common man who used it most often, and in this case the meaning was by now quite different from the other two, so much so that the very creators of the concept ended up by forswearing it, since they no longer recognised themselves under that vulgarised label.

Despite all the confusion surrounding the term, however, Modern Style was a solidly established reality in Catalonia during the final stages of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century and, at all events, indicated the existence of a state of extremely intense cultural ferment, directly or indirectly linked to Catalanism, that translated into spectacular creations radically different from the conventional arts.

In this sense, Gaudí would not just be classifiable as a Modernista, but would doubtless be the most outstanding name of Catalan Modern Style. Although he was always a loose cannon and his aversion to Els Quatre Gats, for example, in which he is supposed to have set foot just once, is well known, Gaudí was sympathetic enough to the Modern Style to contribute to the subscription organised in 1894 by the movement's leading figures to acquire a work by Darío de Regoyos for Barcelona's art museum which the official bodies refused to buy. In addition to this, it was precisely the Catholic and Catalanist Gaudí who opened up, for the sensual Republican Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, the doors of Mallorca, the island where he was brilliantly to develop the whole of his mature career as a painter.

In fact, Antoni Gaudí's is the first name that occurs to any layman -the average person- when they think of the Modern Style. And, therefore, this is where, despite his remaining faithful to a total religious orthodoxy, that radical Catalanist, individualistic and unclassifiable creator, capable of inventing brilliant and disturbing shapes and structures, which the most iconoclastic avant-gardists wanted to adopt as their own, may best be understood: in the dense, diverse and restless breeding ground of the extraordinary flowering of Catalan culture at the end of the 19th century that we conventionally refer to by the name of Modernisme, or Modern Style.

There is no need, therefore, to separate Gaudí from his Catalan context the better to fit him into the European art of his time, as the very Catalan Modern Style to which Gaudí belongs already is, in and of itself, a very substantial part of the best innovative European fin-de-siècle art.

PARC GÜELL OR GAUDÍ'S SPECIFICITY
BY Xavier Güell

If we heed, or stick closely, to the meaning of the term "specific", we ought to describe Gaudí's architecture in detail. However, I think it is important to make the following exception: to describe in detail what is most characteristic of Gaudí. And it is at this point that we have to leave aside all the work done by the architect prior to 1900. I do not think this decision requires too much explanation, as it is an opinion held by a considerable majority.

Nevertheless, I do think it necessary to recall the number of projects Gaudí was engaged in around 1900. 1883 marked the start of his professional career and, coincidentally, the beginning of his dedication to the Temple of the Holy Family, or Sagrada Família, which was to be one of his main occupations throughout his professional life. During the period from 1890 to 1898, the only major work he had was his extremely personalised continuation of the construction of the temple. However, the approach of the new century brought with it a change in Gaudí's activity and a diversity of projects. From 1898 to 1904, he worked on designing and constructing Casa Calvet. Between 1900 and 1905, he did the same in relation to Bellesguard. Also in 1900, he began work on Park Güell. And his last project at this time, for which he had been commissioned in 1898 and had been planning since then, was the Colònia Güell church. As a result of all this, 1900 was an exciting time in his life, with a wide variety of very interesting commissions: dwellings, religious architecture and a garden city as well as designs for objects and furniture.

On 15 March 1879, Gaudí graduated as an architect and on 10 August of that same year he wrote, in Spanish, Manuscritos sobre ornamentación. These Manuscripts on Ornamentation) contain, among other things, a considerable number of concepts to which I would like to draw attention in this article.

· The use of precision as a means of reproducing nature.
· Geometry is highly appropriate for public and religious buildings. The Greek temples and other buildings rectangular ground plan, conic columns, square metopes and triangular pediments; their ornamentation features a host of meanders decorating the members and the palmettes are simply lines perpendicular to the horizontal line they follow.
· The richness of the relief, of the light and shade, of outline in each and every one of their parts.
· Nature does not present us with any monotonously uniform objects.
· Until the natural colouring of time arrives, paint is indispensable.
· The Egyptians developed horizontality, the Middle Ages verticality.

You can find all these concepts, in one way or another, in the most important project Gaudí carried out in his city, Barcelona, although the city did not honour, or acknowledge or pay tribute to the architect's work during his lifetime. I am referring to Park Güell, a work I believe encapsulates the specificity of Gaudí.

Eusebi Güell, who met Gaudí in 1878 and had bought the 20-hectare estate of La Muntanya Pelada from the Marquis of Marianao, wanted to transform it into a garden city or garden suburb.

The idea Güell put to Gaudí was as follows: Plots with a surface area of approximately 1,000 to 1,200 square metres and 60 dwellings, taking up around 35% of the total surface area. Construction of retaining walls and all the roadways (about three kilometres) providing access to the dwellings, lighting, sewers and water and gas supplies, all on land with a considerable slope and uneven terrain. At first, the intention was for there to be two entrances, one to the north, on the Carretera del Carmel, and another, which was to be the main one, on the south side, on Carrer d'Olot. All this development work would produce specific urban spaces and singular architecture.

The urban spaces are those which are subject to the concept of horizontality as the principle regulating the topography with the creation of the large esplanade projecting over Barcelona's plain as it slopes gently down from north to south as far as the sea.

The geometry, the conical columns, the metopes, the sinuous profiles, the chiaroscuro, the fluting, the relief are ingredients that shape part of this esplanade's huge support. Eighty-six Doric style columns, each one approximately 7.2 metres high, provide a reference to antiquity. The shafts of the seventeen inclined outer columns -the others are upright- are covered with cracked tile work to a height of 1.8 metres, while the remainder of the column is decorated with gentle, yet deep, fluting as far as the gorgerin that leads on to a capital with a low profile and broad base. The space where this pillared room is located was originally intended for an open-air market protected by the flat roof provided by the garden city's esplanade overhead.

The ground plan of this space is defined by two geometrical figures: a rectangle and a triangle. The longer side of the rectangle is flanked by eleven columns, the shorter by six. The longer side gives onto a retaining wall and the base of the triangle. However the base of the triangle does not have eleven columns, but ten. The elevation of the triangle does not have six columns; it has three. There again, the second row of the base of the rectangle towards the retaining wall does not have eleven columns, but nine grouped into three sets of three, all aligned. That leaves four columns, two in the direction of the base and two in accordance with the elevation direction lines. But where are they? Within this forest, where the distance between the centrelines of the columns is around four metres, Gaudí has created three bigger spaces, as though he wanted to determine, or arrange, the position of the stalls set up by the women from the country who would periodically come to sell their fresh produce here. Four bosses full of colour and relief occupy the place of the columns. These four discs were made at the same time as the facing of the new skin of the refurbished Casa Batlló.

Coincidences approximate to the iron will of those who make plans. The centrelines of the columns mark out certain directions and in this case the axis perpendicular to Carrer d'Olot coincides with the grid of the axes of the streets of the Eixample. As a result of the absence of the two columns, in accordance with the elevation direction line of the triangle, the space coincides with the centreline drawn from the main entrance to the end of the hypostyle room. However there is a big difference in height between these two points, which is overcome by a stairway with two handrails that has three flights of steps and two landings. The space between the handrails is used to channel the overflow from the water tank under the market room. The dragon and the snake, covered with many-coloured broken glazed tiles, serve this purpose.

There are other elements of the urban space that we still have to mention. Let us leave behind the roadways for vehicles and the paths for pedestrians, with inclines of about 6% and 12% respectively, and their repeated cross porticoes with from one to three treelike, spiral columns standing at an angle, like the retaining walls, according to the lines of the stress funiculars used in calculating the graphic statics, all of them designed by Joan Rubió i Bellver and Gaudí, and let us go to find the bench that skirts and limits the esplanade and finishes off the frieze and the cornice of the room's inclined outer columns.

This bench was designed with just two prefabricated pieces and a third symmetrical piece, which made it possible to construct the whole of its ingenious wavy structure. The entire bench is covered with broken tiles from various different sources forming masses of colours with freer compositions on the backrest than on the external part of the wall. The pieces at the top of the round handrail contain marine inscriptions and incisions representing leaves and flowers. This broken tile work was done by the other architect who collaborated with Gaudí, Josep Maria Jujol, regarded as one of the most explosive, yet subtle, plastic creators of contemporary European art. Although this bench was built around 1909 and 1910, the period in which the construction of Casa Milà, or "La Pedrera" as it is more popularly known, was being completed, both these architects displayed an impressive ability to formalise its covering -so full of colour, texture, shape and light- thereby consolidating the urban space par excellence of the whole park.

The other important spot in this place are the two buildings flanking the main entrance on Carer d'Olot, one of which was to serve as a porter's lodge, while the other was where the administration and various services for the park were to be based. Standing to the right and the left, they are, as it were, the two bastions of this enclosure which is surrounded by a brick wall faced with stone taken from the site. The wall has an upper band of the same stone broken up into smaller pieces -the idea of order is not lost- topped by an undulating ridge covered with broken white and red tiles incorporating circular ceramic medallions with the name or the initials of Park Güell on them.

The gatekeeper's lodge and the administration building, built in 1901 and 1903, are integrated into the outer wall, their walls being made of the same stone. The roofs have undulating shapes with the air vents, merlons and decorative elements also covered with broken tiles.

But let us pay attention to the park's architecture, as, in my opinion, Gaudí's specificity also lies in these two buildings.
Characterised by differences in scale, the orderly arrangement of the exterior and the functionality of the interior, they are geometric constructions whose ground plan and elevation plan are both based more on the circle than the rectangle. They display the static uniformity of nature and what Gaudí called "architectural painting" in order to make the contours and structural planes more energetic and thus give the object more life.

The building on the left as you stand at the main entrance is the one intended for administration. It has a 17 metre-high tower built with the same two materials used in the rest of the park: stone and broken tiles. The cylindrical stone base is the same height as the façades, while the rest of the turret is adorned by broken blue and white tiles, the intention being to establish a geometrical relationship between squares and the profile of a wreathed column. An outside staircase leads up to the balcony, which is the tambour of the column just described. The roof is a volume that does not form part of the building's perimeter. It has a conceptual autonomy as a piece in its own right and as the support for a more peaceful and more orderly display of colours than that of the bench. But why do the two big openings of the two larger façades have different architectural designs? One has a column in the middle, while the other has not; one has three windows above it, while the other has two. However, they are both are hiding behind the two gratings like four wind-filled sails, a splitting into two of the lower floors.

At that time Gaudí was building Bellesguard, a dwelling that was quite different in its conception, programme and construction, and rather controlled by a defensive material conception. As a result of this, there emerged two ways of going about things that are too different to be understood in terms of contrast, although they can be comprehended from different functional standpoints with certain points in common. During this same period he also started the transformation of Casa Batlló in which the new configuration of the gable end of the main façade kept this element in the background while highlighting the plane of the façade itself. This was a solution he would repeat in the building for Pere Milà i Camps, "La Pedrera", which he designed and built between 1906 and 1910.

The building on the right, the porter's lodge, is more compact than its companion and is more appropriate for use as a dwelling, although it maintains a perfect formal balance with the one on the left.

The ground plan is conceived in the same way, though the building itself is higher. It has two galleries in the middle of the two façades at the level of the first floor, more tightly controlled openings in keeping with the functionality of the interior, an entrance at one corner opposite the entrance to the other building and, taking the sunken cross of the round ventilator in the attic as the reference point, a symmetrical overall composition. Several rather curious details need to be added to this picture: the absence of grilles and the extremely peculiar design of the front door. This door is made of embossed convex wrought iron plate with a hexagonal-triangular composition that ends up by defining the standard format of a door measuring 2.30 x 0.88 metres. A new hexagon with a vertical format is the setting for a piece of work that is the result of making small cuts in the shape of a cross and opening the incisions up at the back to produce square holes, the whole arrangement serving as a spyhole.

Gaudí said that nature does not present us with any monotonously uniform objects. He always looked to nature as his reference point and inspiration in all his work, although it is true to say that he made use of it in many different, tremendously original and personal ways. He would create a static, immovable nature, but would that be the natural order of things? He would convert nature into architecture. He was a man of his time and he achieved a personal language, without foreseeing many comparisons or anticipating much thanks.

"Materialising classical expressions in new contexts so that they can be converted into new and original expressions. The free intervention of unrelated elements is what originates new values and creations".
The preceding paragraph comes from a work entitled "Ka-Cho-Fu-Getsú is informalism" written in August 1989 by the painter Toshimitsu Imaï, who was born in 1928 in Arashiyama, Japan. I think this provides a fitting conclusion, enabling us to grasp the enormous diversity existing in the different items designed by Gaudí in Park Güell. Full of "the free intervention of elements" is a phrase that defines one of the most enriching collections of urban and architectural works carried out at the changeover from the 19th to the 20th century and, in my opinion, explains the definition with which I began this article.

THE SAGRADA FAMÍLIA AND GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE
By José Luis González Moreno-Navarro, Albert Casals Balagué.

All students of Gaudí agree that one of the reasons why he imagined his religious buildings with shapes that were totally new in the history of architecture was that he wanted to surpass the procedures the Gothic builders had used to erect their cathedrals.

When the plans for the Sagrada Família (Fig. 1) were to be exhibited in Paris in 1910, Gaudí instructed the then young architect Jeroni Martorell, who was to represent them there, on what to say, roughly as follows:
"In Paris they won't understand this architecture and it will lead to arguments. If they ask you what it is, you tell them: an improvement on the Gothic. They'll get excited and say things, but you don't answer. Only when you realise that they have run out of steam you repeat that it is an improvement on the Gothic, and nothing else."
The tone he used on other occasions was decidedly pejorative:
"Gothic art is imperfect, it is only half-resolved. Its stability is based on permanent propping-up by buttresses; it is a flawed body held up by crutches."

Many other assertions regarding the supremacy of Gaudí's procedures, concerning other matters such as natural light or production processes, were gathered and written down by his disciples. Here we shall focus only on the reference to "crutches". We have dealt with the other points elsewhere.

The second version of the project for the temple, in 1916, represented a major change. From the Neo-Gothic of 1910, Gaudí moved on to a genuine language of his own combining the arborescent system, which he had already introduced in the school for the nuns of the Company of Saint Teresa and Palau Güell, with the leaning pillars and twisted surfaces with which he had experimented in the Colònia Güell church. His disciple Sugrañes compared it to the Gothic cathedral in the German city of Cologne, pointing to the defectiveness of the latter's complex arrangement of buttresses or "crutches", while, of course, there were no such elements in the plans for the Sagrada Família. (Fig. 2)

Sugrañes did not explain why he took only Cologne Cathedral as his reference point and not others, such as the cathedral of Barcelona or Manresa. Or, better still, Mallorca Cathedral, which also has some remarkable buttresses and flying buttresses -as they are called- and which Gaudí and his team knew very well. He could have made use of the recently completed study by another of Gaudí's disciples, Rubió i Bellver, in which the latter demonstrated its extraordinary architectural value. Perhaps it was because the one in Cologne had the most flying buttresses or "crutches", making the contrast with the Sagrada Família even sharper.

As far as Sugrañes is concerned, it might be said that Gothic was only German Gothic or its historical forerunner, central French Gothic. However, it should not be forgotten that in the historical development of the Gothic style there was another quite different conception of space and structure.

Clearly the first in time was the canonical Gothic of Île-de-France that, with slight variations, was also the canonical Gothic of Germany, England and the kingdoms of Castile. However, beside this canonical Gothic, there developed another in Languedoc, in the south of France, and in the dominions of the crown of Catalonia and Aragon, a geographical area which, for the sake of simplification, we shall call Mediterranean.
The key characteristic of French canonical Gothic is the spatial predominance of the nave, which attains a great depth along its centre line and a great height in comparison with the aisles, which are much lower. The thick pillars separating the nave and the aisles help to accentuate the extended, verticalised proportions of the central nave. Reims Cathedral is generally regarded as a fairly representative example of this type of Gothic. (Fig. 3)

Mediterranean Gothic differs from French precisely in the fact that it seeks the maximum width of the available space, as can be seen in the cathedrals of Girona (Fig. 4), Barcelona (Fig. 5) and Tortosa (Fig. 6). The Cathedral of Mallorca partially shares this idea, but taken as a whole, it is one of the greatest attainments of Mediterranean Gothic, since it seeks and achieves this lateral spatial effect by means of the slenderest stone pillars in all history. (Fig. 7).
The same effect is found in the church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona, with aisles almost as tall as the nave and similarly very slender pillars separated in the direction of the length of the nave, the biggest distance in Gothic architecture. The extreme example of this spatial choice is Girona Cathedral, in which there are no aisles and the single nave has the most light of all the Gothic constructions.

Several authors have tried to relate these spatial conceptions to the specific political culture of each place, such as the authoritarianism of the French model and a more democratic character in the case of the Mediterranean. Although these ideas are certainly thought-provoking, we shall focus here on purely architectural questions.

In view of the fact that masonry work does not withstand traction, the stability of the vaulted naves and aisles depends on the resultant of their thrusts always being contained in the constructed mass, as in this way tractions do not appear in it. The equilibrium of the thrusts of the diagonal and transverse arches of the cathedrals with a single nave (and no aisles), such as the one in Girona, or other similar ones in Perpinyà (Perpignan), Albi and Bordeaux, is accomplished by transmitting them directly to buttresses that are sufficiently big to ensure that the resultant thrust of the whole structure passes through their bases.

If there are two aisles and a nave with a relatively small difference in height between them, this transmission can be effected by means of a simple element such as a buttress on the arches of the aisles, as happens in the church of Santa Maria del Mar or Tortosa Cathedral. If, on the other hand, the difference is quite large, as is the case in the cathedrals of Reims and Mallorca, other elements are required to connect the central vaults to the buttress, i.e. flying buttresses, or in Gaudí's terms, "crutches".

It is worth stressing: the flying buttress arises as a skilful way of transmitting the thrusts of the nave over the lower aisles. But it is dispensable. Girona Cathedral, with just a central nave and no aisles, does not have any flying buttresses. In Barcelona, we have the most extraordinary Gothic church with a nave and an aisle on either side, Santa Maria del Mar, but there are no flying buttresses on it, while those on the Cathedral are more symbolic than real. And we should not forget that there are other solutions that do not make use of flying buttresses, such as Barbastre Cathedral, where the nave and the two aisles are all of the same height, or Saragossa Cathedral, which has a nave and four aisles. In this connection, it also has to be remembered that in spite of being a space typical of the French model, the oldest Gothic cathedral in Catalonia, that of Tarragona, does not have any flying buttresses either.

It may be said, then, that Gaudí's criticism was aimed at French canonical Gothic, such as Reims cathedral. And what was the solution he proposed? Let us have a look at it.
Obviously Gaudí had planned a solution for the naves and aisles of the Sagrada Família that avoided the need for anything resembling flying buttresses from the outset. The first plans were based on an arch with a parabolic profile that he had already used in his early works. The advantage of the parabolic arch, in comparison with the round arch and the Gothic arch, was that if it is very pointed, it greatly reduces the thrust exerted on the side elements and thus eliminates the need for buttresses.

Nevertheless, the formal and spatial result of the Sagrada Família compared to a construction of similar dimensions, such as Mallorca Cathedral, was not, in our opinion, very satisfactory. Gaudí must have had similar thoughts when he completely ruled out this idea in the second set of plans he drew up in 1916. The new solution, which was radically different, but also involved the rejection of buttresses, was based on the experiment he had carried out in the preceding years on the Colònia Güell church.

The method Gaudí used to establish the shape of this, his second religious building, was a complex funicular model employing lengths of thread hung with weights representing the different parts of the building. Their photographic images turned through 180º gave the position and direction in space of the centrelines of the constructive elements. By making the shapes coincide with the natural trajectories of the forces in action, the exclusively linear masonry elements -piers and arches- were subjected only to axial compressive stress. All the elements were balanced and so did not need any buttresses, still less any flying buttresses.

The resulting shapes were very different from the usual Gothic, Romanesque or Classical forms based on verticality. Their exterior appearance, with the sloping façades, was similar to that of a mountain, and their inner piers were also inclined. But it can be seen, too, that it was a building of modest dimensions and that its unsupported inner spans were not very big. This is no coincidence: if the best rational advantage is to be taken of the space, the antifunicular system necessitates the use of profiles of extremely vertical proportions.

That is why it was only possible to transpose this procedure to the Sagrada Família, with its plumb façades, in regard to the inclination of the central piers with the nave and the aisles having rather modest spans in comparison to the cathedrals of Mallorca and Girona.

However, although they had short spans, given their profiles, the vaults still exerted considerable pressure. Paradoxically, though, the façades receiving the thrusts from the side vaults were absolutely vertical, while the central piers were only slightly inclined, according to Sugrañes to make their construction easier (6). How, then, could all that be reconciled? Quite simply, in fact. Gaudí managed to verticalise the thrusts exerted by both the central and lateral vaults by means of great weights on the piers coming from an enormous ceiling or the prolongation upwards of the side façades.

It is fairly obvious, although no-one has said so until now, that Gaudí did away with the critical flying buttresses and their buttresses by maximising another of the procedures with which the French and German Gothic architects had already experimented, albeit to a lesser extent: putting pinnacles on top of the buttresses to verticalise the thrust of the flying buttresses.

Seen in this way, did the Sagrada Família really perfect the canonical Gothic? Gaudí's criticism was based on the fact that the flying buttresses and the buttresses were on the outside and exposed to the weather. But, would not the cap and the prolongations of the façades that he devised have been left equally unprotected? From what we have said so far, we think it is possible to conclude that Gaudí did not perfect the French Gothic, but rather replaced his usual method by one with roots in French Gothic.

Providing an answer to the question of whether, at least, the final balance sheet was positive or not would require more space than we have here. However we can add a small, final note regarding the surface area of the cross sections of the naves and the aisles of the various different cathedrals and churches we have referred to. Barcelona, the smallest of them, extends to 600 m2; Reims, only 750 m2; Santa Maria del Mar, 780 m2 (more than Reims!); Girona, 800 m2; and the two biggest, Mallorca, 1370 m2, and the Sagrada Família, 1,480 m2. In this sense, the Sagrada Família is bigger than Mallorca Cathedral, but not by as much as might have been expected, just 8% more, although its exterior volume is much larger.

Why is this?
The reason is quite clear. Whereas in the case of Mallorca Cathedral the only mass constructed on top of the vault is an extremely simple ceiling, in the Sagrada Família, the body added to the central part is almost 30 m tall, almost as high as Barcelona cathedral! (Fig. 8). In other words, Gaudí managed to avoid buttresses and flying buttresses and achieve just 8% more capacity by placing another cathedral on top! It does not seem that from the standpoint of the historically implacable economy of resources he perfected any Gothic cathedral, whether French or, still less, Mediterranean.

However we shall not argue over this point. It is a well-known fact that Gaudí did not manage to carry out his plans using masonry as the Gothic architects did. Given that the Sagrada Família is built of reinforced concrete, it makes no sense to see it as a supposed rival to anything in the past.

Nevertheless, although the constructive structure of today's Sagrada Família has nothing to do with classical Gothic, we can still continue to wonder whether its space, at least, bears any relationship to Mediterranean Gothic.
As we have already noted, the key differentiating feature of French Gothic in this respect is the open nature of the space, similar to the hall space, as a result of the proportion between the height and the width and the openness between the nave and the aisles or the absence of aisles. The value that gives us the key to the spatial perception is the ratio of the height to the free width of the nave. In Girona it is 1.6, making it almost square; in Barcelona, it is 2.1; in Santa Maria del Mar, 2.5; in Mallorca, 2.6; in Reims, 3; and in the Sagrada Família, 3.3. In view of these figures, which do no more than confirm what we can see with our own eyes, it does not seem an overstatement to say that the space created by Gaudí is much more closely related to that of one of the French Gothic cathedrals, Reims, than to the space of the Mediterranean Gothic.
In other words, the Sagrada Família of today has neither a Gothic constructive structure nor a Mediterranean Gothic space.

So what is it, then?
Well, in fact, the space of the Sagrada Família was extremely strange. Compared to the Gothic naves, its nave was very short and what dominated its interior was the immense empty space under the gigantic dome of the transept. The truth is that there was no point in comparing it with Gothic or anything else. It was itself, and that was that.

Perhaps all this controversy originated in the fact that, at the time of the exhibition in Paris -precisely the birthplace of canonical Gothic- Gaudí, not trusting Martorell very much, told him to say something simple and easy to remember, or maybe it was the first thing that came into his mind. Afterwards, his unconditional disciples, just as they did with every word that came out of his lips, turned it into holy writ. Or was it really Gaudí who insisted on this idea? It is hard to know, as he never actually left anything written down. Perhaps, if the Paris exhibition had never happened, or if it had been held in New York, we would not be talking about all this today. In any case, all we can say now is that Gaudí's Sagrada Família was only Gaudían and, as such Mediterranean. The one being built now will be, if only because it is in Barcelona.

SEARCHING FOR A NEW LANGUAGE IN THE PAST
By David Mackay

By the end of the year 2002 many people may be tired, and even bored, with so much Gaudí. In our age of banal simplification heroes are invented, like theme parks, for the day, for the week, for the year. The power of the corporate message to capture the market through heroes has spread to all walks of life and tends to freeze intellectual history into a closed approach of recycling old stories. The history of art and architecture has been dominated by philosophers, or worse, by ideologists, rather than historians who are prepared to get dirt under their fingernails with field studies on the archaeology and archives of their subject. This philosophical approach to history has led us to neatly classify works into a series of periods like Modernism, Noucentism, Rationalism, etc. and then fit authors and artists into each convenient pocket.
Antoni Gaudí is a case of this philosophical distortion. There is no doubt that he was a great European architect and that many of his buildings merit the popular attention that they are now given. But are they understood? Is it not part of their attraction that they are presented as works that are beyond normal understanding, invoking a mystical experience rather than an analytical approach?

Of all the thousands of books written on Gaudí, only a handful, if that, have attempted to decipher the grammar of his architectural language as a useful instrument to contribute to the discipline of his profession. Is it not strange that in his own city, and country, he left no school of creative influence? There is an almost embarrassed silence on Gaudí amongst Catalan architects, in discussions about architecture, a silence that acknowledges with respect the presence of his work, but that's all. One reason has been this philosophical distortion of history, but there is also another, perhaps more sinister reason: the kidnapping of the person of Gaudí by both the exclusive Chair of Gaudí in the School of Architecture and the disciples of the Sagrada Familia - only Sugrañes had the honesty to resign from the Temple's continuation.
Fortunately most of Gaudí's buildings have been carefully and intelligently restored by experts, the most notable being the "Pedrera", or "Casa Milà". Incidentaly its excellent didactic exhibition within the restored vaults of its roof proves to be an exception to my comments above.

When in the mid-eighties I was asked by Alan Yates of the Anglo-Catalan Society to write a booklet on Catalan architecture, I was given the opportunity to comment on the grammar and language of Gaudí's buildings. Later this booklet was translated into Catalan by Edicions 62 and re-published with excellent illustrations mainly from the archives of Català Roca. It was also published in Berlin and London. Now, nearly twenty years later, there is little that I would change and this convinces me that the garden of Gaudí's architecture contains an inalterable grammar, still waiting for younger historians that are prepared to get dirt under their fingernails to undertake the necessary fieldwork that has been neglected by us all. Just in case my own observations serve as a challenge to be verified, I have selected a few extracts from my work in the hope that the mystical experience of Gaudí can be sustituted by a more modern analytical approach.

Antoni Gaudí hardly needs any introductio. No other architect has had so many books written about him and his work. It is necessary, though, to rectify a certain mythology which shows him as a lone genius, a revered mystic. This image derives from his later period when he was exclusively dedicated to work on the "Sagrada Familia" church. A group of well-meaning collaborators have described their experience of Gaudí, and their accounts have fed this profusion of publications that cultivate the version of the architect as an "outsider". But it is as an "insider" among his fellow architects that Gaudí's contribution to the modern movement really counts. He was, in fact, closely integrated with all that was going on around him, and his own professional history fits comfortably into the general lines of our story. Gaudí, like others, was caught up with the early Romantics' searching the past for a new vocabulary.

Gaudí's early work shows a disciplined control over the composition of architecture, confidently adapting the eclectic vocabulary that was developed in the transition from "Renaixença" Romanticism to the expressive personalization of "Modernisme". The "Casa Vicens" has a hesitant symmetrical plan that hides an agile aggregation of domestic rooms. The difficulty inherent in such a combination has been superbly camouflaged in the design of the façades: a symmetrically pitched roof in the form of a "W" over a continuous gallery, combined with a gradual change in the intensity of materials, from stone rubble with brick ribbons laced with bands of green and yellow floral tiles, through to corbelled turrets over the awkward corners, give unity and apparent coherence to the house. The metalwork has its source in Viollet-le-Duic, whose illustrated works were familiar to Gaudí. (The famous metal fence, with its palm-leaf design, was installed at a later date). The "Casa Vicens" aleady expresses what was to be Gaudí's basic approach to his work: a strong architectural idea or concept to which the plan is fitted, and careful elaboration of a decorative theme developed in the course of building, capable of concealing any inconsistencies in the original project. Architects at that time rarely drew more than the minimum amount of plans. The fact that Gaudí produced many, for his early works, would indicate that such inconsistencies were created by him out of deliberate choice, as a way of regulating the plan to the discipline of the main archiectural idea. The "Casa Vicens", built for a tile manufacturer, is really a three-storey semi-detached (against the blind wall of a convent now demolished). In its decoration we find references to the budding Arts and Crafts movement (especially in the floral elements), to the "mudéjar" (in ornamental patterns) and to the fashionable East (in a smoking-room ceiling worthy of De Quincey's Opium Eater).

The two most original and influential features of this building are, however, the introduction of the outside room, a shuttered gallery with horizontally pivoted screens, and the double façade along the second floor where the windowed wall lies in a second plane behind the columned gallery. With the first Gaudí created the concept of an outside room, and with the second he imaginatively exposed then reconciled conflicting demands on the wall - façade composition in relation to interior function - creating a microclimatic breathing-space within the exterior wall itself. This addition to the vocabulary was later to have considerable currency in Catalan architecture. The incorporation of plant boxes, as well as the fountain, into the fabric of the house was a further innovation in the design of a home, later used extensively by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. What we see here is the underlining of a new and closer relationship between domestic life and the garden. If its origins can be traced back, through Nash and Repton in the early nineteenth century, to Rousseau's eighteenth-century "naturalism", it was Gaudí, in the particular context of Barcelona, whoi revitalized and freshly re-projected the concept.

In one sense these two buildings, by Domènech and Gaudí, represent the culmination and the first solid sucess of the search for identity in the past. Domènech retrieves both the functional expression of Gothic architecture and constructive expression of a local material, brick, Gaudí retrieves from the Mediterranean tradition the frontier space between inside and outside to control the climate for comfort, while his mixing of Nature and Urbanity refers back to an idealized intimacy between the two. Both architects rely on eclectic decoration, but this is now regulated in a secondary role. Catalan architecture thus enters a new phase, of which the key-note is self-confidence. (...)

The creative imagination of Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) provided an extreme Baroque formulation of the effervescence generated by "Modernisme". Extending the analogy, we can see in Gaudí's exuberant "Modernisme" a sort of collective Orphism of the Catalan community seeking to recover its Eurydice back across those centuries of decadence when the full experience (social and cultural) of the Baroque was denied to them. This may be one explanation for the apparent contradiction between the normal sobriety of Catalan architecture and the public acceptance of the "exorbitance", as Nikolaus Pevsner puts it, of Gaudí's work. The contradiction itself is perhaps indicative of the gap in Catalan cultural development which Gaudí's creations bridged and closed.

In his early works, as we have seen, Gaudí maintained a disciplined control over composition in architecture. This is clearly evident in the "Palau Güell" (1885-1889), where the central hall betrays its origins in the context of a covered court. The other rooms are placed around this court as if they had been added in an almost extemporized way. Some rather brusque constructional transitions indicate that the architect probably had to cope with last-minute changes demanded by the client as building work progressed. Analysis of the structure shows Gaudí to be a master in deploying the arch and the vault, somewhat brutal with his steelwork and frankly unsound as to the stable limits of load-bearing walls, subjected here to stresses that run very closely the risk of buckling. The street and interior façades evidence meticulous care in the drawing stage: the former responds to the restrictions of a narrow street with a double façade, to protect the intimacy of the inside and enrich the spatial transition of light. The parabolic arch of the entrance and the rich texture of its wrought-iron gate demonstrate Gaudí's creative ability in experiments with form. The rather severe Scottish-baronial façade of the interior is a relaxed expression of the internal functions, held together by the rather forced symmetry of the tribune. Out on the roof the architect worked with a freer hand, and his chimneys and ventilation shafts, curiously out of scale with the rest of the building, give us the first display of the full range of Gaudí's original and exciting fantasies in form, material and colour.
Otherimportant early works are the gatehouse and stables for Güell, in Pedralbes (1887), the "Col.legi Santa Teresa"(1889-1894) and the "Bellesguard House" (1900-1902). The Güell gatehouse and stables (1887) illustrate how Gaudí could lift a simple building into the realm of creative architecture without abandoning appropriately cheap materials and construction methods. The stables themselves are roofed with staggered tile vaults (the Catalan vault, a legacy of the Romans, consisting of two or three layers of overlapping tiles glued together in quick-setting cement in a curved vault form that is initiated from the supporting wall or arch without the normal shuttering for its temporary support). These are supported by wafer-thin brick parabolic arches between each stable. The square exercise room has a vault sitting onsimple squint arches. In these two buildings, together with the forged iron dragon gate, we see a Gaudí feeling his way towards a refinement of local construction and a distinctive richness of compositional decoration, both of which predominate strongly over the marked touches of Arabic patterns and other eclectic details.

The "Col.legi de Santa Teresa" convent is Gaudí's most severe rational building, simple and economical, with decoration limited to an expression of construction and to control over the horizontal composition of the façade with a richer line of recessed pointed openings, both blind and real, along the upper fourth floor. This nuns' residence, for which the aspect as well as the reality of economy was required, disciplined Gaudí to produce a strict rectangular building (60m x 18m) of four storeys. Within, it has a staggered linear light-well, running along the major axis, with corridors on either side. Buckling of the lengthy internal walls is avoided by twisting the first-floor wall to accomodate lateral fins pierced by parabolic arches. The majestic simplicity of form and structure is evocative of the great pragmatic civil tradition in Catalan architecture, found in its late medieval stock exchanges, civic halls and religious buildings.

The "Bellesguard" house completes this trio of buildings which show us a Gaudí doing ordinary work extraordinarily well. "Bellesguard" is a formal exercise in the unity of material to match the ruins of the nearby castle, with stone facing on roof and walls, and even on the drain pipes. But the study under the roof, with its dextrously thin arched cantilevers in brick, strikingly abuses structural economy not only for decoration but also for spatial effects that are quite absorbing. No doubt there are simpler ways of building: Gaudí in his prime seems to have delighted in creating problems in order to demonstrate how he could solve them. The results are of exceptional interest, for they present a paradigm of the role of that redundant design in architecture which the Rationalism of some thirty years later would contest so rigorously. Seen in its immediate context, though, the compact plan of "Bellesguard" reminds one of Gaudí's contemporary C.F.A. Voysey whose work, including Perrycraft in Malven (1893-1894), was widely published in "The Studio" and broadcast in Europe and America through the writings of the Belgian Van de Velde. The kinship extends as far as Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow house in Chicago, likewise distinguished by its compact plan and emphasis on horizontal lines. It was at this point in his career that Gaudí himself departed from this simplifying process of formal synthesis, the line that was carried on by Mackintosh, Olbrich, Behrens, Hoffman and Lutyens abroad, and by Domèneh, Puig, Berenguer, Muncunill, Jujol and Masó at home. A sudden increase in commissions around 1900, and no doubt increasing confidence, led Gaudí to evolve his design methods through sketches and models, which were a more appropriate means of composing his architecture around a strong central idea. There are interesting correspondences between the poet Maragall's theories of inspired expression based upon "la paraula viva" (the living word) and Gaudí's contemporary effort to give architectural shape to the creative process itself. Thus, the oval plan of the crypt of the chapel in the "Colònia Güell", gathering the congregation around the altar; the integration of nature and architecture in the "Parc Gúell"; the flowing form of the Batlló house, based on the theme of St George and the Dragon; "La Pedrera" or "Casa Milà", luxury appartments in a free plan made possible by the use of a stone hung-curtain wall on a steel frame; the structural form of the school buildings of the "Sagrada Familia" temple; and, finally, the tapering cylindrical towers of the "Sagrada Familia" itself: this is the compendium of Gaudí's unique contribution to "Modernisme", and of that unmistakable "Baroque" effusion from which his name is inseparable.

The previous allusion to Maragall has already indicated Gaudí's filiation with a pronounced neo-romantic tendency in "Modernisme", particularly as regards the exaltation of individual artistic inspiration. As with the architecture-music analogy in the case of Domènech, the architecture-poetry motif has very deep roots in Romantic theory. Carl Menzel wrote in 1832: "A piece of architecture in which there are any manifestation of genius is worked out in the same manner as a poem: invention, or the ground idea of the subject, must come first, and it is to this conception of the fancy that technical skill is afterwards applied, so as to work it up and render practicable in construction what is originally the mere apprehension of beauty. This is the only true process." The same idea is the basis of Ruskin's architecture/building, poetry/verse distinction as elaborated in "The Stones of Venice", a work which was available in translation to the Catalan architects and artists and which was a typical influence in the formation of "modernista" aesthetics.

It is nevertheless important to understand Gaudí's role in the creation of his major works as that of a determined and persistent creator, holding to and developing a single architectural purpose (or "invention") through the mediation of his team of collaborators, ranging from the precise sobriety of Berenguer to the rococo graphics of Jujol. In addition to these close assistants, Gaudí also gathered around him able craftmen and artists who, completely identified with the spirit of "Modernisme", were able to add their own contributions to the master's overall vision. Arcihteture being a preeminently practial art-form, Gaudí's "poetic" genius both thrived in and inspired this kind of operational teamwork.

The crypt chapel in the "Colònia Güell" (1898-1915) is comparable in concept only with Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel (1950-1954). Both break with the traditional basilican plan and adopt a more Baroque spatial scheme, but Gaudí's design is in some ways more audacious on account of the hardly perceptible double aisle and the continuation of the choir gallery behind the central altar literally gathering the enclosed space around it. With great sensitivity to the personal dimension of a Christian gathering, where human contacts can prolong the spiritual ones, he extended the shelter of his chapel with a lowering porch tilted towards the sun and forming a breezeway that mingles with the surrounding pine-wood, so that one is comfortably and ambiguously both inside and outside the church at the same time. With a sort of "gentleman's agreement" that removes uncomfortableness, Gaudí has acknowledged the fact that men tended traditionally to hover close to the church entrance with the womenfolk converged on the service inside. This layered entry, like the double façades, is picked up with the suggestion of two aisles that swing around the altar inside the chapel. The exterior stone wall is extraordinary thin, almost literally folded, as though it were paper, to gain the necessary strength for stability (an idea that was to be exploited by Marcel Breuer in his UNESCO building in Paris, completed in 1958). We can now see that Gaudí was here confronting one of the major problems of 20th-century architecture, that is the question of thin walls and the associated violence of the transition between outside and inside. One of Gaudí's solutions, anticipating the ideas of Louis Kahn in the 1960's, was to thicken out the wall around the window reveals, thus allowing the introduction of a frame of coloured tiles that could soften the refleced light upon the coloured glazing. Apart from this and many other sensitive details, perhaps the most surprising thing is the placing of the chapel in relation to the formal axial planning of the colony of worker's housing in the total complex of the "Colònia Güell" by Gaudí, Berenguer and Rubió, constructed after the completion of the new Güell and Alsina factory between 1891 and 1912. At one nd of the village is Berenguer's school, in the centre the main square, and at the other end one would expect the church, as was done in Port Sunlight (1887) for instance; but no, Gaudí plaed his chapel casually off away from any dominant position, on the wooded hillside nearby, thus bringing religion into communion with nature. The full churh building that was originally projected was never completed, perhaps fortunately if we are to judge from the surviving sketches and inverted model (and from the imprecision of his design ideas of later years).

Obsessed at this time with how to continue the neogothic crypt of the "Sagrada Familia" with a more scientific solution to the outward thrust of the vaults, Gaudí profited from the mathematical and constructive talents of Joan Rubió (collaborating between 1893 and 1906) to study the form of the chapel that should occur from a mechanical or "natural" disposition of the weight of the roof. This was ingeniously done by inverting a model made of canvas slung between cables supporting tiny sacks of sands, rather like a mobile sculpure. It was an attempt to find form through structure that was obviously subject to a preconceived idea about the image of the required building. Even so it was a method of design which clearly contributed in a practical way to the final symmetrical form of a centralized plan. Further, a natural consequence of this experimental design process was the improvization that ensued during the construction itself. It is obvious that the almost anarchic tracey of the brick arches and ribs that spring from the tilted columns could never have been drawn. The crypt of the chapel took shape, in fact, like a full-scale model, which needed almost daily supervision. Gaudí had a good team to support him in this, notably Berenguer and, at different times, Rubió and Jujol. Indeed, the undertaking was effectively terminated with Berenguer's death in 1914. Although there is speculation about how the completed building might have looked, the fact is that continuation of the chapel might well have meant destruction of the seminal architectural model that we are left with. A product still of the discipline carried over from his early work, but already incorporating his personal Baroque feeling for space, the crypt of the "Colònia Güell" must be considered Gaudí's finest work.

In the "Parc Güell" (1900-1914), Gaudí brought his architecture even closer to nature. His client, Eusebi Güell, was one of the most powerful members of the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie. Married into the aristocratic family of the Comillas, Güell had important business contacts in England and France which gave him both the wealth and the cultural outlook to make him one of the outstanding patrons of modern architecture. It is related that Gaudí first came to his notice as the designer of a stand for the glove firm Comella in the Paris exhibition of 1878. After the stables, the Count's own house and the chapel for his worker's village, Gaudí now applied himself to giving shape to the ideas acquired by his patron in England for a "garden city" and to designing the infrastructure of a small privileged community on one of the hillsides overlooking Barcelona. The "Parc Güell" is distinctly Arcadian in conception: the placing of the Calvary high up on a rock outcrop seems deliberately to evoke C.D. Friedrich's well-known painting "The Cross in the Mountain" (1807-1808) and the iconography of a whole tradition of Romantic landscape painting that it inspired. Seen in this light, Gaudí's park can be interpreted as a counterpart in building of this pictorial mode. The grotto-like passages and bridges recreate Rousseaunian images of the bosom of nature while classical motifs of the Golden Age are recalled in the ironic use of the Doric columns for the market under the square in the middle of the park. Around the edge of this raised square we find the famous curved tile bench which snakes its way from one side to the other. What appears to be a free form is actually a composition of prefabricated cured and countercurved pieces which match the geometry of the market hall below.Nor is it gratuitously decorative: its sinuous shape, comfortably designed to accomodate the human figure, presents the alternative opportunity of sitting facing other people, thereby becoming part of a group, or of facing away, enjoying the freedom to be alone in a crowd. It is the same insight into "social" behaviour that Gaudí displayed in the layered entry and the benches of his "Colònia Güell" chapel.

The "trencadís" or broken tilework covering the seats is a spectacular performance in a collage technique that anticipates aspects of modern abstract geometrical patterning. It has something, too, of a surrealistic revaluation of commonplace objects, lovingly set out by J.M. Jujol who was obviously developing another of Gaudí's ideas. Below the square and market, like sentinels on either side of the entrance gate, are two Disney-like lodges, the most interesting feature of which is the fact that Gaudí has realized that their roofs are effectively a fifth façade, being moulded and tiled as such and forming a delightful sight from above. These were, however, the only houses to be built, except for one by Berenguer which now contains a small Gaudí museum. With the death of Güell in 1918 the garden-city idea lost its prime mover and the grounds were shortly afterwards sold to the city to become a public park.

The "Casa Batlló" (1905-1907) in the Passeig de Gràcia was a conversion of an existing house which Gaudí "modernized" with an impressive face-lift. Evelyn Waugh, writing about it in the "Architectural Review" of 1930, mistook it for something to do with the Turkish Consulate, so exotic did he find this building. Even today it is certainly an odd-looking construction. the "Casa Batlló", nevertheless, has two major lessons to teach us, one inside and the other outside. The central court has been reformed so that its staggered section opens out as it reaches upwards (as in the Convent of Santa Teresa), the window sizes grow as they descend, and the coloured tiles change gradually from ll white to blue between the bottom and the topmost floor. Gaudí realized that a multi-storey apartment building does not just consist of one equal dwelling placed on top of another, and here he accordingly took account of each unit's differing relationship with the light-well. The façade has a similar composition, with wide bulging openings creating a double façade on the first floor, which Gaudi completely reformed for the owners. The original window openings were retained as a base for the composition, only the top left-hand room being removed, demolished by Gaudí in order to tie up with Puig's "Casa Amatller" next door: an extraordinary example of good manners in urban architecture, seldom, if ever, see nowadays. Now, as the house faces S.E., it catches only the early-morning sun and then only at an angle. In order to enliven this façade, Gaudí introduced an undulating skin across the surface which he faed with "trencadís", broken tiles and plates, etc., in a delicately coloured texture which reflects the early-morning sunlight and contrasts with the muscular stone awnings and bone-like pillars of the lower tribunes. Moreover, Gaudí gave free rein here to his desire to stamp each building with his personal signature and wit. In this case he went to the extent of impregnating the whole façade with a symbolic "poster" of national identity incorporating that most potent of Catalonia's collective emblems, Saint George. the patron saint is illustrated here with the presence of his lance, a small turret crowned with a cross, piercing the tile-scaled dragon's back of the roof, beneath which we find the metal balconies shaped to form the skulls and bones of the victims. The confidence of genius (and the receptivity of a politically galvanized cultural ethos) is needed for this kind of positive flouting of all the conventions of architectural connotation. (...)

The "Casa Milà" or "La Pedrera" (1905-1911), on the other side of the Passeig de Gràcia, is a much larger building and contains several advanced innovations. Here Gaudí used a steel-frame structure in order to free the layout of each floor from the normal restrictions of load-bearing walls. Where previously steel structures had merely replaced conventiona walls, here Gaudí realized that he was now free to bend them at will. This differential layered composition of the plan is expressed in the same differential layering of the façade. Gaudí simply hung his bush-hammered stone curtain upon the steel structure, in the same way that our business buildings have their glass façades hung. In the process of doing this, he subjected the design of the steel structure to his idea of free planning in such a way that many of the columns do not coincide with the ones below. The medium bestws this freedom: Gaudí was the first to exploit it. Another innovation was to separate the lifts from the staircases. Since the introduction of mechanical lifts, architects had limited themselves to adding a lift-shaft to the staircase. Gaudí realized that by separating the two he could vary access to the apartments and at the same time relegate the stairs to use by servants. Large apartment dwellings could thus be designed according to the traditional hierarchy of the detached house, without problems of cross-circulation between owners and servants. Two other innovations were: first, the aceptance of the carriage or motor-car within the building, allowing it to be driven into the courtyard and the, by way of a spiral ramp, to be parked underground; secndly, the recoverry of the roof as a public space for use by the inhabitants. The building exceeds considerably the normal height of its contemporary neighbours, so to dissimulate this dubious excess, Gaudí covered the sloping façades of the upper floors with white tiles which merge in tone with the sky. To the observer the main visual impact of "La Pedrera" comes not from such innovations, but from the impressive wave-like rhythms of the irregular façade walls draped with sea-weedy balconies. The constant movement of the composition evokes at once Van Gogh's idea of the "caricature of the real" in art and also something akin to the impact sought by the expressionists. Illustrations in the contemporary satirical journal "Cu-Cut!" and "L'Esquella de la Torratxa", ridiculing Gaudí's "Casa Milá", would indeed indicate quite a deep affinity of purpose and effect - a deliberate shock to the complacent bourgeois - between the "Modernista" architect's "expresionism" and the "frisson" of Edward Munch's famous lithograph "The Cry" (1893).

Certainly, Gaudí broke clean away from the classical disciplines of architecture and created a personal style that gave a novel interpretation to the concept of the Baroque. The results could have been chaotic, were it not for the strength of his imposed ideas which gave unity to each of his compositions. The common elements in Gaudi´s Baroque manner are the attentin to human circumstances and the constructional basis of many of his most original details and effects, which he infused with a considerable humour. If his wit is something which helps us to enjoy his buildings, it must also have sustained Gaudí himself, and his creativity, during the laborious process of work on each project and construction of each building. The enigma of Gaudí is that, although he was an outstanding talent, he failed to consolidate a viable architectural discipline that could be continued and elaborated by his followers. His abundant imagination, private wit and public self-confidence finally became mortgaged to a consuming and reactionary religiosity that grew up around him through his work on the "Sagrada Familia" temple. He misread his brief, and it destroyed him. His architecture became subjected to a religion of symbols. After 1914, with the Catalan cultural elite rejecting the "chaos" of "Modernisme" in favour of the classic order of Mediterranean culture, disoriented by the death of his patron Güell and of his chief assistant Berenguer, Gaudí withdrew more and more into his private obsessions. It is from this later phase, as we have remarked previously, that the myth of Gaudí derives. The foregoing pages have been concerned with demonstrating the relevance and centrality of his work within the whole dynamism of Catalan "Modernisme". Seen in this light, the achievements and the contradictions of the architect manifest their true significance.

Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1956), fifteen years younger than Gaudí and seventeen years younger than Domènech, straddles the age of "Modernisme" and that of "Noucentisme". It was perhaps a degree of "generational" reaction which turned his interest back to the unfinished work of the early Romantics of the "Renaixença". In a scrupulously scientific way, he consummated the process of recovery of the past through his studies of Romanesque architecture: the three volumes of "L'Arquitectura romànica a Catalunya" (1908-1918) with Goday and Folguera, and his two-volume "Arquitectura" (1901) within the "Historia general del Arte" edited by Domènech. If we simplistically consider "Modernisme" to be a version of "Art Nouveau", then Puig, who never used a sinuous wave in his life, would be excluded from the movement. This fact itself underlines how "Modernisme" is to be understood fundamentally in terms of its underlying cultural and "political" motivation, beyond the diverse (even contradictory) stylistic modes which it generated. What Puig i Cadafalch did do was to join the "Renaixença" nostalgia for an authentic past with the ideals of a modern, European and institutionalized Catalonia projected into the twentieth century, that global "modernista" aspiration which the ensuing movement of "Nouentisme" (emphasizing the break between the old century and the new, the "nineteen hundreds") would appropriate, refine and endow with specific aesthetic ......

DESIGN: BETWEEN THE LEGACY AND THEINVENTION OF TRADITION
By Oriol Pibernat

What is the legacy that Gaudí has left us? Has he had an influence on contemporary Catalan design? To what extent can he be cited as a forerunner of current design? And, lastly, what remains of the triple identification Gaudí-Barcelona-design? Answering these questions requires, not so much an academic approach to the analysis of Antoni Gaudí's designs, as a review of what has been said and done in the name of the creator who has aroused both perplexity and passion, while leaving others quite indifferent. And this review may well prove to be full of surprises.

There is no doubt that Gaudí Year will remind us of, or reveal to us, as the case may be, Gaudí the designer. In the first place, because his work, like the Modern Style movement of which it is such an original part, stands at the very heart of the relationship between art and technique, craftsmanship and industry, ornamentation and structure, individual creation and mass production, constructive rationality and expressive will, styles and new languages, urbanism and domesticity, etc., all elements that constitute the foundations of modern design. But also because Daniel Giralt-Miracle, the person organising the Year, is someone who has enthusiastically spread a view of Gaudí that stresses both the architectural and the design aspects and that discovers in the master from Reus a designer who is more modern than the most modern of designers.

Gaudí died in 1926. With his death, his teaching virtually died out too. Gaudí's strong creative personality was not conducive to the emergence of people who would continue his work. Moreover, the architect's disciples and admirers quickly faded out of sight. The movement known as Noucentisme had been in full force and culturally dominant on the Catalan scene for years. The fact of the matter is that, although the construction of the Sagrada Família might seem out of time with regard to the local cultural climate, it was apparently even more so in relation to the avant-garde architectural movements elsewhere in Europe. You only have to remember that the Fagus Works were built by Gropius and Meyer in 1910-14, the Monument to the Third International was designed by Tatlin in 1919 and the Schroeder House by Rietveld in 1924.

Neither during his lifetime nor once he was dead did the critics take him into consideration. And although it may seem surprising to us today, international criticism completely ignored his work or, if it did not ignore it, had a clearly unfavourable opinion of it. An article in the magazine L'Architecture, commenting on the work exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nacionale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1910, speaks of an "ice cream cornet seller's architecture" (as you can see, food analogies in relation to the Sagrada Família have a long history). Gaudí did not make his way into the history of architecture and design through the front door. Repeatedly being left out kept him a virtual unknown for a long time while he played second fiddle to the international masters of Modern Style. In short, despite its acknowledged originality, his work was a minor story set in a city of secondary importance.

In Catalonia, Noucentisme was extremely reproachful of Gaudían disorder. Following Eugeni d'Ors' belligerent criticism, a general indifference set in that lasted almost up until the 1950s. Nevertheless, Francesc Pujols, a rara avis, came out in his favour and, in defiance of d'Ors, demanded Gaudí's "great monstrous, Baroque and excessive style" for the city. The other attempt at rehabilitation came from the surrealists. In fact it was Dalí, in a famous article published in 1933 in the magazine Minotaure, who spoke of "the terrifying and edible beauty" of the Modern Style. Gaudí's work, vindicated using precisely the same analogies as his detractors -our amorous imagination leads us to "eat" the object of our desire- was employed at the same time to attack Le Corbusier, "a masochistic Protestant architect who is, as everyone knows, the inventor of self-punishing architecture" (Salvador Dalí, Els cornuts del vell art modern -The Cuckolds of the Old Modern Art- 1959). The Surrealists' Gaudí is the Gaudí of genius, the visionary, the child, the primitive, the producer of a convulsive beauty, as demanded by Breton, with its world of imaginary objects to be enjoyed and swallowed.

Perhaps this view of Gaudí held by the Surrealists enables us better to understand the reservations of critics and traditional historiographers of architecture and design and the difficulty they had in incorporating Gaudí's work into their narratives. In his book Pioneers of Modern Design, from William Morris to Walter Gropius, the canon or grand account of the Modern Movement, Nikolaus Pevsner tiptoes round Gaudí and, in his desire to weave a historic yarn, ends up by considering him as "a step" between the Art Nouveau of the 1890s and Expressionism. Years later, in his prologue to the Spanish edition in 1957, Pevsner admitted that "if I had to re-write my book, this is where I would make the most important changes. Now it seems to me absolutely necessary that Gaudí, who only appears in the explanatory notes, should appear in the main body of the text as the most significant Art Nouveau architect, as in fact he is. What is more, I now think he was the only genius that movement really produced".

It is essential to pay attention to this point: the history of art and design, as in Pevsner's case, may be based on historical unity and a linking together of connections. Often, therefore, it is not a matter of making Gaudí's work more comprehensible in relation to his time, but of trying to fit Gaudí plausibly into a pre-defined scheme, allocating him a step on the stairway of architectural progress. In a different sense, the Gaudí of the Surrealists is itself the invention of another tradition, sufficiently daring as to superimpose the paranoid-critical method on the pious man's image.

In the 1950s, Gaudí still occupied an eccentric position. However, it was then that interest in the Modern Style and Gaudí's work began to grow and the first writings updating his legacy appeared. In addition to the books by J.F. Ràfols and J.E. Cirlot, there is a book by Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, El arte modernista catalán (Catalan Modern Style Art), that provides a contemporary reading of the Modern Style phenomenon. In regard to Gaudí as a designer, the book Arquitectura Modernista (Modern Style Architecture) by Oriol Bohigas, published in 1968, is an essential reference point. The author of this book highlights the anticipatory nature of Gaudí's work and defines his furniture as a new typology standing right on the verge of industrial standardisation. Bohigas' view of this question is that "it was a pity that, when the ground seemed sufficiently well prepared for the craft experience to lead to fully-fledged industrial design in Catalonia, Noucentisme… came along to cancel out the New Style experiment and held up the country's artistic development for over ten years, until the rationalists of the twenties and thirties picked up the thread again". The modernity of Catalan industrial design established by Bohigas redraws the Pevsnerian unity in the sequence: practitioners of Modern Style (and in the case of design, Gaudí in particular) / GATCPAC (Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània - Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) / the designers drawn together around ADI FAD (Associació de Disseny Industrial del Foment de les Arts Decoratives - Association of Industrial Design of the Promotion of Decorative Arts) in the sixties.

In spite of these efforts at rehabilitation, Modern Style was not assimilated right away. As far as the conservative sectors were concerned, they still saw it as an extravagance of dubious taste. On the other side, the idea remained strong in progressive circles that it was a reactionary style, as it was bourgeois and anti-industrial. As for Gaudí, his individualistic character, plastic exuberance and mystic symbolism were not traits that facilitated his being accepted as a reference point by contemporary designers. One thing is the respect, recognition or admiration the discovery of Gaudí as a designer might arouse; his usefulness as a point of reference, quite another. We can well imagine that for many industrial designers and architects it was easier to establish a link with the legacy of the GATCPAC or, more directly, with the centres of contemporary European design, than with an extravagant type of design far removed from the idea of industrial standardisation.

During the 1970s, there was greater consensus in the milieu in regard to the ground-breaking role of Gaudí's designs. As I have already said at the beginning, Daniel Giralt-Miracle has been one of the most effective spreaders of knowledge about Gaudí's facet as a designer. He was actively involved in mounting the exhibition Gaudí dissenyador (Gaudí the Designer) staged by ADIFAD in 1977, presenting Gaudí not as a whimsical creator of exuberant shapes, but as a master of constructive rationalism and functionalism. Later on, in the 198 Design in Catalonia catalogue, Giralt-Miracle wrote an article entitled "Gaudí, a designer avant la lettre", in which he showed how, in various fields, "Gaudí's designer mentality operates entirely within the modern concept of design". Design in Catalonia was an itinerant exhibition organised in the middle of the 1980s' design boom with a view to making the names and work of Catalan designers better known throughout the world. This exhibition presented the work of Mariscal and Pepe Cortés, Alberto Liévore and Jorge Pensi, Gemma Bernal and Ramon Isern, Equip Quod, Miguel Milà, André Ricard, Òscar Tusquets and Ramon Benedito. Although the exhibition was about the current scene rather than history, it still began with the Calvet chair in the role of the emblematic object and unquestionable forerunner of contemporary design. Funnily enough, however, the article by Giralt-Miracle was the only one that actually referred to it and explained its presence in the exhibition and why it was featured on the front of the catalogue. The purpose of mentioning this is to recall the relative enthusiasm that making this link still aroused in the 1980s.

Viewing Gaudí as a designer may have aided an understanding of certain less obvious aspects of his work and helped to get away from the cliché of a formalist artist opposed to technical modernity. On the other hand, it would be rash to infer from this image of Gaudí as a "designer ahead of time" that he actually influenced Catalan design. Although Bohigas and Giralt-Miracle enabled us to see Gaudí in a new light, the imprint he left on Catalan architecture and design was weak. We can speak, in generic fashion, of the programme for integrating traditional, typically Mediterranean, constructional systems, and architectural modernity, or fine crafts and the new architectural design culture. But the audacity of the engineering and the formal and plastic repertory characteristic of Gaudí are absent from the "revival" of the 50s and the 60s. In other words, Gaudí was more of an emblem than a master.

If we go over the products of the period, we will not find anything to suggest that the rediscovery of Gaudí had any influence on contemporary design. The only reference is in the Gaudí alphabet by the great master of typography, Ricard Giralt-Miracle, who won an ADIFAD Delta d'or in 1962. Nevertheless, the reference is in the name, not the morphology, The Gaudí alphabet belongs to the world of geometrical and constructive reduction. The only link its two main features -the reinvention of a sort of serif and the accentuation of the secondary uprights- have with the Modern Style architect is the fact that Ricard Giralt-Miracle, like Gaudí, was a permanent experimenter.

Maybe it was the Surrealist reading of Gaudí in the 1970s that had a more visible influence in the design sphere. Two factors coincided to stimulate this discovery which, unlike the one just described, has not often been pointed out. Dalí and the Surrealists had highlighted the objectual dimension of Gaudí's work. The buildings, their elements and furniture were perceived as dream objects satisfying the libido. Not technical objects, not objects of use. And this reading is evident in the most innovative components of design in the seventies. The rational-functionalist conception ceases to be a desideratum in designing objects, as does the industrial poetics of design. The masters of the Modern Movement are questioned and designers seeks other references. There appear ironical designs critical of their own banality, far removed from the grave and serious tone of "good design". These are pop objects or objects influenced by Italian anti-design or, sometimes, simply gadgets. We are talking here of designs that attempted to come together in the "disueño" show as an alternative to the Delta prizes or objects sold in shops such as Insòlit and Dos i Una. Among the objects making up this group, some are recognisably Gaudían.

Another way in which Gaudí is present, this time much more directly, is through the reissues of his work. The first of these that should be mentioned is the hexagonal cement tile. This flooring tile, originally designed for Casa Batlló, but finally laid in La Pedrera, was produced by the Escofet company in 1904. Since then it has been reissued several times to lay the pavements in Passeig de Gràcia, which has obviously made it very popular. The piece's hexagonal shape means that the relief marine motifs on it can be complemented by seven other pieces. This is an entirely industrial object made from a single metal cast.

Other items have been reissued by Bd, ediciones de diseño, beginning in 1975: the Calvet chair, the Casa Batlló chair and bench, the Casa Calvet mirror and the metalwork from Casa Calvet, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. These reissues were the direct result of the efforts to recover Gaudí's designs, which culminated in the exhibition Gaudí dissenyador in 1977, and there is no doubt that they helped as much as the books, if not more so, in getting his designs known. Despite the intention, the manufacturing process and the price of these reissues show that there was still a long way to go between these designs of Gaudí's and industrial production.

Among the new creations, perhaps the design representing Guardian inspiration with the greatest dignity is the Catalano bench by Òscar Tusquets and Lluís Clotet. This 1974 article, made of déployé steel and with a cross-section similar to that of the bench in Park Güell, unites an innovative use of materials and constructive rigor with a free-and-easy shape. Tusquets is precisely the designer who has felt himself closest to the legacy of Modern Style and Gaudí. Another bench -in this case by Ramon Benedito and Josep Lluscà- makes use of Gaudí and Jujol's discovery in Park Güell. This a modular bench of prefabricated concrete that combines two types of modules (concave and convex) to reproduce the forms and the profile of the one designed by Gaudí for the park. In this case, the designers have taken the industrial possibilities latent in the original design to their ultimate consequences.

In the realm of wooden furniture, I would highlight the Andrea chair designed by Josep Lluscà in 1986. This chair is based on an empirical study of the centre of gravity and takes the Casa Calvet chair or the Casa Batlló bench as its reference in order to solve the problem of fitting the seat, backrest and structure together. As in Gaudí's design, the seat and the back are independent elements made of moulded solid wood whose thicknesses and shape bring out the object's sculptural materiality and the anatomic organicism of its form. Lluscà combines these elements with a three-legged metal structure that is quite different from the Casa Calvet chair. Despite the obvious differences, the explicitly acknowledged relationship between the two chairs goes beyond their formal similarity. Overcoming the distance in time, the Andrea chair seems to reproduce the dialogue between the craft legacy and the new constructive and industrial typological solutions. We could go on and look at a few more items, but we would be hard pressed to reach a dozen. Admiration for Gaudí, it has to be insisted, is no guarantee of his being transformed into a source of ideas or references.

Generally speaking, the prudence of the furniture designers and most of the graphic artists who dared to "quote" Gaudí has acted as a filter keeping out the most obvious references. In contrast, for several years now a whole host of souvenirs, decorative objects, ceramics, personal accessories and applied graphics have been invaded by figures taken from Gaudí. This comes on top of all the kitsch, such as the ashtrays with transfers of the Sagrada Família on them in the souvenir shops in the Ramblas, but has pretensions to being of superior status. Silk scarves, umbrellas, rugs, diary covers, trays and coffee cups fill the museum shops with Gaudían motifs. This is not a matter of reproductions or quotations, of ironic objects or paying tribute. There is nothing here that tries to bring out Gaudí's style by means of the most hackneyed stylemes: the inevitable broken tile work, the decorated hexagons, his signature, the dragons and other symbols.

The boom in Gaudían iconography in such "cultural commodities" appears to be inescapable. In the same way, the graphic symbols that are supposed to express "Barcelona" seem tempted to allow themselves to be contaminated by this virus. The trivialisation of Gaudí has to do, in fact, with the trivialisation of urban identities. The equation Gaudí/Barcelona or Barcelona/Gaudí/design has been more a matter of something given than something desired. Barcelona's cultural circles have always been quite discrete in disseminating Gaudí's genius. One might even go further and say that they have resisted having the city's image reduced to an overly singular type of architectural monumentality. In the imagination of tourists, however, who neither bother to weigh things up carefully or go into fine details, Barcelona is Gaudí just as Figueres is Dalí. This reduction tends to give the city a provincial image abroad and, who knows, if things go on like this, may even end up doing the same at home. Accepting Gaudían iconography means taking on an identity packaged for merchandising and giving up any say in the portrait they want to make of you.

Catalan Modern Style was a movement that, during a certain period, managed to synthesise a double cultural aspiration: the construction of a brand of modernity rooted in the Catalan society of that time without turning its back on the country's history or relinquishing its goal of linking up with international modernity. Every contemporary movement invents a tradition for itself. The Modernistes did it with Gothic, so why should not today's designers do it with the Modern Style. Interpreting and inventing are not the same thing, but the frontiers between them are not clearly defined. From the historian's point of view, however, it is necessary to accept that there are broken lines and roads leading nowhere that link up with nothing. In short, it is necessary to accept that a capital as important as Gaudí's may have had much less influence than might have been expected. From other standpoints it is legitimate, and perhaps even justifiable, to use Gaudí as an identity symbol of Catalan design. This may even be the way to make Catalan designers get rid of the most trivial uses of Gaudíism.

THE FUNCTIONAL YET PLEASING FURNITURE OF A CONSUMMATE CABINET-MAKER
BY David Ferrer

Towards the end of the 19th century, the concept of the home as a work of art began to spread out from Britain into the cultural circles of Europe and many architects then set about designing the interiors of the houses for which they were drawing up the plans. And of course furniture was one of the main items they worked on.

This practice constituted a major new development and led architects into fields such as cabinet-making and other trades previously confined exclusively to artisans. As far as most of the architects of the time were concerned, designing furniture went no further than personalising its traditional structure by applying to it stylistic features in keeping with the type of architecture practised by the architect in question.

However, in Gaudí's case, it represented much more, and this is the first characteristic that makes his furniture distinctive. Gaudí did not just have an expert's knowledge of the physical properties of wood, he was also a consummate cabinetmaker. As happened with wrought iron, his insatiable professional curiosity and the time he spent as a student in visiting, and even working in, various craftsmen's workshops, afforded him a mastery and authority not normally to be found in an architect.

Gaudí regarded furniture as small structural elements included in the interior of the house in close contact with its occupants. This concern for structure is only to be expected of an architect, but, in his case, we are talking about an architect who was fascinated by the new theories of Viollet-le-Duc. According to these theories, structure is the basis of all architecture and should be conceived taking into account nothing but the function it has to fulfil. Similarly, in designing furniture, considerations regarding the use to which it is to be put are essential, as are the intrinsic properties of the material employed in making it. Ornamentation -one of the most incorrigible obsessions of the period- can only be accepted as an intrinsic part of the item being designed. These concepts, which in the 20th century were to be incorporated into the functionalist credo, are the theoretical underpinning of Gaudí's furniture and its second characteristic.

The third characteristic flows, in fact, out of the previous two and, although it is a requirement of all good design, may appear rather prosaic: comfort. In spite of the fact that the formal appearance of his furniture seems to be belie it, this is a constant feature that will surprise anyone using it for the first time. Gaudí was certainly a designer with a heightened social awareness, concerned to adapt his furniture to human measurements and anatomical positions as a basic condition for ensuring that it was pleasant to use. In a social context and in a period in which formal and representative aspects took precedence, it was unusual to find furniture like his which did not forsake them, but provided, in addition, a comfortable relationship with the user.

Gaudí designed furniture as both a cabinetmaker and an architect at the same time and this enriching approach explains the quality of his creations.
The first piece of furniture he made, around 1878, was his own writing desk and in it can be seen the main features that were to characterise his entire subsequent production. Although the desk itself was destroyed during the Civil War, a photograph of it exists showing us a piece of furniture that aims rigorously to bring out the distinction between the bearing structure and the assembly of closed containers typical of a bureau. Gaudí himself provided the best description of the desk when he likened it to the saddlebags on a beast of burden.

The compositional clarity of the writing desk stands in contrast to the ambiguous items of furniture he made later for Palau Güell. In the sumptuous interiors of his first major work, half hidden amidst the motley furniture created by the interior decorator Francesc Vidal, are to be found the only two pieces designed by the architect.

The first of these is a woman's dressing table. The initial impression it makes fails to go beyond that of a whimsical piece of furniture in a vaguely Rococo style. A closer look, however, reveals a table standing on just three legs, one of which rests on a rather strange stool supported, in its turn, by three more cabriole legs. On the table there is a tilted mirror whose wooden frame dissolves, at the top, into bunches of ribbons, while at the bottom the bare quicksilver terminates in the profile of a heraldic coat-of-arms. All this formal nonsense in fact conceals the redundant structure of two tripods, one of which has been designed precisely to serve the owner as a footrest when putting on her shoes. Although we do not know what people thought of it at the time, nowadays the strange tension among all these different parts and the zoomorphic appearance of the legs produce a rather disturbing sensation.

The chaise longue, which is the other creation by Gaudí in Palau Güell, also displays an unresolved formal ambiguity. Quilted and upholstered in cowhide, it expands dynamically in amoeba-like stumps denying their own volume. These dissolving shapes were made possible by the fact that Gaudí replaced the traditional wooden structure with which such items used to be made by an innovative iron frame that permitted all sorts of formal liberties. Only the slender strut-braced wrought iron legs reveal that the internal structure is made of metal.

In 1903, when he was about to finish work on Casa Calvet, Gaudí was asked to design various pieces of furniture for the owner of the house.
Resuming his research into metal frames which he had begun with the chaise longue, he conceived a set of upholstered furniture that far surpassed his previous discoveries.
A voluminous settee and several armchairs, chairs and voyeuses (high stools with a backrest) were the pieces intended for the main rooms in the house. Their opulent shapes, flamboyant upholstery and gilt legs situate them within the Neo-Rococo inspiration coming from France where, under the name of style pompadour, it also found favour among the newly-fledged bourgeoisie.

In spite of this morphology imposed by the owner, in one or two cases the metal frame allowed Gaudí to make the seat completely independent of the backrest, a trait he later maintained in all his designs. The two parts are joined together only by a thin strip of gilded iron acting as a sort of bracket to keep them rigid. Underneath the seat, this strip splits into two branches and is attached by brackets to the front legs, which are made of wood. The bulky, anatomically shaped volumes of the upholstered parts make the furniture more comfortable while the gap between the seat and backrest leaves plenty of room for the tails of men's frock coats or the skirts of ladies' dresses to go through and so save them from their usual fate of being crushed.

For the owner's office, Gaudí conceived a series of wooden pieces, each of which surpasses the other. Two years later, this perfectionism reaches its peak with the furniture for Casa Batlló.
The first item, from which all the others derived, was a chair inspired by another historical model: the Bavarian chair. Rendered fashionable by the Barcelona furniture-makers of the time, this essential reference point caused Gaudí to radically rethink his approach.

The chair, like all the other items in the series, is made of solid oak and the choice of this wood at that time represented a considerably new departure. The oak took the place of the darker woods such as mahogany, rosewood and ebony which were so often used in 19th century cabinet-making. This change, adopted by many architects of Gaudí's generation, represents a recognition of the wood of which medieval furniture, praised by Viollet-le-Duc in his writings, was made.
Again, in this chair, the seat and backrest are two separate parts held together by a wooden bracket taken to the limits of its flexion. The Bavarian chair's mortise and tenon joints are replaced by invisible joints enabling it to have cone-shaped legs. Gaudí enhanced the comfort of the backrests by making them concave as a result of assembling several flat pieces of wood at an angle to each other. Since they were quite thick, he had circular holes drilled through each of the backrests to prevent them from cracking. Following his usual methods, he had each of these holes play an important part in the decoration, surrounding them with carvings of floral motifs.

If in his early chairs there is an over-reliance on the metal structure of the upholstered pieces, the manager's chair, with the legs attached in a more convincing fashion and without any trace of ornamentation, is certainly a sculptural piece of furniture, but much more refined.

In the benches of Casa Batlló he made his syntax clearer by employing an architraved supporting structure carved into hard edges, in explicit contrast to the conoid forms of the seats and backrests mounted on it. Once again the concavity of these items is achieved by joining pieces of oak at an angle to each other, but this time it has the polished surface of a smooth pebble.

The best synthesis of this long series of furniture is achieved in the dining-room chair. Unlike the presumptuous seats used in other bourgeois dining-rooms, this chair is of small proportions and not very high. As to its construction, it is made from a small number of skilfully assembled parts and has a far more unitary appearance than the preceding items. In keeping with the gently rounded shapes of the seat and backrest, the legs are slightly helicoidal and point sideways to a parabolic profile. The two small prolongations of the backrest, conceived to offer greater support to the back, are decorated with two dimples. However there are deeper reasons for them than mere decoration. They are there to weaken the fibres of the wood so as to prevent it from splitting and to give users suitably sized grips for their fingers when they need to lift this heavy chair. Gaudí's designs are always like this.

It would be impossible to conclude this review without stopping to take a closer look at his most famous piece of furniture. Although it is not made of wood, the bench in Park Güell is quite rightly one of his most highly rated works. It is also one of the most ingenious. The apparent freedom of its bends in fact hides a carefully thought-out arrangement in which two single circumference arcs are linked together and the continuity of the curved surfaces is achieved by over a hundred pre-fabricated pieces walled with brick. The extraordinary comfortableness of the bench is directly due to the plaster cast taken of a naked worker in a sitting position. Finally, the ceramic upholstery covering and unifying the whole bench is one of the most refined and meticulous examples of Gaudí's use of the broken tile technique. It was carried out by Jujol with the aid of a team of highly motivated bricklayers and, a century later, it still arouses surprise and admiration.

THE ARCHITECT'S CLIENTS
BY Josep M. Huertas

In 1879, the nuns of the Order of Jesus and Mary in Sant Andreu de Palomar, then an independent town on the outskirts of Barcelona, asked the architect Joan Torras i Guardiola to build them a convent on an undeveloped piece of ground. Torras, who was a lecturer at the School of Architecture, accepted the commission and, in passing, thought of a young disciple who had graduated a year before to design the altar, the monstrance and the mosaic of the church. So it was those nuns who, certainly unbeknownst to them, as they had commissioned Torras to do the work, who became the young Gaudí's first clients when he was just 26.

In 1878, the tile manufacturer Manuel Vicens Montaner commissioned Gaudí to design a house on the border between Gràcia and Sant Gervasi, both of which were also independent towns at that time. The site was in some fields beside Riera de Sant Gervasi that he had inherited from his mother, Rosa Montaner. When, five years later, that is in 1883, Gaudí actually began to build the house, he employed the Neo-Mudéjar style. The architect was also a friend of the family and as such he spent several summers on the estate that the Vicenses had in Alella.

The house was sold by Manuel Vicens' widow to a doctor, Antoni Jover, in 1899. Many years later, in 1925, the doctor wanted some alterations made to the property and he asked Gaudí to do them. However by this time Gaudí was quite old and he passed the job on to the architect Joan B. Serra de Martínez. Nevertheless, Gaudí supervised the project, which included the construction of a small temple dedicated to Santa Rita beside the gully. The size of the property was reduced in 1946, when the waterfall in the garden was done away with, and again in 1963, when the little temple that had been added in 1925 was demolished, naturally for flats to be built there instead. Practically nothing was left of the garden and the railings were taken to Park Güell.

Joan Martorell, an architect who had designed a house in La Rambla for the industrialist Joan Güell i Ferrer, introduced Gaudí to the latter's son, Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi (Barcelona, 1846-1918). Both Catalanists, they soon hit it off together and for 35 years, from 1883, the year Gaudí did his first job for him, until 1918, the year Güell died, they kept up a strong relationship which led to Gaudí doing a series of works for him: the outhouse in Pedralbes with the dragon grille, Palau Güell, the crypt in Colònia Güell and Park Güell. In fact, Eusebi Güell was in part his patron, although he was just six years older than Gaudí. He had inherited his father's business and, in addition, had married Isabel López, the daughter of Antonio López, Marquis of Comillas, and it fell to him to administer the considerable family fortune.

Güell's first commission was the porch at the entrance to a country house he had bought on the outskirts of Les Corts, Can Cuiàs de la Riera. Gaudí again employed the Neo-Mudéjar style on the entrance to the porter's lodge that can still be seen today in Avinguda de Pedralbes and he also made a marvellous grating with a dragon. In the same year, as a result of his relationship with Güell, Gaudí drew up the plans for El Capricho in Comillas, Cantabria, for Máximo Díaz de Quijano, Antonio López's brother-in-law.

It was Joan Martorell who advised the bookseller Josep Maria Bocabella (Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1815 - Barcelona, 1892) to get rid of the architect Francesc de Paula Villar, with whom he did not see eye to eye, and put Antoni Gaudí in charge of the work on the expiatory temple dedicated to the Holy Family on land in Sant Martí de Provençals, yet another of the independent villages on the plain of Barcelona. Bocabella headed the group of wealthy parishioners who had bought the site in order to build the temple.

Bocabella gave the young Gaudí, who was barely 31 at the time, a free hand to come up with a different project. This job would help an architect who was just setting out on his career to become famous in the Catholic world.
In July 1886, Gaudí presented the plans for a large house, or palace, in Carrer Nou de la Rambla for Eusebi Güell. The industrialist's idea was for the new building to equal, or surpass, Palau Moja, situated in La Rambla, on the corner of Carrer de Portaferrissa, which belonged to his brother-in-law, Claudio López, the second Marquis of Comillas.

A year later, a well placed person who came from the same town as Gaudí, Joan Grau i Vallespinós (Reus, 1832 - Tábara, León, 1893), the bishop of Astorga, decided to ask Gaudí to build a new episcopal palace, as the old one had been destroyed by a fire. Although the work advanced quickly during the first year, following this the canons made the innovative architect's life impossible and it was decades before the palace was eventually finished.

In 1889, Gaudí was given another job with religious connections, the Col·legi de les Teresianes, a convent school situated in yet another of the independent municipalities on the plain of Barcelona, in this instance Sant Gervasi de Cassoles. Les Teresianes was an order of nuns dedicated to education founded by the priest Enric d'Ossó i Cervelló (Vinebre, Ribera d'Ebre, 1840 - Gilet, Camp de Morvedre, 1896). Ossó had commissioned the builder Joaquim Codina to construct the school, but he was not pleased with the results and sacked him. He then asked Gaudí to change the plans, although walls two metres high had already been put up. As the priest did not stop interfering for fear that the architect would overrun the budget, Gaudí eventually ran out of patience and asked him not to go to the building site any more: "I shall build houses and you get on with preaching sermons and saying mass".

During the following decade, Gaudí worked on several projects outside Barcelona: Casa de los Botines, in León, for Mariano Andrés and Simón Fernández, friends of Güell's, and a wine cellar, in El Garraf, for Güell.
One autumn day in 1897, Juliana Pintó, the widow of the textile industrialist Pere Màrtir Clavet, went to see Gaudí accompanied by her two sons, Eduard and Pere, and commissioned him to build a block of flats in Carrer Casp, in Barcelona. This request broke the string of jobs either of a religious nature or from his preferential client, Eusebi Güell. The flats, which now have a Modern Style restaurant on the ground floor where Gaudí situated the textile company's office and storeroom, won the first prize awarded by the City Council in 1899 for the best building of the year. In point of fact, the client was actually the elder son, Eduard Calvet (Barcelona, 1875-1917), who was to become an influential Republican politician.

In the meantime, an old friend, Joan Grau, the bishop of Astorga, had died and the executors of his estate were selling off the properties he had in Catalonia, which included the grounds of the old royal castle Bellesguard in Sant Gervasi. The architect advised Jaume Figueras' widow, Maria Sagués i Molins, to buy them and she acquired the estate, of almost 12 hectares, on 12 June 1900. It was Gaudí who signed the contract of sale, as the woman was illiterate. Work began on a new house in 1901, making use of the remains of the old castle. Jaume Figueras Sagués inherited the house when his mother died. In 1942, it became the property of Abdon Bordoy and, two years after that, of Lluís Guilera, a doctor who turned it into a clinic. It is now once again being used as a place of residence and still belongs to the Guilera family.

In 1900, the same year as Gaudí bought the property for Maria Sagués, he began work on building a garden city that would never be completed, Park Güell, on the outskirts of Gràcia. He spent fourteen years working on the project that passed into the hands of the city in 1922 when Eusebi Güell, who had been made a count by King Alfonso XIII, died and the family sold the property. The count regarded this work of Gaudí's as the architect's best and tried to make it better known by organising Catalanist parties and social gatherings, photographs of which were published in the magazines of the day.
Two years later the publisher and printer Hermenegild Miralles Anglès (Barcelona ? - 1903) commissioned Gaudí to build a house on a site near the Güell estate. For various reasons, including, obviously, Miralles' death, all that was erected was the front gate. Still in existence, it was attributed by Ramon Sugrañes de Franch, the son of Gaudí's assistant, the architect Domènec Sugrañes, to his father. Be that as it may, at the bottom of the gate there is a reproduction of the figure of Antoni Gaudí by the sculptor Joaquim Camps.

In 1905, another textile industrialist, Josep Batlló Casanovas, a member of the famous Batlló family, decided to have a house he owned in Passeig de Gràcia, originally built in 1877, completely remodelled. Batlló did not want it to be anything like the other Batlló's houses, for example, Pia's, that had been built on the corner of Gran Via and Rambla de Catalunya by such a well-known man as Josep Vilaseca. He therefore chose the Güells' architect and asked him to come up with a daring idea. The result is the extremely beautiful Casa Batlló, now owned by the Bernat family, the inventors of Chupa Chups. The house was completed by 1907, by which time Gaudí was already working on Casa Milà, another of his best creations.

Pere Milà, a friend of Batlló's, wanted the same thing: to have a house built that would be admired by everyone. He had acquired a site on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Carrer de Provença and work began as soon as the old building there, which was of no particular interest, had been knocked down. The new building was also conceived as a block of flats and Milà was able to count on his wife's, Rosario Segimon's, fortune to have it put up. It was to be Gaudí's last building before he dedicated himself completely to the old commission of the Temple of the Holy Family, the Sagrada Família.
Relations with these clients were far from easy and they ended up in court. In 1916, the courts found in favour of Gaudí and he gave the money which he had claimed, but which Milà did not want to pay him, to a friend, the Jesuit priest Ignasi Casanovas.

In 1908 he did another job for his friend Eusebi Güell: the crypt of the church in Colònia Güell, in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. A quarter of a century had gone by since the architect had begun working for the industrialist. And the crypt did not compare unfavourably with the other jobs he had done for him; quite the opposite.
After this, there were to be no new clients. Eusebi Güell had grown old and the Park Güell project was not going as he would have wished. The bishops and priests were looking for architects who were not so difficult and Gaudí dedicated himself body and soul to the Sagrada Família.

GAUDÍ AND BARCELONA: A COMPLICATED GENIUS IN A CONVULSED CITY
BY Patrícia Gabancho

Gaudí's relationship with Barcelona is full of misunderstandings: the architect never fitted easily into the city (not to mention how he had to wait for his genius to be historically recognised while the city was in the grip of the drab pettiness of Francoism, and other minor sins). But in spite of this strained relationship, which is understandable when confronted with a path-breaking man who was ahead of his time, Barcelona made room for him. It allowed him to train as an architect, gave him the social support of a group of craftsmen who were malleable and full of talent, provided him with the patronage of Count Güell - and two or three notable clients. The fact of the matter is that, perhaps never before had Barcelona been so complex, capable of witnessing the persecution of the poet and cleric Verdaguer, typical of a closed society, but equally of revealing itself to be both euphoric and powerful through the Modern Style movement which was, when it came down to it, the achievement of a European culture.

It is the city as a collective project, as a political and cultural construction, not as an accidental build-up of population: the City that becomes aware of itself as a City, as Xènius once wrote, with two capital letters. We have to think of the Barcelona that began building the Eixample and annexed the surrounding municipal districts within a span of barely fifty years. The people of that time must have felt that the city was growing and expanding as though someone was blowing up a balloon before their very eyes, not occupying the periphery, which is how most cities grow, but right in the centre, in its heart. This leap from the small, walled-in Barcelona, with the other tiny towns and villages on the plain scattered and poorly connected, to a single city the size of a major capital, must have made their heads spin.

Marvellous buildings sprung up on the open esplanade, but at the same time, new factories were being out up near the beaches while the suburbs expanded in the shelter of the industries. And the tramlines were extended out to the new districts and flagstones were laid in the streets, which were being provided with better lighting. And the first cinematograph was greeted with surprise, as were the first telephones, and football and tennis, and the press -a political press with a clear purpose- was multiplying and the middle class was establishing itself, ready to take over the leading role in another couple of decades. In short, a world that was being transformed day by day. We can imagine that tension, the enthusiasm, the uncertainty. Joan Maragall, speaking of Barcelona, said that the city would be the work of one generation, but only the future would be able to determine whether they had been madmen or visionaries.

We know that the Eixample, the symbol of the new city, did not please the inhabitants of Barcelona of that time. The exuberant proponents of Modern Style saw it as monotonous. Cerdà, who is one of the best examples of a loser the country has ever produced, was creating a political manifesto and, at the same time, seeking, through his design of the city -urbanism, or town planning, as he called it- the solution to the social problems of a Barcelona that was particularly convulsed and class-conscious. Therefore he imagined the egalitarian and mixed grid, clean and liveable in, with wide pavements and spacious street corners and roads arranged at right angles to each other: the exact opposite of the densely packed, higgledy-piggledy city of the working-class quarters. Cerdà calculated the best angle for maximum sunlight, made plans for trees to be planted, anticipated the flow of traffic, dreamed up a public transport system and made sure the buses would have enough room to turn. It was all perfectly rational. So rational that it failed to take into account the people, the bourgeoisie for whom the Eixample was originally to be, as it was they who had to build it.

That bourgeoisie was aware of being the hegemonic class -a fact soon to be confirmed by elections- and sought pomp and representation and, sure enough, was to have its Passeig de Gràcia as a stage on which to show itself off. Cerdà, who was also a pragmatist, adjusted the grid, increased the size of the buildings, closed off the huge courtyards in between the blocks of flats and raised the height of the constructions to get the builders interested. However the first inhabitants of the Eixample were branded as mad by the industrialists and professionals who lived entrenched in the old part of the city, although they also had a summer house in Horta or Gràcia. Of course there arose a generation of architects prepared to play around with shapes, ready to perform the trick of inventing for themselves a calligraphy with local roots, yet at the same time European -this was the time of Stile Liberty and Sezessionstil, of Modern Style and Art Nouveau- and this expressed itself in the contrast between the coldness of the grid and the prodigious brilliance of the façades and details. Each bourgeois could have a more outstanding residence than his neighbour's, one that was solider, more elaborately decorated. Common sense when it came to the construction, unbridled whim when it came to the form, stone and culture, origin and originality, work and spirit, that was the Eixample.

I get the feeling that Gaudí rather stayed outside all that. That was not his issue. It is true that in the strategic Passeig de Gràcia, not more than a couple of minutes from each other, he built two formidable "houses" for two posh families, the Batllós and the Milàs and that an early work of his, Casa Calvet, is also in the Eixample. But this was the Gaudí who, faced with the supposed Bohemianism and debauchery -relaxation of values- of the Modern Style artists, ran off to seek refuge in the arms of bishop Torras i Bages and the extremely reactionary Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc (and we wonder how such a surly and ascetic man as Gaudí could produce the fantastic polychrome imagery in which he expressed himself). And it was the Barcelona that laughed, coarsely, at his works, yet did not stop him from building them. Gaudí shut himself away and, outside of the Cercle Artístic, did not get involved at a time when intellectuals and artists were mixing and active and becoming presidents and members of parliament, and writing and engaging in polemics and taking the lead. Gaudí went his own way: he was a man with a work to complete.

He shut himself away, then, with his patron Eusebi Güell who, on the contrary, was very much an influential public figure, though every bit as stubborn. Güell did not deign to take a look at the Eixample and commissioned Gaudí to build him a palatial house in Carrer Nou de la Rambla, an extremely distinguished and relatively new street, but one that had nothing to do with the new Barcelona, militantly in favour of newness, of the Eixample. This was in 1885, perhaps a trifle early for the Eixample, but from this magnificent, almost Gothic, fortress, he went straight on to his (frustrated) garden city of La Salut. The bourgeoisie that was committed to the Eixample, for its part, thought little of the Park Güell housing scheme. They visited it, held parties and meetings there, but never actually bought a plot for themselves. Perhaps they failed to understand it. When it came to luxury and imagination, how could they compete with a few cottages tucked away somewhere that no-one would ever see? Was not there already enough nature in the gardens of the Eixample courtyards? How could anyone who regarded Carrer del Concili de Cent as being "in exile" live on top of a hill without even a tramline nearby?

Nevertheless, Gaudí and Barcelona did miraculously become tuned into each other with the Sagrada Família. The temple was born outside the city, in El Poblet de Sant Martí de Provençals: a couple of houses and a few goats, hence the name (poblet meaning hamlet in Catalan). And it was born as an expiatory temple, against the evils of the time: materialism, anarchism and, for good measure, anticlerical republicanism. In other words, the real Barcelona, convulsed and tense, of social conflict and alternative workers' culture, the city that played the leading part -which it won for itself by going to the barricades so many times- in the splendid Oda (Ode) by the poet Maragall. Gaudí made the temple project his own and with it took on its expiatory sense and that is why he included in the iconography of the sculptures, expressly designed to convey a message, the figure of the worker rejecting the temptation of Orsini's bomb - the bomb that had blown up El Liceu, the opera house that was the lay temple of the bourgeoisie.

Almost immediately, however, the Sagrada Família took on the role of being the new cathedral of the new city. The Modern Style writers, who for the most part came from good families, took it as a symbol of the driving force of the city that was in the process of making itself. Maragall was the first, but so did Pijoan and Raimon Caselas and, some time later, Eugeni d'Ors. It was a temple under construction, still of bare stone, with a curiously horizontal shape, in the same way that Catalan Gothic is horizontal -you just have to look at the photos of it before the towers were built up and the liquid decorative material was poured onto the Nativity façade. At the same time it was a popular temple, built as the alms were slowly collected in, in contrast with the façade of the "old" cathedral which was paid for on the nail by the banker Manuel Girona. And it was then that Gaudí started to achieve the popularity -because he already had a name and reputation- that he had never known before. Increasingly odd, ill-tempered and vain, the man who never spoke to anyone, who did not want honours, who had never received a public commission at a time when the city was being filled with public buildings, this man, then, became identified as the "builder" par excellence of the new Barcelona. And during the Tragic Week of 1909, he took absolutely no interest in what was going on other than to walk down to his temple to see whether it had suffered any damage. And he found that it had not, because the "rabble" had respected the cathedral of the poor.
And it was to the Sagrada Família that the funeral procession made its way with the body of the architect, still misunderstood -many years would have to go by before his genius was acknowledged- but at last an important person in the city. Now he has found a place to fit into. Barcelona has "blessed" him. Because the city is like that, generously embracing even what it is incapable of understanding: the great charmer, as Maragall dubbed it.

PAGE 99
INTERVIEW, ALBERT SOLER, HEAD OF THE SPORTS DEPARTMENT AT THE CITY COUNCIL OF BARCELONA
by Gabriel Pernau

Next 25th of July will mark the tenth anniversary of the 1992 Olympic Games. In the beforemath of that date, coinciding with the holding of a series of official meetings that should serve to define the future Strategic Plan for Sport in Barcelona, our magazine's editorial staff wanted to ascertain what remains of that historical event today and which are the shortcomings as well as the values of the sector in our city. The head of the Sports Department, Albert Soler, talks little about football, as he prefers to focus attention on popular sport and sport culture.

· Is Barcelona a sport-oriented city?
Yes, it is, as current indexes on sports practice show. The fact that some 300.000 people - approximately 20 per cent of the city's population - are paying fees to use the city's sports facilities is a patent indicator of how sport is very much part of our day-to-day life. Over the last ten years, sports practice has increased radically. And, if we take into account all the people who practise sport outside specific facilities, such as those who go jogging, riding a bike or trekking at weekends, the number of inhabitants involved would be close to 600.000 ...

Over the last years, the concept of sport itself has changed. Ten years ago, only those who were enrolled at a sports club or a gymnasium were considered sportmen or sportwomen, and the practice of sport was often connected with participation in some kind of competition. Today, on the other hand, the practice of sport is more a question of health and personal hygiene, seen in terms of achieving personal equilibrium between sport and work or family life, and it usually implies an individualized way of practising sport. People no longer enrol at a sports club because they feel attachment to its colours, but they rather choose a place which provides a specific service, not very far from their homes or at a reasonable price. And, if they do not find what they want, they just move to another club. In Barcelona, the sports association movement has always played a very important role. It was one of the most valuable instruments at the city's disposal for organizing the Olympic Games. Now I don't mean that these associations are currently in crisis, I just think that they have be redirected to today's needs. (...)

· Which benefits does show sport bring to popular sport?
Benefits? Right away, damage is what comes to my mind... Show sport has a phagocytic action on popular sport. More particularly football and clubs like "Barça" or "L'Espanyol". There are 15.000 young boys presently enrolled at football schools, for which their parents pay a fee of up to 50.000 pesetas every year. Parents are ready to pay whichever price they charge, it's a reflexion of society itself. And it often becomes an unhealthy obsession. Many parents think that their son is another Rivaldo in the making. And, lately, something similar is happening in the sphere of tennis and, to a lesser extent, in that of basketball. On the other hand, when you ask them to pay for a knapsack or a subscription.... (...)

· What could be done to see this trend reversed?
The city's two sports newpapers sell some 150.000 copies per daily issue, I think, and in 80 per cent of their articles, not only do they write exclusively about football, but they write exclusively about the "Barça". And what's a real shame is that 150.000 people buy those newspapers because their sports world is circumscribed just by that; nothing else exists for them. We are doing our best to contact the people who work on those newspapers and inform them of the campaign launched by the City Council so that all the city's children might learn to swim, and of other campaigns focused on sensitizing people to the problem of violence.... But they are not interested; obviously, those things are not considered selling points.

· What did the Olympic Games bequeath the city as far as popular sport is concerned?
Aside from the large-sized installations, the rest of the facilities have been turned into places where the city's inhabitants can practise sport. The Games also bequeathed us the desire to understand sport as an intrinsic feature of our city. In the nineteen nineties, to go jogging in the streets was a strange thing to do, and nowadays...
(...)