Antoni Gaudi

AntoniGaudi (1852-1926) is Barcelona's most famous architect, responsible for tourist attractions such as the Sagrada Familia, and ParcGuell?. His work, which was both structurally and aesthetically daring for its time, is characterized by a heavy use of artisan work in tile and stone, volumetric organic forms, and colorful surfaces.

The art critic RobertHughes wrote a book about the city (titled Barcelona, simply enough - ISBN 0679743839 (US), ISBN 1860468241 (UK)), and had a few points about Gaudi's methods that might be of interest to people here:

Gaudi did not work heavily from abstract designs.

Part of what makes Gaudi's work so unique is that he does not rely heavily on right angles. This made him a bit of an oddball at architecture school, and it also meant that his plans were very difficult to characterize with two-dimensional blueprints. He thought instead in volumetric terms, preferring to work on-site and perhaps creating as he went along:

: (Gaudi) said he learned to think in terms of complex membrane surfaces -- hyperboloids, helicoids, hyperbolic paraboloids, and conoids -- by watching his father work metal, beating the iron and copper sheets, curving and pleating and distending them, producing the miracle of volume and enclosure without the banality of flatness, making up the forms as he went along without drawing them first. ... Gaudi did not like to draw and did so only as a last resort. ... Some critics think that next to none of the detail sketches for Gaudi's projects were made by Gaudi himself: 'They are drawings made by his assistants to understand what Gaudi wanted,' wrote the Catalan historian Alexandre Cirici i Pellicer. (emphasis added)

To help himself visualize forms before building them in tons of masonry, he invented a brilliantly low-tech method. He realized that if you hang a string from two points, it looks like an upside-down arch. And that if you tie a small sand bag to a point in the string, its arc will deform in much the same way as if the upside-down arch was being supported by an upside-down pillar.

So he and his assistants often created highly complex string structures hung from the ceiling, and then as the final step, they would take photographs of the forms, and turn the photographs upside-down. There's a replica of this method in the basement museum at the Sagrada Familia; a structure made up of hundreds of string arches, hanging from a plate over a gigantic mirror.

Gaudi's work was geographically bound by its attention to craft.

He planned structures that relied heavily on the skills of local artisans, including those who worked in tile and stone. Modernists later dismissed his work as too unsuited for the international rhythms of 20th century architecture: In Hughes' words, they saw him as "a designer so dependent on a vanishing artisan base that he could have no practical message for the future."

http://www.op.net/~jmeltzer/Gaudi/mila.html

http://www.op.net/~jmeltzer/Gaudi/eltemple.html

You can see other works at http://www.op.net/~jmeltzer/Gaudi/works.html

A Gaudi design has been proposed for the WTC site nearly 77 years after his death: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2687565.stm

This proposal was ultimately not accepted but the BBC archive link is still interesting.

CategoryPerson