The date is well known. At around six in the evening on 7 June 1926, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was on his way to his daily mass in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, a hidden corner in the heart of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter where the dwindling local community – embodied by the children from a nearby school who play in this kind of courtyard – puts up resistance to the 26.1 million tourists who come to the city every year, largely to enjoy the legacy of the quintessential Catalan architect.
Fittingly, on the centenary of his death, Pope León XIV will be in Barcelona for the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus at the Sagrada Família, his greatest work, which has been under construction for more than 140 years.
Contemporary reports tell how, at the moment when the man from Tarragona was crossing Gran Via between the corners of Bailén and Girona, two trams on the line between Plaza de Tetuán and Paseo de Gràcia passed each other. Gaudí stepped back to avoid one of them but was hit by the second. The spot where the accident occurred lies exactly midway, a 20-minute walk, between two of his most emblematic works: Casa Milà (popularly known as La Pedrera) and the basilica of the Sagrada Família.
The accident caused a concussion and several broken ribs, and he was taken first to a first-aid station in Sant Père Més Alt (because the two passers-by who helped him did not recognise him) and then to the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, where he died around 48 hours later, aged 74. He was buried in the Chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in the crypt of his most famous and unfinished work.
Known for his Catholic devotion and claimed as a symbol by the pro-independence right, Jordi Pujol himself (who, like Gaudí, is impossible to separate from the identity of contemporary Catalonia) went so far as to say in front of Queen Emeritus Sofía at a commemorative event in 2002 that Gaudí was not only "a builder of buildings" but also "a shaper of the collective soul of Catalonia", as Catalina Serra reported at the time in her piece for 'El País'.
It is no coincidence that Gaudí's most prolific period unfolded in parallel with the Renaixença, the cultural movement that led to a boom in Catalan literature, among other artistic disciplines, at the end of the 19th century. It forms part of the Romantic current that swept across the European continent in that century (as in the case of Galicia's Rexurdimento), sowing the seeds of many nationalist movements in the Old World.
The beginnings of the legend: from the Calderera to the Mataronense
Historian Josep Maria Tarragona relates how the small and sickly Antoni, the youngest child in a modest family of coppersmiths, raised from 1852 onwards between the city of Reus and the village of Riudoms (Tarragona), learned his father's trade during his frequent attacks of rheumatic fever, which often prevented him from going to school.
Catalonia, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in Spain, was undergoing a profound economic and urban transformation: two years after Gaudí was born, Barcelona's medieval walls were demolished and Ildefons Cerdà's revolutionary Eixample was implemented, improving public hygiene and reunifying the walled city with its surrounding municipalities, such as Gràcia. Just four years earlier, in 1848, the state had opened its first railway line between Mataró and Barcelona.
The Gaudí i Cornet clan, Josep Maria Tarragona explains, did not want to miss this train and moved to Barcelona in 1868 to give their sons the chance to go to university, for which they had to sell several properties and mortgage the Mas de la Calderera, the farmhouse that several of the architect's acquaintances insist was his birthplace.
Antoni, however, would not manage to enrol at the School of Architecture until 1874, because of the academic prerequisites and his limited financial means. By then he was working as a draughtsman and shortly afterwards began to sign his first projects, such as the hydraulic system for the monumental waterfall in the Ciutadella park (1875) under the supervision of Josep Fontserè.
This work was created for Barcelona's 1888 Universal Exposition and is one of the first examples of Catalan Modernism, the architectural branch of the Renaixença characterised by an exuberant, flowing style and forms inspired by nature, such as floral motifs. From the outset, then, his stamp would remain linked to Barcelona right up to the present day.
A supporter of the Glorious Revolution that led to the Democratic Six-Year Period and the government of Juan Prim (also from Reus), Gaudí worked between 1878 and 1882 on another project with a clearly political bent: the Mataró Workers' Cooperative (Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense).
It was conceived as a social complex comprising the factory itself and facilities to serve the workers (affordable housing, gardens and a services building) at the height of the utopian socialist current and the demands of the working class at the end of the 19th century. Gaudí in fact fell in love with one of the teachers at the school, Pepeta Moreu, although she turned him down, saying she was already engaged.
With an impressive CV behind him and a capital that was beginning to treat him as a public figure, the architect and director of the School, Elies Rogent, declared as he handed him his degree in 1879: "I don't know whether we have given the diploma to a madman or a genius: time will tell."
Work on the Sagrada Família begins
By now Gaudí was fully integrated into the bourgeois society of the burgeoning metropolis: he took part in associations typical of the Renaixença, such as the Catalanist Association for Scientific Excursions, and mixed with contemporaries like the poet and priest Jacint Verdaguer and the industrialist Eusebi Güell, who would become one of his closest clients and friends.
In 1883 he was commissioned to continue the work on the project of his life, the Sagrada Família. Gaudí decided to modify the original plan and develop a gargantuan work around the starting point of the project, the crypt of the Catholic church where he would end up buried, which he would never see completed and which, even today, despite progress on the central tower, still has a decade to go before being finished in line with its creator's wishes.
From that year until 1887 he also focused on developing the Güell pavilions, commissioned by Eusebi. It was here that the architect, who had been experimenting with neo-Mudéjar elements, used for the first time the trencadís technique, one of his most recognisable inventions, consisting of a coating of mosaics made of fragments of ceramic, glass or marble, generally in bright colours.
Its design is linked to another anecdote involving the workshop of the ceramicist Lluís Bru. In a fit of irritability or ADHD, as he watched his colleague patiently laying the pieces one by one, Gaudí picked up a tile and hurled it to the floor, allegedly exclaiming: "They have to be laid by the handful or we'll never finish!"
That flash of anger is now reflected in many of the monuments that bear witness to this period and still stand in his city, but also beyond Barcelona. From this period comes, for example, Villa Quijano ("El Capricho"), in the Cantabrian town of Comillas, which has been declared a Site of Cultural Interest.
Maximalism and grief cubed: the final period
Gaudí would markedly accentuate the contrasts of colour on the façades of his creations, leaving an unmistakable imprint on some of his best-known works, such as Casa Calvet, Park Güell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. Nature imposes its presence through helical shapes and slanting columns, and this evolution would ultimately be reflected in the project that would obsess him and command his attention almost exclusively from 1915 onwards: the unfinished basilica.
The master suffered several losses (his niece Rosa; Francisco Berenguer, his main collaborator; his friends Josep Torras i Bages and Eusebi Güell himself) that deepened his religious fervour and his isolation in favour of completing his life's project. After another of his collaborators, the sculptor and modeller Llorenç Matamala, also died in 1925, Gaudí moved into a small room in his workshop at the Sagrada Família and devoted himself entirely to his work.
Witnesses recall that, as the afternoon of 7 June 1926 began, Gaudí was working on some lamps for the crypt and, at the end of the day, before setting off as usual for the church of Sant Felip Neri, he called over one of the workers assisting him: "Vicente, come early tomorrow, we are going to do some very beautiful things." An unfinished beauty that León XIV himself will have the chance to see this Wednesday, 10 June, when he visits the work, home and tomb of the Catalan master.
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