Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926)

Transcript (PDF)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 9 of 13

Gaudi (1852-1926)
Architecture Breaks Open its Traditional Forms
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 30, 1984

Transcript:

The date is August the 30th, 1984. This is the ninth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the prelude to the twentieth century. Tonight's lecture is on Gaud, G-a-u-d-i, who lived 1852 to 1926. Architecture breaks open its traditional forms.

Saturday courses are going along and we are starting Tuesday with a series which I think will eventually yield a book. Our psyche has an architecture. It has a structure to it. And the foundations of that psyche are not Atlantean. They're not Paleolithic. They're Hellenistic. And all of the imagery that comes to us subconsciously was all integrated at that time and never since. And so very often when we reach very deep levels of ourselves it does not occur to us that we are dealing in a rational or conscious manner but rather intuitive and unconscious. But the fact is that those levels of our psyche are much more integrated than the personalities which we display in the ordinary world. One of the great discoveries in any kind of a concerted yoga or therapy is to discover that our interior life is extremely well organized. The dream world is not disorganized. It is highly polished. It is sophisticated. It presents ourselves as director rather than as actor. And so that interior mode often composes the sense of the real. So this kind of presentation which will take about a year to run through, the history of the Hellenistic world, and again in order to sidestep a lot of ideational complexities we're taking a person by person mode of moving through those eras.

And we'll begin with Alexander the Great. And he's probably the most important person in the classical age. And with him starts a whole new notion of what man might be. So that's Tuesday nights. And we have a few of these if you're interested at all in coming. My daughter has a few of them to hand out during the break. Meantime we are moving in a Thursday night series towards the twentieth century toward our – towards our own time. And we're dealing now with individuals whose sensitivities and talents and abilities and discoveries laid the foundations for the development of the cultures and civilizations of the twentieth century. And we are beginning to see now with the individuals in this series that the twentieth century literally came in leading with its chin. There was no possibility for our times to be peaceful and there was no possibility for our times to have any kind of resolution capacity within them. Fortunately whenever these types of centuries have happened in human history, and they have happened several times in varying cultures east and west, they have inevitably been followed by a mystical century. So we can look for the twenty-first century to be one of very high mysticism. And if that's accomplished with a little bit of the humanity that is still kept alive in our time the human race may fare pretty well by the twenty-second century.

In the meantime we're having to live out as James Joyce said, “A nightmare that we'd like to wake up from.” And every time we manage a yawn we just sink deeper and deeper into more levels of nightmare. Part of the difficulty is in the ignoring of individuals of great genius and perception. One individual who we have tonight. Antonio Gaudi discovered a method of architecture which was new. Someone once reproached him and said, “The Greeks never built that way.” And he replied,
“If the Greeks were alive today they would build this way.”

Someone else Remarked that, “It's only in every thousand years or so that we have a new architectural style and that it is so rare that at the time that it happens those generations just simply don't recognize it as new.” In a very real way, Gaudi and Wright together discover independently on their own a very new style of building. And next year when we get to the United States we'll do a whole year on Thursday nights of the United States. We'll take seven or eight lectures to take a look at Frank Lloyd Wright. But tonight we have Gaudi. He is Spanish but more importantly he has Catalonia. The Catalans in the south, the north of Spain, but the south the Mediterranean coast. Very privative individuals in fact very individualistic. He was born in a city which at the time was about the second in size in Catalonia, exceeded only by Barcelona.The city is R-e-u-s. Reus. And it is on the Campo de Tarragona somewhat inland from the Mediterranean. And just before you get to the hills presaging the rising mountains that eventually become the Pyrenees.

Tarragona, The Campo de Tarragona, is ancient. It was settled very heavily by the Romans. In fact some of the most distinguished Romans from the Empire came from that section of Spain. We think of the sterling character of Trajan, the great Roman emperor, under whose egis the power of Rome had its vastest extent. About 100 AD. In fact the ruins, the Roman ruins, in the Campo de Tarragona furnished some of the imagery that influenced the young Gaudi growing up. One thinks here of the long arched Roman aqueducts, the use of this beautiful brick masonry to put these arches out in the sunlight– out in the landscape. Not for some transcendental glory but to bring fresh water to people. And so the image of the great repeating arches the flashing of brickwork in these monumental structures all to bring fresh water. So there's something practicable, there's something in tune with nature, and the monumental Roman engineering talent brought to bear in this way had its influence on Gaudi. There were in fact a number of influences there. The rocks at Montserrat with their wind blasted turret Like shapes. The Campo de Tarragona in various seasons is subject to hurricane weather and monstrous winds from time to time blow through and carve out strange shapes in the rocks and landscape.

Reus at that time had about twenty-five thousand people. Barcelona in comparison had about two hundred thousand. This is about 1852. By the turn of the century Barcelona had six hundred thousand. And today has more than two million. So that Barcelona becomes the focus because it was growing. Growing not only as an industrial center but as a cultural center for the Catalan people who saw themselves opposed at many turns of life by the persons in Madrid. By the old Castilian Spanish. And so the Catalans wanted to have a country of their own. Independence, freedom, liberty. And this feisty Catalan temperament goes into Gaudi's makeup. We detect it later on in Picasso. We detected in a cousin a French cousin Dali. And so these individuals become fiery out of integrity. Their exoticness is an exoticness because they insist upon an individuality that they will not compromise. They are not sports or wild cards or jokers in the deck. They are in fact the almost unrecognizable the exotic man who is exotic because he simply will not compromise himself. Because he holds to his ideals tenaciously and waters them down never. And so they become strange in our eyes. They don't blend in. They don't join. They exist by themselves. Almost Quixote-esque. And so Gaudi has only in the last twenty years or so started to become fully appreciated as a world class architect. In fact it wasn't until the 1950’s when they were setting up a museum in his town of birth that they found a manuscript, a written page in Goudy's handwriting that had been thought lost for at least fify years.

He has some interesting statements on that paper about art and I'll give you a few of them.

“Art aspires to the fullest possible expression of the effect it proposes.”
“The more elevated the subject, the more powerful the means required for the effect.”
“Religious subjects require the employment of all means in a higher key. The church should combine greatness with necessity.”
“Before the middle of this century, tradition imposed the forms of the Renaissance. Since then the tendency is to reject them in order to adopt those at the Middle Ages. Both possess elements which are very well worth while preserving, in which we are the inheritors of both ages. The brilliant and at the same time rational qualities of the Gothic style are not free from defects inasmuch as modern features were included in those constructions, but manual work is of supreme importance in constructions. The extent of its influence on them depends on the nature and requirements of the work.”

These are just some examples of a page found recently [that were] lost in the shuffle of papers. I want to show two photographs of Gaudi. I don't have them on slide. I have other slides for you. This is what Gordy looked like as a young man just starting his architectural career. And this is what he looked like just a few years later.

And I think you can all from where you are sitting recognize that some profound change had happened to the man. In fact, the second photograph catches him midway through the change, and after the change was completed. We have no real photographs of Gaudi. We have sketches of an old man. We have a photograph from 1924 when he led a religious procession. But Gaudi by 1888, which was the second photograph, he was just thirty-six years old already looks fifty. By 1894 he'll look like a hundred. Gaudi had opened himself up to a quality of perception which simply ate up the physical form. He was from youth a very sickly individual with an odd condition. He had arthritis. We call it sometimes rheumatism when it occurs in that form. But even as a six year old he was bothered by arthritis. Consequently Gaudi did not participate in the normal childhood activities as much as he would have. And in his withdrawn-ness, as we have seen so many times before, he began to create a perceptible world of his own posited around an individuality that when it was not mature he strove to arrange his life in such a way that it could come out and express itself rather than to find ways of fitting in with the society that was around him. In fact it became constellated at the age of sixteen or seventeen when he was an adolescent – a teenager. He had kept companionship with two other individuals– one of them a man named Eduardo Toda, who became a very famous diplomat for the Catalonian people. And another man named Ribera.

The three of them decided as adolescents that their religious task was to help restore an old monastery that was falling apart and was impoverished. And this monastery, the Poblet Monastery, P-O-B-L-E-T became for Gaudi the first vision that one could go back into the past and with contemporary insight and contemporary work reestablish a viable reality. Not just refurbishing the past but by taking the materials and the forms of the past and bringing them current passing them through a living sensibility. They were rejuvenated, revivified in fact, re-presented to the world.

This was 1869 and the year after this we find Gaudi going to Barcelona to try to enter architectural school. Gaudi was never a very good student. In fact we have the report of his progress in 1863. These were the grades that he was given in his schooling in Reus: Latin and Spanish- fair. Christian doctrine and Bible knowledge- fair. Principles and practices of arithmetic- failed. He resat for the exam and failed again. 1864-1865 Latin and Spanish- fair. Descriptive geography- failed. He resat for the exam and he had fair. And then in 1865-1866 when he first became interested in Poblet, the monastery, the revivifying of the past. Greek- very good. The very first time you see Gaudi was actually a Greek reincarnate,he was very very strong. He could see clear like the Aegean vision.

Very often towards the end of his life reporters who would always make fun of him other architects would be making fun of him and they would always castigate him as a madman, a mumbler, somebody who just in his lonely routine plodded through the streets of Barcelona wizened. Until one of the reporters mentioned the fact that when Gaudi looked up his blue eyes just seemed to penetrate through form, melt through to the personal. And then he would look away and he'd just be an old man again. From 1866 until 1869 Gaudi began then to find the stirrings within him. One thinks almost of Cézanne, who we had last week. An individual who just simply didn't realize that they were, as Trine used to say, “In tune with the infinite.” And suddenly it would occur to them at a period of their lives that they were important in some whispered secret esoteric way and they should take care for themselves. And so Gaudi began to prepare himself in fact the next year. Mathematics- very good. Rhetoric and poetry- very good. General history- very good. And so on.

He went to Barcelona then in 1870 filled with a sense of destiny, wanting to go into architecture. And it would be eight years before he would graduate. He would have to prepare himself. There was time out for some military service.

There was also the fact that he simply didn't have funds. His mother had died when he was in infancy. His father who was a coppersmith had managed to sell a little piece of property that he had to send his son Antonio to school. One of his other sons had gone to medical school, had become a doctor and then had suddenly died. In fact, all of the relations of Gaudi died very young. Except his father and the daughter of his sister– his niece. And he took care of the two of them for most of their lives. Gaudi never married. In Barcelona, in order to support himself, he began a lifetime habit of working with builders. Craftsmen. What we would call the construction people. They were perhaps called architects gratuitously but they were actually the contractors. And Gaudi knew how to do a lot of crafts work himself. He knew metalwork. He knew tile work. He knew stonework. He had acquainted himself with his materials. One thinks in the nature of materials and usually thinks of someone acquainting themselves with the catalogs of materials. Gaudi was somebody who had it in his hands and in fact one of the great successes of turning his wild fantastic architectural drawings into realities, later on, was that he could look at the work of a craftsman and tell what he could do. He could tell the limits of the man's ability and he would never assign to an individual more than they could handle.

And of course the word spread through the grapevine. And later on Gaudi became proverbial among the workmen and he gathered around himself, much like Greene and Greene did in this country– in Pasadena, a group of craftsmen that were almost unbeatable in the world for their technical virtuosity. Tile workers, stone workers, metal workers, individuals who could be trusted to carry out a plan. They would be shown what it was, what it entailed, and Gaudi himself would start them off on it. And then he would have confidence that he or his field architect, or the craftsman themselves could carry through the plan. In fact, Gaudi becomes distinguished as one of the few architects of our time who counted on future generations to actually complete his works. His great lifelong construction, the cathedral of the sacred family– Sagrada Familia, is still unfinished, still being built. He foresaw this and left detailed architectural drawings so that other individuals, other generations could build. He finally, through his working in architectural offices and even in the face of being what we would call a recalcitrant student, graduated in 1878. And immediately had more commissions than almost anybody else around him. He began building almost immediately.

Some of his early designs at this time were lighting effects for the seawall that was being constructed in Barcelona. These were, I think the measurements were, about seventy or eighty feet high and they were enormously complicated sculptural light posts.

He built fountains. He built gatehouses. One of his early works was an entrance to a cemetery that was a huge Roman triumphal arch done in brick and masonry. He also designed a showcase for the Paris Exposition of that year and this showcase was the first of the many furnishings that Gaudi would design.

There are many books out now that have come out in the last five years on Gaudi's furniture. He was a master craftsman in the sense of furniture design. This drew attention to Gaudi by one of the young wealthy industrialists, a man named Eusebi Güell, G-Ü-E-L-L. Eusebi Güell in Paris recognizing the talent of a young compatriot from Barcelona. His family had textiles. He was thinking of Barcelona in the same terms that people in the 1920’s thought of Los Angeles. It was going to grow and fast. And so he began buying up properties around the edges of Barcelona rightly guessing that the city would have to expand and eventually these properties would become very valuable. But he also had the sense of commitment to the individual. To projects that would allow individualism to come out. And in Gaudi, Güell found the perfect companion. He would provide the funds and Gaudi would provide the intuition and the fantastic sense of design.

Probably there hasn't been a match like this. Since the days of Brunelleschi and the Medici. Gaudi was given a number of assignments. He built a number of houses just outside of Barcelona. Casa Vicens is one that's usually shown in the art books. It's the one with the white and green tile work running up and down the structure. The owner had a tile factory.

He also used at this time a series of parabolic arches for construction. This is over one hundred years ago. And he got involved in a workers cooperative, it was called the Mataró. And this workers cooperative actually was set up in the 1860’s. And they would buy food wholesale and then ration it out to the workers. The workers would put in funds so that they would have a strike fund in case that they were laid off. It was a very advanced kind of a labor union set up. And he built a warehouse for them. And in that warehouse was the first dramatic use of parabolic arches.

Gaudi then got a commission from his friend Güell to build a set of pavilions. Actually they were to be a coach house, an innkeeper's house, and some stables and some gates. These are often referred to in Catalonia as Finca Güell. They’re actually pavilions. There is a coach house that exists, I think I have a slide of it, and a gate and a stable set. This so influenced Güell that he decided that he would have Gaudi build him a palace. Something to rival the medieval, late medieval Renaissance palaces. And so the Palacio Güell was under construction for five years from 1886 to 1891. And Gaudi during this construction began to manifest a blending of the Arabic style of architecture, the fading arches, the kinds of decoration that you would find in Arabic architecture.

And it came to a center in the Palacio Güell by its use of spatial interpenetration. One would get this sense of space and the Alhambra. Where the space the interior space blends and fades and veils towards the central courtyard. But in the Palazzo Güell, it is the hyperbolic paraboloid dome in the center of the structure reaching up to enormous heights. I have a slide of this and the dome being punctuated by tiny starlight openings and this central space as it would come down would allow for the other areas not rooms so much but areas of the interior of the palazzo to gain their sense of proportion And their relationality in terms of this vast star perforated light filled dome and the space that would conically come down from it so that the cross-section of this dome would be a parabola. And that shape and that sense of spatiality would then inform the whole interior sense of the building so that the Palacio Güell is actually not built in terms of phenomenal exterior form but is one of the first architectural developments of space as the reality of a building of a home.

At the very same time as, he was building this rather unique structure – the Palacio Güell, he was building a school for the Teresian College in Barcelona. And there, everything was almost completely non-dramatic. Completely traditional. And the only thing that was outstanding was the decor, and the decor of the Teresian College is what they call in Spanish, the Mudéjar. Or we call it in English, Moorish. An interpenetration of Muslim and Christian, a Christian structure and Muslim decoration. But for Gaudi as he worked with this, as he worked with a spatial sense rather than as an exterior form an interior spatial sense, the structure and the decoration became interpenetrated in such a way that they were equally important. And this then changed the notion of decor from an ornament stuck onto a structure to the notion that the decor in itself would be a new kind of a structure. Or conversely the structure itself would gain the convolutions that hitherto had been limited to an ornamental appliqué on top of the structure. So that the structure became permeable and reshaped in terms of Moorish or ornamental esthetic.

This in fact became extremely well developed in Gaudi's mind in the next few years. He worked on a number of commissions then throughout the 1880s And into the early 1890s. And then in 1894 there is nothing. In fact most books on Gaudi simply ignore the year 1894. They skip it over. They don't give any indication. But in a wonderful Spanish book on Gaudi, published in Barcelona, there is an interesting illustration. And I was unable to get a slide of it. You can see it later on at your own leisure.

It reads Gaudi. And it shows a man laying in his bed. Obviously Antonio Gaudi with his clothes just heaped upon this Art Nouveau type couch next to his bed. He has his shoes on and he is lying there with his coat as a coverlet. He's lying on top of the coverlets and his hands are folded and he is looking up into space and he looks very much like some El Greco hermit chained inside his own psyche seeking some release.

And the year 1894 was a year of extreme psychic catastrophe for Gaudi and his response was to turn his life into an extreme austerity regimen. And from 1895, 1896, 1897 we find Gaudi undergoing this tremendous inner change. And almost as if the external world was cooperating with him. The very nature of the projects which he was handed changed from entertaining types of structures to religiously informed commissions. He had as early as 1883 been included upon a commission to build a new cathedral for Barcelona. By 1895-1896, it was really in Gaudi's hands and he redid most of the structure that had been done up to that point. He simply rebuilt. He went over the plans again and again until finally his metamorphosing of the plans of Sagrada Familia outstripped the capacity of anyone to draw them out. And in fact he began carrying around in his own sensitivity a realization of what was true. And he would have something designed and then it would be built. And if it wasn't right he would tear it down and he would start again.

And this created the impression in the popular mind that he was a madman, or at least an architect who didn't have a plan. Why would you keep doing this? But in fact Gaudi, like a very great artist will always do, was searching for the veracity of expression. He had transformed himself in an interior sense and had come to understand that architecture presents an interpenetration of two kinds of coordination. One kind of coordination is between nature and the religious. Nature and religion. Religion exemplified more often than not as the symbolic so that between nature and the symbol, there was a coordination. And this coordinate line of orientation was crossed and made whole by another ordination that we could call structure and materials. So that the movement from structure or to structure through materials, or the investigation of materials in terms of structure, was complemented and fulfilled by the nature of the symbol via the natural. So that these two lines seem to cross each other. For Gaudi, the natural..in the Catalonian psyche meant the sea and the mountains. And the plains in between the sun, wind . But largely mountainous forms and oceanic backgrounds. For him the religion meant a balancing between the Catholic and the Muslim. It meant for him an interpenetration of the two and in terms then of structure and materials that coordinate line, he developed a sense of structure which we would call and designate architectonic. Often it's referred to as equilibrated, which means that a structure must stand on its own without an external buttressing. Without an internal bracing that the very structure itself must carry the tracing in its own right. And Gaudi would say that the symbol of this in nature is a tree and that there by the world tree is a symbol for man of the right architectonic for his inner nature. And in fact we will see that near the end of his life, when the great Sagrada Familia was finally rising. The four great towers on the facade of the Nativity at the very top of the portal in between the pairs of towers he put a great sculptural tree crowning the threshold coming into the cathedral.

This equilibrated sense of form then, had the ornament and the structure interpenetrate until they both became the same thing. We use that term today. Nature and the symbol also had this kind of integrity between them so that the symbolic message as it were of an equilibrated architectural structure was a proper threshold for man to experience himself in its most poignant form. Religious comprehension. And this was why for him the Gothic was so interesting. Going back before the Renaissance back to the Gothic sense of structure. In its uplift. And yet the Gothic still was curtailed because it needed the bracing and the buttressing. The internal and the external cribbing as it were. To help it along. And so Gaudi with his piercing Greek eye, redid the Gothic sense of structure and form so that it could stand on its own. Wouldn't need buttressing. And for this he developed an amazing array of techniques.

One technique was to lay out a grid of ropes and then append weights to the joining of these grids of ropes so that he would see how gravity made a sense of structure and then he would draw that and then turn it up on its side. And these would be the shapes of the pinnacles and the roofing and so forth. And so it became masterful at conceiving of an artistic form in a way that is reminiscent of William Blake. That if you carve what you want to express in its negative and its opposite way. When it is brought in contact with the phenomenal world it will give itself in its true form so that the artist has to learn not so much how to create but how to discover form so that the artistic reality that he thinks in is a discovery mode rather than a creation mode. That the creation mode comes into play when the art is brought to the phenomenal world. When it is made real, when the building is built, when the print is made into a picture. So for Gaudi there came the necessity to discipline himself stringently because it was incumbent upon him to pace himself in such a way that this discovery mode could reveal in himself the profundities of nature in terms of a universal symbolic form. And that in a way that was commensurate with the materials in the sense of structure that was available for him.

And this is what made it so astonishing because all the new materials were coming into play just about that time about the turn of the twentieth century. So that Gaudi by 1900 was in place, both spiritually as an interiorized human being and as an accomplished artist and as a figure in a viable cultural matrix. Barcelona 1900. All of these facilities were in place and then his patron Eusebi Güell made available to him a project.

He had bought an enormous acreage of land which was outside of Barcelona and now the city limits were almost coming in upon it. And so Güell decided to make this an expensive what we would call today housing project. But you have to imagine now that the smallest plot was to be about thirty-five acres. The largest plot would be about fifty acres. And there were seventy of these this big time. It's a huge project. So that Gaudi was the man then to conceive of this whole project and to provide what we would call now the entertainment center for this park we have. That is it would be a place where all of the residents would have a coming together to make a sense of community and each of the houses that would be built in Parkville would be built by individuals, no two alike…completely free reign so that this would be a community of individuals on the outskirts of the virgining industrial city and it would be a beacon for the whole population. Not only of Barcelona, but of Catalonia, of Spain– of Europe. A beacon of what could be done if human beings were freed and given a chance to work together. What would man do?

So Gaudi brought all of his talents to bear. And for forteen years, off and on he worked, at Park Güell which is one of the great landmarks of modern architecture. By 1903 some of the structures were up and Gaudi was working with construction techniques that simply hadn't been seen before. He was using brick piers. Thick brick piers leaned at an angle so that they would send the thrust out into a volume that normally would have been a ceiling. But because of its parabolic and hyperbolic arching and contouring and because of its thin shell structure, not having much stress in and of itself would be able to carry this thrust from these leaning piers and columns. Tilting actually was the word that should be used. Transmitting diagonal thrusts throughout the entire structure so that one had almost a crystalline sense of structure operating in the building. And in order to emphasize this Gaudi then began to work with windows that were almost like flowers of stained glass light that appeared almost like stars in a new cosmos.

This thin shell laminated tile vaults that in and of themselves had very little weight very little thrust in and of themselves could carry that tension and that structure very lightly very easily. And what was freed then was the internal space. The internal space no longer had to be a box or a rectangle or any kind of recognizable simple geometric shape. Dome. Sphere. The shape of the space of an interior of such a building could be anything that you wished, any kind of complexity. And in fact Gaudi would develop a sense of complexity that would so baffle the ordinary habituated sense of proportion that you would think that there was no design whatsoever but only upon real in-depth inspection does it reveal that there are layers and layers of structure interpenetrating perfectly. So that what seems to be almost a jumble is actually a very sophisticated discovery of freedom of interior space. This of course cannot but have its analogy in terms of the human personality. We may be free if we have a free architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright once said he set out to destroy the box as a home for man. He said the box inculcates the totalitarian feelings and that if you destroy the box man will naturally become more democratic. Gaudi is someone who simply stretched the whole notion of what space might be in architecture to limits that are still fantastic some seventy years later.

In fact many people still call it fantasy architecture. But the fact is is that Gaudi was a very serious engineer, a very great mystic, an incredible artist, a devoted saint. And for him developing the actual capacity of structure to deal in this way with the reality of materials was his life mission. Unfortunately at this time a cultural movement known as Modernismo, Art Nouveau, was blossoming and everyone mistook Gaudi as being another one of the boys. Well we'll come back after the break and we'll see a few other things and then we'll see some slides.

There are so many elements that I would wish to include always. We cannot include everything in just the brief time that we have. And also I think you must recognize that we are leaping like mountain goats from peak to peak. We don't have the luxury of all the spaces in between. It's like someone playing you all the favorite passages from great music week after week and you don't realize until reflection later that in between are millions of failures. What we're dealing with is the cream. These are all individuals who in their own way were extraordinary. Gaudi kept a diary. Here's one sentence from his diary which architects today could take to heart.

“They almost never build in color anymore. Everything is a modulated dignified dead gray in terms of color.”

Gaudi wrote, “Color and architecture must be intense, logical, and fertile.” He used to have the same problem that the magister Frank Lloyd Wright used to have is that he would give cryptic little statements occasionally. Towards the end of his life, the last fifteen or twenty years, he lived in a little hut that was appended to the great cathedral in Sagrada Familia. And he would rise in every morning make his way and be at the 5:00 mass and he would walk this round circuit. He would walk down to the ocean and in the break, the gray daybreak, he would look out to the sea and then he would go to mass and then he would come back and go to work. And his withdrawal into himself was almost complete at this time. And it was only towards the very end of his life that poets or other architects would try to make contact with him in some of the images that I have run across. One image from a Catalonian poet is seeing the old man with his white hair and his clear eyes looking up in beautiful rapture at the huge open bone like monstrous structure of the Sagrada Familia and whispering something about mountains of the spirit.

We have some slides but actually The Great Church is not his magnum opus. His great work was also built for the Güell family. It's usually called Colonia Güell or the crypt of the Colonia Güell.

And in one of the few intelligent books on Gaudi,and I must say that books are hard to find on him, but intelligent books are as scarce as one. A Reappraisal of Gaudi by Carson Ellis published by the New York Graphic Society. I think about fifteen years ago. He writes in this way,

“The interior of the crypt is oviform. It unfolds around the central structure formed by four basalt columns joined by segmental arches. Over them converged the ribs which support the vaulting. From these central arches spring the lateral ramifications supported by pillars. The plastering on these gives an impression of canvas and takes weight from the circular mass. Other pillars are only half rendered exposing the naked breast. The altar at the back is visible from every angle. Looking at the central structure which has the shape of a tabernacle the idea springs to mind that possibly Gaudi thought of putting an altar there. The faithful would then have knelt all round the most sacred place in the crypt. The whole crypt is an insight into the mind of the architect who was perfectly familiar with every aspect of building.”

He writes further, “The true significance of the crypt of the Colonia Güell must be judged in relation to the historical perspective of contemporary art. It is his most important work. The one at last freed from all outside influences. This is the work in which he completely molded the future with the strength of his vision.”

The chapel of the Colonia Güell is an architecture whose time has not yet come. Even though it was finished three generations ago, it is still for a future esthetic. We still do not have a population of people who could appreciate. That iis who could live in terms of its structure, its color, its spatiality.

The closest that people have come in the art world are the surrealists and the abstract expressions. And in fact Gaudi was doing abstract expressionist design and broken tile fifty to seventy years before it appeared after the Second World War.

I think in some of the slides you'll be able to tell just with your eye a little bit the sense of wonder. Gaudi in his own words wrote, “Creation works ceaselessly through man but man does not create, he discovers. Those who seek out the laws of nature as support for their new work collaborate with the creator. Those who copy are not collaborators. For this reason originality consists in returning to the origin.”

We can become colloquial in saying the origin is that still voice within but that does a disservice because it still leads us to expect that there should be a place, a form, a shape, a point, a fulcrum where that comes to be. What is discoverable almost every time in Gaudi's architecture is that interior presence is infinite and positioned in any statistical focus and completely present wherever we will have it.

Well let's have these slides and see if we can discover some of that.

Here's a photo of Gaidi at age thirty-six. I think he was. This is the Palacio Güell. This is the central vault. Down below would be the the sitting area and all the other spaces and levels and rooms feed off this, and this becomes a pinnacle, a tower on the outside. Almost always in Gaudi's pinnacles in his towers he would put a six-pointed cross on the top for the four directions and up and down. This is some of the brickwork vaulting in the attic of one of his early buildings. You can see the determination here to make structure not just simply the carrier of the building but the expressive presence of the building. So that structure and space interpenetrate in the experience of those who live there. Le Corbusier once said, “A house is a machine for living in.” I think Gaudi would amend that to say it's a spiritual reality which a man can inhabit if he is true to himself.

This scalloping vaulting propensity of Gaudi carried very early on into the interiors. This is over a staircase in a home built I think in the middle 1880s about a hundred years ago. This was a building that he redid. It was a structure that needed to be remodeled. The exterior surface here I don't know how is this in focus? It's hard to get it. There's a mottling here of turquoise green, brown, cobalt, blue. And the whole surface is then sheen with this. These are the colors the marine colors that you would see in tide pools. And that's brought into the structure. And the tiles up here are shaped actually almost like the large scales of an armadillo or something like that. And they model themselves from gold to blue. So depending on the time of day wherever the sun is there's a different kind of glistening and highlighting. And then the roof line is accentuated with the tiling here reddish orange tiles with these cobalt green/blue globes on them. This whole roof line has a punctuation on this side. There's a hole in it a shaped carved hole almost like the kind of space that you would see on sea stacks going out into the ocean. Think of the Oregon coast and the waves would wash holes into the rocks. That kind of a shape complementing the tower here. I don't know if we got a detail of that or not. I guess not. We go inside.

This is a ceiling. A vault ceiling on the first floor of that structure. It gives you a chance to see how he worked with the ceiling bringing it down to the walls to the wood shape. This actually is a doorway. Gaudi loved to put little doors inside of large doorways which had hinges so that on certain occasions, what we would call colloquially state occasions, one could open the whole ensemble and have a huge entrance. Or a space large enough to move furniture in and out but generally the day to day motion would be through the small door. But the shaped wood, the shaped glass, the shaped ceiling here, all of this is to deliver a sense of undulating space. If you turn this upside down and we're in the sympathetic feeling mode, it would be almost like swimming at the bottom of the sea over sand ridges that wave patterns had made. This kind of an esthetic, or rather we should use the term here – this kind of a kinesthetic apperception was the key, the pitch of the architectural composition.

This is from Casa melia Villa. Casa Mila, La Pedrera, built about 1910 and this is the interior view looking out from what we would call today the garage entrance or in those days was the carriage entrance. And again you see the small door set into a larger space. And all of this where you see glass and fretwork and so forth all of that could open up. You see the heavy columns outside. These were not the kinds of stick columns you usually see. I don't know if we have a detail of that or not but they presented almost a cave like Honeycombing in structuring. The Casa Mila was ridiculed by all kinds of cartoons. One of the more famous ones showed people parking their blimps, their new age blimps and all of these large spaces made by his structure.

This is on the roof of the Casa Mila. The treatment of the chimneys and the ventilation, they look like mysterious Saharan travelers cloaked and disguised. And you see back through the distance, this photograph was taken about 1967. You can see they're still working on Sagrada Familia, the church of the Holy Exposition in the background. These sculptured forms the use of cracked tile in this way predates by several generations the types of forms we're now familiar with forms like this from Henry Moore and other sculptors. But at this time about seventy years ago this was totally new. Totally just being discovered. Note the arch. Everywhere you look that's a key. That's a module key actually. Structural key. These are all permutations of that motion that geometry.

This is one of the entrances to Park Güell. This is a fountain in the form of a lizard. I guess he's in focus is he? It's hard to tell. And there are steps that go up. And then on the inside in Park Güell, this rampart, with the tilted columns is holding up as a retention the entire upper structure where there are structures like this. This is the keeper's house with its roof form and this long undulating bench work. In fact it goes on around an enormous space. And over the generations this has become the pride of Barcelona. The people themselves have taken to Park Güell to Gaudi's architecture and finally have made it their own.

One of the craftsmen who actually executed the tile work was named Jujol. J-U-J-O-L. Gaudi himself would appear every day at three o’clock in the afternoon to check on the progress and he would look at things and explain to the workmen what they were doing and what kind of vision he had. And he would talk with them with what they were experiencing as they put it up. And then he would change things from day to day. From week to week as new insights and new aspects would reveal themselves. So it was an architecture of natural discovery. In 1908 he was approached by a wealthy New York businessman to build a hotel in New York City. It never got beyond the planning stage. All of Gaudi’s designs were lost but they found in the late forties early fifties a workman who had witnessed Gaudi’s sketches had been privy to some of his design materials for the hotel and he drew these sketches. It would have been one hundred stories high. And if this had gone up in New York City in 1908 it would have made Gaudi an international figure overnight. Actually we had an American architect who designed something very similar to this for Las Vegas, Bruce Goff. Maybe when we get to the details of US culture we can bring in Bruce Goff's architecture.

This is the facade. This was as far as they've gotten. They're still working on it, of Sagrada Familia. And I think when you first view this it just looks like a pile of rubbish. And it's a great discovery. It's a great aspect of our intellectual and spiritual capacity to penetrate through the unknown, the chaotic and discover that there is not only order. But purposeful order and its purpose is to reveal aspects of our own selves qualities of intuition that we normally wouldn't have developed. Qualities of carrying through esoteric patterns montage upon each other until you might have five or six motifs working at the same time and all of the orderings kept articulate to the informed eye.

Here's a detail I think you can pick out the tree. There's a trunk coming up and here's the tree looking very much like a primordial large scale sculpture christmas tree. World tree. Actually there was a lot of criticism when they got to about this height and when these fluted columns began coming in. Most people counted Gaudi out. They thought he was just a complete madman. But it goes with the structure. And actually in all of these flues in Gaudi's designs there are various colors that are put in so that sunlight moving through these structures will begin to radiate and glisten color. If you notice there are also words sculptured into the structure. And in the late 1960’s they found that the whole ceramic bench at Park Güell had secret messages put onto the tiles words and phrases and so forth before the glazing process and it had been done so perfectly in keeping with the fragmented mosaic pattern that no one had ever noticed this up to that point. [inaudible]

This is the Colonia Güell which was finished. And I think that Katzenelson is right in saying this was Gaudi's greatest work. This is the approach to it. And notice here that it's very difficult to tell where nature ends and where the building begins. It's very difficult to determine what is natural from what is man made and the phasing from nature into man's architecture becomes almost imperceptible. And there are moments in Gaudi's architecture where one would be very hard pressed to declare that it simply was not natural. And in fact this seems to be a purpose in Gaudi's discovery mode to reveal new facets of nature that architecture at its finest discovers for man. The fact that his buildings are a natural happening. They are a part of the landscape. They are not set in the landscape. They are not blended to the landscape; they are an outgrowth of that landscape. And that real architecture is in and of itself natural. The maestro once said, “If a house is built right you can't imagine that house anywhere but where it is.” –he said that of Fallingwater 1936, that's Wright.

It's of choreography of dancing through the mysterious. And we are rewarded by this effort for this adventure by coming upon sudden flowerings of light and form like these windows that on the outside looks so strange and so forbidding. And yet here they are beautiful rosettes of primordial colors and forms illuminating an interior. And here we see his incredible ribbing and vaulting. And you notice on the back vaults here the checkerboard pattern. You see that on the Alhambra everything. It’s still the Arabic and the European traditions blended together. In fact I don't think I have a slide of it but the vault of Sagrada Familia is a larger version of this. And there is a virgin and child. The mother and child in the top circle in Sagrada Familia where all the ribs come together. Notice the positioning here of material so that it almost approaches at first glance the haphazard. It's only when one experiences the invisible tensions, the invisible structure, the hierarchies of order in the building that one realizes that you don't have to have a straight steel line to carry a load. You can have it just like this. It will work just as well but in this case it gives us a chance to fade back into the natural almost imperceptible. We do that because we transpose our visual orientation to a moving dynamic kinesthetic orientation which finds its field of home in the spatiality of the structure. And when our feeling interiorizes the space of the structure, we are then able to experience the supporting materials as a structure which is symbolic of a basic nature. Stone. Brick. Rock. Arch. Colors. Light. Is that it? That's it. No more. Next week is Claude Monet.