Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 9 of 13

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

Transcript:
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The date is August the 30th, 1984. This is a ninth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Ware on the prelude to the 20th century. Tonight's lecture is on Goudy G A U D I who lived 1852 to 1926. Architecture breaks open its traditional forms.
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Saturday courses are going along and we are starting Tuesday with a series, which I think will eventually yield a book. Our, 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 sentence. 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. What the fact is is that those levels of our psyche are much more integrated than the personalities, which we display in the ordinary world.
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One of the great discoveries in any kind of a concerted yoga or a therapy is to discover that our interior life is extremely well organized. The dream world is not disorganized. It is highly polished 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 areas 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 what man might be. So that's Tuesday nights. Um, and we have a few of these. If you're interested at all coming, my daughter has a few of them to hand out during the break. Meantime, we are moving in the Thursday night series towards the 20th century, toward her, towards our home 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 20th century. And we're beginning to see now with the individuals in this series that the 20th 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.
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Fortunately, whatever these types of centuries have happened in human history. And they've happened several times in varying cultures, east and west, they have inevitably been followed by a mystical century. So we can look for the 21st century to be one, a 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 22nd century. 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,
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We just
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Think 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 Gowdy, he discovered a method of architecture, which was new someone once reproached him and said the Greek 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 yeah. 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, isn't it? Yeah.
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Yeah. And well, Jerry railway Goudy and right together discover independently on their own, the very new style of building. And next year, when we get to the United States to do a whole year on Thursday nights at the United States, we'll take seven or eight lectures to take a look at Frank Lloyd Wright. But tonight we have Goudy, he is Spanish, but more importantly, he has Catalonia the Catalans and the south, the north of Spain, but the south, uh, uh, the Mediterranean coast, very private individuals. In fact, very individualistic. He was born in, uh, 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 R E U S. And it is on the compote, a teller gunna, somewhat inland from the Mediterranean. Um, just before you get to the Kilz, presaging the rising mountains that eventually, uh, become the parenting's Tortona the combo de tower going on is ancient.
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It was settled very heavily by the Romans. In fact, some of the most distinguished Romans from the empire came from that section of sane. We think of the Sterling character of Trajan the great Roman emperor under who is Egypt. The power of Rome had its vast to some extent about 180. In fact, they ruined the Roman ruins in the compo de Terragon. It furnished some of the imagery that influence the young Goudie growing up. One thing sear of the long arch Roman Aqua docks, the years of this beautiful brick masonry too, put these arches out in the sunlight, uh, 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 fashioning of brick work 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. How does influence on Goudy?
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There were in fact, a number of influences there, the rocks at Montserrat with their wind blasted turret like shapes the account Dade Tarragona in various seasons is subject to her hurricane weather and monstrous winds from time to time blow through and carve out strange shapes in the rocks and landscape right time had about 25,000 people. Barcelona in comparison had about two a hundred thousand. This is about 1852 by the truck end of the century, Barcelona had 600,000 and today has more than two millions. So that Barcelona becomes the focus because it was growing, growing. Yeah, not only as an industrial center, but as a cultural center for the catch Alon, the 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
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Independence, freedom, Liberty,
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And this feisty catalog temperament goes into Goudy's makeup. We detect it later on in Picasa were detected in a cousin, a French cousin, uh, Dolly. And so these individuals become fiery out of integrity. There exoticness is an exotic in us because they insist upon an individuality that they will not compromise. They are not sports or wild cards or jokers in the deck. They were in fact, they almost unrecognizable. They exotic man, who is exotic because he simply will not compromise himself because he holds to 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 AF. And so Goudy has only in the last 20 years or so started to become fully appreciated as a world-class architect.
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In fact, it wasn't until the 1950s, when they were setting up a museum in his town of birth, that they found a manuscript, a written page, and Goudy's handwriting that had been thought lost for at least 50 years. He has some interesting statements on that paper about art. And I'll give you a few art inspires to the fullest possible expression of the effected proposes. The more elevated the subject, the more powerful than means required for the effect religious subjects require the employment of all means in a higher key, the church truth, combined 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 that the Gothic style are not free from defects in as much 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.
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These are just some examples of a page found recently young, um, lost in the shuffle of papers. I want to show two photographs of Gowdy. I don't have them on slide. I have other slides for you. This is what Gowdy looked like as a young man, just starting his architectural career. And this is what he looked like just a few years later. Okay. And I think you can all from where you were sitting recognized that some profound change had happened to the man. In fact, the second photograph catches in midway through the change. And after the change was completed, we have no real photographs of Goudy. We have scattered because of an old man. I have a photograph from 1924 when he led a religious person, but Goudy 1888, which was the second photograph. He was just 36 years old, already looks 50 by 1894.
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He'll look like a hundred Kennedy had opened himself up to a quality of perception, which simply ate up the physical for him. He was from youth, a very sickly individual with an condition. He had arthritis. We call it sometimes rheumatism when it occurs in the form. But even as a six year old, he was bothered by her, right? Consequently Goudy did not participate in that normal childhood activities as much as he would have. And in his withdrawn this, as we have seen so many times before, he began to create a perceptible world of his own policy 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 came it's at the age of 16, 17, when he was an adolescent teen, he had kept companionship with two other individuals.
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One of them, a man named Eduardo toda, who became a very famous diplomat for the Catalonian people and another man named Rivera. The three of them decided it was adolescents that there religious task was to help restore an old monastery that was falling apart and was in poverty. And this monastery, they public monastery P O B L E T became for Gowdy. The first division that one could go back into the past and with contemporary insight and contemporary work, re-establish 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 them.
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This was 1869. And the year after this, we find Gowdy going to Barcelona to try to enter architectural school. Goudy 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 and race Latin in Spanish fair Christian doctrine and Bible knowledge, fair principles and practices of arithmetic failed. He reached out for the exam and failed again, 18 64, 18 65, Latin and Spanish fair, descriptive geography failed. He reached out for the exam and he had fair. And then in 18 65, 18 66, when he first became interested in public, the monastery, the reserve of flying past Greek. Very good. The very first time [inaudible] 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.
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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 plotted through the streets of Barcelona. It wasn't until one of the reporters mentioned. And the fact that that wouldn't gout, he looked up, his blue eyes just seemed to penetrate through no through to the personal, and then he would look away and he'd just be an old man from 1866 until 1869 Gowdy began them to find the stirrings within him. One thing is almost of Suzanne, who we had last week, an individual who just simply didn't realize that they were as trying to use, to say in tune with the infinite and suddenly it would occur to them and a period of their lives, that they were important in some whispered secret, esoteric way, and they should take care for themselves.
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And so Goudy 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. We wish watching 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 copper Smith, 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 and become a doctor. And then it suddenly died. In fact, all of the relations of Goudy died very young, except his father and the daughter of his sister, his niece.
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And he took care of the two of them for most of their lives. Goudy 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 Gowdy knew how to do a lot of crafts work himself. He knew metal work. He knew tile work. He knew stonework. He had acquainted himself with his materials. One thing in the nature of materials and usually thinks of someone acquainting themselves with the catalogs of materials. Goudy 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 never assign to an individual more than they could handle.
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And of course the word spread through the grapevine. And later on, Goudy became proverbial among the Workman. And he gathered around himself much like green and green did in this country in Pasadena, a group of craftsmen that were almost unbeatable in the world for the 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 Gowdy 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, Goudy becomes distinguished as one of the few architects of our time who counted on future generations to actually complete his works. He had this great lifelong construction. The cathedral of the sacred family [inaudible] Familia is still unfinished, still being built. He foresaw this and left detailed architectural drawings so that other individuals, other generations could build.
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He finally through his working in architectural offices and even in face of being what we would call a recalcitrance transfer 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, uh, lighting effects to the seawall that was being constructed in Barcelona. These were, um, I think the measurements were about 70 or 80 feet high and they were enormously complicated. Uh, sculptural, light posts. He built a fountains. He built, uh, gauge houses. 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, uh, furnishings that Gotti would design. There are many books out now that are come out in the last five years on Goudy's furniture. He was a master craftsman in the sense of furniture design. This drew attention to gout eight by one of the young wealthy industrialists, a man named [inaudible]. Well,
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G U E L L. You said being real
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In Paris, recognizing the talent of the young compatriot from Barcelona. His family had textiles. He was thinking of Barcelona in the same terms that people in the 1920s 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 Goudy grill found the perfect companion he would provide the funds and Gowdy would provide the intuition and the fantastic sense of design. Probably there hasn't been a match like this since the days of Bruna last G and the metal sheet Goudy was given a number of assignments. He built, um, a number of houses just outside of Barcelona of Casa Vicens.
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He has one that's usually shown in the art books. It's the one with the white and green towel work running up and down the structure. The owner have a tile factory. He also used at this time, a series of parabolic arches for construction. This is over a hundred years ago. And, uh, he got involved in a workers cooperative. It was called the tile and this worker's cooperative actually was set up in the 1860 days and they would buy food wholesale and then ration it out to the workers. The workers would put in funds. They would have a strike fund in case that they were laid off. There was a very advanced, a 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 Gowdy then
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Got a commission
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From his friend grill to build a set of pavilions. Actually they were to bill the coach house and an innkeepers house and some stables and some gates. These are often referred to in Catalonia as Finca grill. They're actually a pavilions. There is a coach house that exists. I think I have a slide of it and a gate and a stable set. This though influenced grill that he decided that he would have Gowdy built him a pallet, something to rival the medieval late medieval Renaissance palaces. And so the Palazzi grill was under construction for five years from 1886 to 1891. And Goudy 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 the center in the plots, you Gale by its use of spatial interpenetration.
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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 plot seal, Gloria idiots, 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, what allow for the other areas, not room so much, but areas of the interior of the plot. So to gain their sense of proportion and their relationality in terms of this vast star perforated light-filled dome and the space that would chronically 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 Plaza we out is actually not built in terms of phenomenal exterior form, but as one of the first architectural developments of space is the reality
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Of a building of a home
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At the very same time as he was building this rather unique structure, the CEO grill, he was building a school for the Teresa and college in Barcelona, and there, everything was almost a completely nondramatic completely traditional. And the only thing that was outstanding was the deck and the deck core of the trees in college is what they call in Spanish, the mood at Hawk, or we call it in English Morrish and interpenetration of Muslim and Christian, uh, Christian structure and Muslim decoration. But for Gowdy, as he worked with this, as he worked with a spacial sense, rather than as a, uh, an exterior form, an interior spacial 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 applicate on top of the structure so that they structure became permeable and reshaped in terms of Morrish or ornamental aesthetic. This in fact became extremely well-developed in Goudy'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 was nothing. In fact, most books on Goudy simply ignore the year, 1894. They skip it over. They don't give any indication,
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But in a
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Wonderful Spanish book, on a Yardi published in Barcelona, there was an interesting illustration
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And, uh,
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I was able to get a slide of it. You can see it later on at your own leisure. It reads Goudy and it shows a man laying in his bed. Obviously I'm Tonio Goudy 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 it looks very much like some L Rocco hermit chained inside his own psyche seeking some release. And the year 1894 was he year of extreme psychic catastrophe for Gowdy. And his response was to turn his life into an extreme austerity regiment. And from 18 95, 18 96, 18 97, we find Goudy undergoing this tremendous inner change. And almost as if the external world was cooperating with him, the nature of the project, which he was handed changed from entertaining types of structures to religiously informed conditions, he had as early as 1883, been included upon a commission to build a new cathedral for Barcelona by 18 95, 18 96, it was really in Goudy's hands and he read dead.
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Most of the structure that had been done up to that point. He simply rebill, he went over the plans again and again, until finally his metamorphosing of the plan was a cigarette, a Familia outstripped the capacity of anyone to draw them out. And in fact, he began touring around in his own sensitivity, a realization of what was true, and he would have something designed and that 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 of the popular mind that he was
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A madman
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Or at least an architect. You didn't have a plan. Why would you keep doing this? But in fact, Goudy why a very great artist will always do with searching for the veracity of expression. He had transformed himself in an interior sentence, and it 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
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Complimented and fulfilled
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By the nature of the symbol via the natural. So that these two lines seem to cross each other or for GoDaddy the natural in, uh, in, uh, the Catalonian psyche, Mount the sea and the mountains and the Plains in between the sun wind, but largely mountainous forms and oceanic, uh, background for him, the religion meant a balancing between the Catholic on the Muslim. It meant for him and in a penetration 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 architect time. Often it's referred to as equal liberated, which means that a structure must stand on its own without an external buttressing without an internal bracing. That's the very structure itself must carry the trusting in its own, right? And Gowdy would say that the symbol of this in nature is a tree.
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Now that there by the world tree is a symbol for man of the right architect tonic for his inner nature. And in fact, we will see that near the end of his life, when the grapes, the grata familiar was finally rising the Fort rake towers on the facade of the nativity at the very top of the portal in between the Paris of towers, he put a great sculptural tree, crowning the threshold coming into the cathedral this week, we're liberated sense of form. Then how'd the ornaments 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 was were of an equal liberated architectural structure, was a proper threshold for man to experience himself in its most poignant form religious comprehension.
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And this was why for him, the Gothic was so interesting going back before the Renaissance, back to the Gothic sense of structure and it's up lift. 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 Goudy with his piercing Greek, I re did the Gothic sentence of structure informed so that it could stand on its own. Wouldn't need Buster 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 on its side. And these would be the shapes of the pinnacles and the roofing so forth until they came masterful at conceiving of an artistic form in a way that is reminiscent of William boy, that acute carved what you want to express in its negative and its opposite way.
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What did is brought in contact with the phenomenal world. It will give itself and its true form so that the artist has to learn not so much how to create, but how to discover for so that the artistic reality that he thinks then is eight discovering 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 it is the building is built, when the print is made into a picture. So for Audi, there came the necessity to discipline himself stringently because it was incumbent upon him to paint themselves 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 and the sense of structure that was available for him.
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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 20th century. So that county by 1900 was in place both spiritually as an interiorized human being and as a accomplished artist and as a figure in a viable cultural matrix, Barcelona 1900, all of these facilities were in place. And then his patron, you said your grail made available to him. A project. He had bought an enormous acreage of land, which was outside of Barcelona. Now the city limits were almost coming in upon it. And so grail decided to make this a unexpensive what we were called today, housing project. But you have to imagine now that the smallest plot was to be about 35 acres. The largest plot could be about 50 acres and there were 70 of these big time.
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It's a huge project. So that Gowdy was the man then to conceive of this whole project and to provide what we would call now, the entertainment center for this park, where 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 Parkway all would be built by intervals, no two alike, completely free reign. So this would be a community of individuals on the outskirts of the burgeoning 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 daddy brought all of his talents to bear for 14 years off and on.
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He worked at Parkville, which is one of the great landmarks of modern architecture by 1903. Some of the structures were up and Gowdy was working with construction techniques that simply hadn't been seen before. He was using brick, piers, thick brick, piers, leaned at an angle for them. 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, uh, thrust from the leaning peers and columns. Tilting actually was the word, um, that should be used transmitting diagno thrust throughout the entire structure. So that one had almost a crystal sense of structure operating in the building. And in order to emphasize this Goudie then began to work with windows that were almost like flowers of stained glass light that appeared almost like stars in a new cosmetics.
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This thin shell [inaudible] laminated tile, vaults that in and of themselves had very little weight, very little, uh, trust in themselves could curing that tension. And that structure very likely very easily. And what was free done 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 smear. The shape of the space of an interior of such a building could be anything that you wish any kind of complexity. And in fact, Gowdy would, um, develop a sense of complexity that would still 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 inner penetrating perfectly? So that what seems to be almost a jumble is actually a very sophisticated just discovery of freedom of interior space.
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This of course cannot, but have its analogy in terms of the human personality. We may be free if we have a free architecture drank wide once, right once said he set out to destroy. The box is a home for man. He said the box inculcates, the totalitarian ceiling. And then if you destroy the box, man will naturally become more democratic GRD. If someone who simply stretched the whole notion of what space might be in architecture to limits that are still fantastic. Some 70 years later, in fact, many people still call it fantasy architecture. But the fact is, is that Gowdy was a very serious engineer, 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 modern art nouveau was blossoming and everyone mistook Gowdy 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,
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There are so many elements that I would wish to include. Always we cannot include everything and just the brief time that we have. And also I think you must recognize that we are leaving. Like mountain goes 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 and in between are millions of failures while we're dealing with the cream. These are all individuals who in their own way were extraordinary. Gowdy kept a diary. Here's one sentence from his diary with which architects today can take to heart. They almost never built in color anymore. Everything is a modulator dignified, dead gray in terms of color, you already wrote color and architecture must be intense, logical and fertile. He used to have the same problem that the market marketer, Frank Lloyd Wright used to.
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How was that he would give cryptic little statements occasionally towards the end of his life. Last 15 or 20 years, he lived in a little hut that was appended to the Greek procedural arriving the grinder familiar, and he would rise and every morning make his way and be at the five o'clock mans. And you would walk this round circuit. He would walk down to the ocean and then break the gray daybreak. He would look out to the sea and then he would go to the mouse and then he would come back and go to work. And his withdraw into himself is 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. And some of the images that I've run across one image from a Catalonian poet, yes, 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 cigarette up familiar and whispering something about mountains of the spirit. We have some slides, but actually the great church is not, he has Magnum his great work was also built for the grille family. It's usually called Colonia Goodwill or the crypt of the Colonia go out.
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And in one of the few intelligent books in Goudy. And I must say that books are hard to find on him, but intelligent books are in scarcity. There's one, a reappraisal. I've got a, [inaudible] always by the New York graphics society. I think about 15 years ago, he writes in this way, the interior of the crypt is off the form. It unfolds around the central structure formed by four basalt columns joined by segmental arches, over them converge the ribs, which support the vaulting from these central arches spring, the lateral ramifications supported by pillars. The plastering on these, give us an impression of canvas and takes away from the circular madness. Other pillars that are only half rendered exposing the naked. Brett, the altar at the back is visible from every angle, looking at the central structure, which has the shape of a tabernacle, the idea of Springs to mind that possibly Goudy thought of putting an alter there, the fateful would then have knelt all around the most sacred place in the crypt.
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The whole crypt is an insight into the mind of the architect who was perfectly familiar with every aspect of building heroes. Nice, further, the true significance of the crypt of the colonial reality must be justice. In relation to the historical perspective of contemporary art. It is his most important work. The one that lasts free 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. Well, he has an architecture whose time has not yet come, even though it was finished three generations ago, it is still for a future thing. We still did not have a population of people who could appreciate it. That is who could live in terms of its structure, its color it's spatiality. The closest people have come in. The art world are the surrealist and the abstract expressions.
(00:58:45):
And in fact, Goudy was doing abstract expressionists design, broken tile, 58 to 70 years before it appeared after the second world war. I think in some of the Friday, you'll be able to tell just with your eye a little bit, the sense of wonder Goudy in his own words, wrote creation works ceaselessly through a man, but man does not create. He discovers those who seek out the laws of nature as support for their 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 and saying that origin is that still voice with him, but that does a disservice because it's 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 Goudy's architecture is that interior presence is infinite.
(01:00:08):
I'm 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. There was a photo Dowdy at age 36. I think he was, this is the Palazzo grill. This is the central vault down below would be the, uh, 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 Goudy. Um, pinnacles is towers. He would put a, um, a thick pointed, a cross on the top for the four directions. And up and down, this is some of the, uh, brick work vaulting in the attic of one of his early buildings. You can see the determination here too, to make structure, not just simply the carrier of the building, but the expressive presence of the building.
(01:01:38):
So that structure and space enter penetrate in the experience of those who moved there. The Kabuki once said a house with a machine for living in, I think GoDaddy would amend that to say it's a spiritual reality, which a man can and habit, if he is true to himself, this scalloping balding propensity of gouty carried very early on into the interiors. This is over a staircase in a home belt. Uh, I think in the middle 1880s, about a hundred years ago, this was a, um, a building that he, he redid. It was a, um, a structure that needed to be remodeled. The exterior surface here. I don't know how is this in focus?
(01:02:47):
It's hard to get it. There was a modeling here. Um, [inaudible] 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, something like that. And they modeled 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 forms, tiles with these cobalt green blue, uh, globe. This whole roof line has a punctuation on this side. There's a hole in it, the shade card home, almost like the, of kind of space that you would see on, um, stacks going out into the ocean, think of the argument codes and the ways we wash holes into the rocks that kind of shape complimenting the, uh, shower here.
(01:04:05):
I don't know if we got a detail of that or not. I guess not. We go inside. This is a ceiling, a fault ceiling on the first floor of that structure. It gives you a chance to see how he worked with the ceiling breaks. You get down to the walls, to the wood shape. Um, this actually is a, um, a doorway Gowdy love to put, um, little doors inside of large doorways, which had hinges. So then on certain occasions, what we would call cook really, uh, state occasions, what 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 shape would you should glass the shape, uh, ceiling here. All of this is to deliver a sense of undulating space.
(01:05:12):
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 aesthetic, or rather we should use the term here. This kind of a kinesthetic out perception was the, the key, the parish, um, of the architectural composition. This is from council Amelia. Yeah. Casa Mila, not project era built about 1910. And this is the interior view. Looking out from the, uh, what, what you call today at the garage entrance or at those days with the carriage entrance. And again, you see the small door set into a larger space and all this, where are you staying the glass? And I'm in fretwork and so forth. All of that could open up, you see the heavy columns outside. These were not, uh, the kinds of stick columns you usually see.
(01:06:29):
I don't know if we have a detail of that or not, but they presented almost a cave like honeycombing and structuring the Casa. Mia was ridiculed by all kinds of cartoons. One of the more famous ones showed people, parking their blimps, the new age glimpse, and all of these large spaces made by his structure. This is under the roof of the Casa, Mila, the treatment of the chimneys and the ventilation. They looked like a mysterious, the Heron travelers, cloaked disguise. And you see back through the distance, this photograph was taken about 1967. You can see they're still working on, uh, say grata Familia, the church of the holy exposition in the background. These sculptured forms that they use of cracked tiles this way, predates by several generations, the types of forums. We're now familiar with forums like this from Henry Moore and other sculptors. But at this time, about 70 years ago, this was totally new. Totally just being discovered. Nope, they arch everywhere. You look. That's a key, that's a module key, actually, structural. These are all pre mutations of that motion, that geometry, okay, this is one of the entrances to park rail, just a fountain in the form of a lizard.
(01:08:19):
I guess he's in focusing, it's hard to tell, and there are steps that go up. And then on the inside, um, in Parkway, this, uh, ramp part 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 forum and this a long undulating benchmark. In fact, it goes on around enormous space and over the generations, this has become the try to burst the laundry. The people themselves have taken to, uh, park rail to Goudy's architecture. Finally made it their own. One of the craftsmen who actually executed the tower work was named Jude. Joel, J U J O L Gotti 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 Workman what they were doing and what kind of vision he had.
(01:09:51):
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, um, new insights and new aspects would reveal themselves. So it was a 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 Goudy's designs were lost, but they found in the late forties, early fifties, a Workman who had witnessed scouting sketches had been privy to some of his design materials for the hotel. And then he drew these sketches. It would have been a hundred stories high.
(01:10:50):
And if this had gone up in New York city in 1908, it would have made Galleria 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, to the details of us culture, we can bring in Bruce Goff architecture. This is the facade. This is as far as they've gotten, they're still working on it. I'll stick right up Amelia. And I think when you first do this, it just looks like a pile of rubbish. And it's a great discovery. It's a great, uh, 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 caring through esoteric patterns, montage upon each other until you might have five or six motifs working at the same time.
(01:12:17):
And all of the orderings kept articulate to the informed on where's the detail. I think you can pick out the tree trunk tree would be very much like Brian or Joel Mars, the all sculpture Christmas tree worldview. Actually, there was a lot of criticism when they got to about this site. And when these columns began coming in, most people counted Goudy out. They thought he was just a complete madness, but it goes with the structure and actually in all of these, uh, flus and counties, uh, designs, there are various colors that are put in it, so that sunlight moving through these structures well begin to radiate and width and color. If you notice, there are also words, sculpture is a structure. And then, uh, the late 1960s, they found that the whole ceramic bench at Parkville had a secret messages put onto the tiles words and phrases and so forth before the glazing process.
(01:13:46):
And it had been done so perfectly in keeping with the fragmented, uh, mosaic pattern that no one had ever noticed this up to that point. He says, yeah, yeah, this is the Colonia Creo, which was finished. And I think, uh, that, uh, CATSA Nelly's is right in saying this was Gotti'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 as the phasing from nature into man's architecture becomes almost imperceptible. And there are moments in Goudy's architecture where one would be very hard pressed to declare that simply was not natural. And in fact, this seems to be a purpose in Goudy's discovery mode to reveal new facets of nature, that architecture at its finest discovers for man.
(01:15:18):
The fact that his buildings are a natural happening, they are a part of the landscape. They're not set in the landscape. They're 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 was built, right, you can imagine that house anywhere, but where it is. He said that a falling water in 1936 that's right. So the 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 looked so strange and so forbidding. And yet here they are a beautiful rosettes of primordial colors informs illuminating an interior year. We see his incredible ribbing involving you notice on the back, bald here, the checkerboard pattern, you see that on the Alhambra, everything is still the Arabic and the European traditions blended together.
(01:17:03):
In fact, I don't think I have a slide of it, but the vault of the Grotta Familia is a larger version of this. And there was a Virgin and child, mother, and child in the top circle in cigarette, a familiar were all the ribs come together. Notice the positioning here of material. So that almost approaches at first glance, the haphazard it's the only one, one experiences, the invisible tension, invisible structure. The hierarchy is of order in the building. That one realizes that you don't have to have a straight steal aligned to carry alone. 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 it field of home in the spatiality of the structure. And when our feeling interiorized as 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 at it. I think next week is a Claude Monet. [inaudible].

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