For many, even today, Antoni Gaud∅ represents the ultimate image of the architect gone mad. Wayward and apparently frivolous, he was regarded as one of the first protosurrealists, revered and celebrated by his fellow Catalan Salvador Dal∅ to an embarrassing degree. The vertiginous towers of the expiatory temple of the Sagrada Fam∅lia, with their appearance of molten stone, still punctuate the Barcelona skyline. While at the Park Gⁿell, above the city and with views across the Mediterranean, thousands laze on sunny afternoons along the length of Gaud∅'s meandering serpentine bench. Recognised as the embodiment of Catalan identity, Gaud∅, it is easy to forget, from the 1920s onwards was effectively sidelined as no better than a fairground fantasist and an architectural freak.
He was born in 1852 in Reus, a city 100 kilometres south of Barcelona, and died, tragically, after a tram smashed into him as he crossed the Gran Via in Barcelona in 1926. If we can forget a catalogue of ailments - he was ill with brucellosis, plagued with rheumatoid arthritis and recovering from a hernia - , when tram No30 bore down on him, in the rudest of health.
His father, a rugged boilermaker, had lived well into his 90s. Apart from his fame as the architect of some outrageously sensual buildings, Gaud∅ was also one of Catalonia's most legendary vegetarians, surviving on a diet of no more than the odd lettuce leaf anointed with milk, a solitary toasted almond, a dried apricot or a burnt piece of toast. He was a fresh-air freak ahead of his time.
Perhaps, on reflection, it was in sympathy with his patron saint, Anthony Abbot, and his kinsman the Roman Seneca that Gaud∅ had plugged into a Catholic and medieval mindset that was as ancient as the hills. Gaud∅ always thought Catalonia was the "urculture", the centre of the universe, and in the end the only place in the world - apart from Greece - in which the true architect could flourish.
And here is the central paradox. Gaud∅ was an extraordinarily inventive architect, arguably the most avant-garde and brilliant of his age, but one who remained in his private life celibate and ascetic to the last., what, then, of his buildings? What of their whimsy, their playfulness, their dangerous flirtation with the wild and the grotesque?
Almost every single one is a riot of colour and a dissolution of traditional form. On the chimneys are broken shards of glistening tile. The outer skin of the buildings are pulled and twisted like putty in the hands of a child.
In his studio, Gaud∅ would mix eco-friendly methods with state-of-the-art experiments into a building's stresses and strains. Complex and enigmatic, they suggest a raft of theories. But the first obstacle for any would-be biographer is the poverty of source material: just a dozen well-argued pages and four bread-and-butter letters to a close poet friend.
On two consecutive nights in July 1936, as anarchy exploded in Barcelona at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Gaud∅'s studio in the Sagrada Fam∅lia, with his models, drawings, letters and accounts, was smashed up and torched. (All we are left with are the studio drawings sent for exhibition to the Barcelona School of Architects a few years earlier and, fortuitously, never returned.)
With Gaud∅'s famous reticence about giving interviews or sitting for the camera, coupled with the paucity of hard fact and biographical detail, it was going to be hard to picture this strange architect clearly and deliver him from the powerful stranglehold of the overwhelmingly eccentric and all-enveloping Gaud∅ myth. But biography and autobiography often, it seems, get mucked and muddled up, each informing and interfering with the other. How can they not?
What I could never have foreseen when I started working on a biography of Gaud∅ was that serendipity would have such a large part to play in the writing of the book. Twice I would encounter Gaud∅ in a personal way, once at the beginning and once at the very end of his life.
My first encounter with a Gaud∅ building was as a six-year-old, screaming with pleasure and wonderment while my father cursed our misfortune as the engine boiled over in the August furnace of a Barcelona late afternoon.
And then, like so many 1960s tourists, we took the caravan trail south along the costas. By chance we ended up in the Baix Camp: Gaud∅'s homeland, the low country that surrounds Reus and Tarragona. Trapped between mountain and sea, this fertile strip of maize plantations and olive and almond groves is punctuated by the occasional farmhouse and flash-flood river courses.
As a seven-year-old I played in the dried-out bed of the riera de Maspujols. By day we looked for lizards and ran from scorpions. By night, under the railway bridge of the main Barcelona-Valencia line, we netted and chloroformed bats for one of the world's leading experts. Just three kilometres away, almost exactly a century earlier, the seven-year-old Gaud∅ had traipsed up and down the same river bed, lovingly describing it later as "the most beautiful place in the world".
This "great book of nature" would remain his enduring source of inspiration. Catalonia was God's land. No higher form of praise was God's due than pure imitation. And so, too, Gaud∅ got out the chloroform to knock out a chicken, and stun a donkey and a gaggle of geese, to sculpt them to perfection for the Sagrada Famil∅a's Nativity facade. But he would always push the limits further: taking stillborn babies and casting them, attending autopsies and, once, famously, witnessing a man dying and proclaiming, significantly later, that he had seen the departure of the soul. Gaud∅ was a profound Catholic. Nothing made sense without reflecting on the faith.
But between the confessional and Mass lay another persona. Gaud∅ the rationalist, the most misunderstood architect in history. For harnessing nature's forces is also another way to build.
Studying gravity through increasingly elaborate models, Gaud∅ came to the conclusion that there was no more perfect, economical and effective form than his favoured catenary arch - the mirrored shape of a length of chain suspended at each end.
With this revelation he would set about rewriting the history of architecture and correcting its mistakes, aiming to kick away the crutch of the Gothic flying buttress and walk away for ever from the limitations of lintel and post.
Lack of ambition was never Gaud∅'s problem. He left a catalogue of unfinished buildings that we might feel responsible enough eventually to finish. Apart from the Sagrada Fam∅lia, predicted to be completed by 2030, he gambled wrong. His greatest work, the crypt at the Col≥nia Gⁿell (see main photograph), will never be finished.
La Pedrera, his secular masterpiece along the stylish Passeig de Grαcia, will never be crowned with its sculpture of a powerful and strident Virgin flanked by a pair of archangels. At 74, he died too young.
For the last decade of his life, Gaud∅ had gradually fallen out of fashion: Bauhaus and the International style had cooled his hot humour. He walked through Barcelona as if in a dream, focusing only on the Sagrada Fam∅lia. Riots and anarchist murders only increased his conviction that the expiatory purpose of the Sagrada Fam∅lia was essential. And then the tram arrived.
Nobody has discovered exactly how Gaud∅ got from Gran Via to the emergency ward, and with whom. For Gaud∅ scholars it remained for decades one of the great unsolved mysteries. And, then, one day at home in Bridport, on the south-west coast of England, a woman came to my door, bringing home our Valencian au pair. She was interested in my book and offered to help.
Joan Bolton said she had stayed every summer in Barcelona as a child with Angel Tomβs . A true good Samaritan, shy and retiring, Mohino chose to slip into anonymity as Catalonia struggled to come to terms with its sense of guilt and the passing away of its future architectural saint. Gaud∅ scholars have checked Bolton's story, and it's true. Another miracle is Gaudi's road to beatification? Or just chance?
Gaud∅ by Gijs van Hensbergen is published by HarperCollins, £24.99 in UK
