Antoni Gaudí: The Listening Builder

Gaudí was a sickly child. The rheumatism that kept him out of games kept him outside instead, sitting still for hours in the fields around Riudoms, watching things. He said much later that his architecture had started there, in those summers — and he meant it literally, not romantically. The branching of a carob tree was a structural diagram. A snail's shell was a stairwell. He filed the observations away and spent the next sixty years drawing on them.

His early Barcelona commissions are charming and a little awkward — Casa Vicens with its tiled exuberance, the Güell estate gates with their wrought-iron dragon. You can feel him searching. The breakthrough is the moment he stops drawing curves and starts deriving them. He built upside-down models out of weighted chains hanging from a board; gravity pulled the strings into perfect catenary arcs, and when he photographed them and turned the picture over, he had a roof that needed no buttresses. The Sagrada Família was engineered by hanging string and sandbags from a ceiling.

Casa Batlló and Casa Milà followed, then Park Güell, which the city of Barcelona almost demolished as a failed real-estate development before deciding, decades later, that it was a masterpiece. He grew increasingly devout and increasingly ascetic. By the end he was living on the construction site of the Sagrada Família, sleeping in a small room next to the workshop, refusing salary, designing one chapel at a time so the work could continue without him. He was hit by a tram in 1926 and, dressed too shabbily to be recognised as a famous man, lay unidentified in a pauper's ward for a day before someone realised.

The basilica is still being built. The crews working on it now follow the suspended models he left behind and improvise from his fragmentary notes; computational geometry has, somewhat miraculously, caught up with his hand calculations. The man's actual philosophy was simpler than it looks from the buildings: nature had already solved most of these problems, and his job was to copy carefully.

“The best buildings teach you how to be in a room.”

We will leave the last word to the reader. The questions below are not rhetorical. They are an invitation.