Gaudí was not by any means the isolated, misunderstood genius that many of the books written about him would lead us to believe. On the contrary, his work was done within very concrete political and ideological strategies. This doesn’t mean to say that Gaudí was an ideologist, or that his work was directly determined by the interests of his clients, the high bourgeoisie and the church.

 

In reality, his particular way of understanding his work often caused Gaudí to confront his clients and society in which he lived. What’s more, Gaudí’s work constitutes the highest moment of the artistic and intellectual production of Catalonia of his lifetime. If today figures such as that of Eusebi Güell seem commonplace, it is basically thanks to the works that Gaudí did for him.

 

Barcelona, its image and character have an extraordinary and absolute relationship with the work of Gaudí. What would this city be, for better or worse, without those extraordinary buildings that he built and which constitute his deepest and inexhaustible treasure trove? 

Gaudí’s importance over his period does not stem from his supposed brilliant isolation or from any sort of inexplicable artistic craziness, but, in fact, from his ability to concentrate that period in his buildings, to contract all of it in such a complex body of work.

 

Gaudí’s work has transcended far beyond the period in which he lived, those turbulent years around the turn of the 20th century. But if it has done so it is because he was able, like no other, to interpret his time, and to come up with some of the most powerful images. This is why it has lived on.

So one could continue talking about Gaudí in excessively praising, formalistic, folkloric or esoteric terms, there are so many: they are all useful terms to forget him, to convert him into this comfortable and gigantic tourist “icon” into which he is inevitably becoming more and more.

 

But if we want to understand his work in all its profound intensity, we cannot forget his era. We have to understand the way in which his buildings were interwoven with the political and ideological strategies of his time, that is, with the desires and needs of his prestigious clientèle.

 

Gaudí’s architecture isn’t formalist but symbolic. It is not architecture wrapped up in its own ideas, but on the contrary, absolutely committed to the life of a Barcelona torn by class struggle.

 

And he is no mystic absent from the world, but a political figure, present like few others on the stage of this struggle. Or, quite literally, Gaudí was the builder of some the most important symbolic backdrops to this class struggle, of the architecture of modernity.

 

 

One of the myths surrounding Gaudí is that he learnt everything he knew thanks to a type of infused science, looking at nature through a child’s eyes. Or that he inherited the moral and material qualities of artisan work through the generations of metal workers that he had descended from. Nothing could be further from the truth: Gaudí trained intellectually at the recently opened School of Architecture in Barcelona. An optimistic school in all regards, that wanted to respond to the material and symbolic needs of a city in great expansion and, at the same time, of a bourgeoisie seeking to express itself in its own, modern and cosmopolitan language. During his formative years, as we can see in his student projects, Gaudí participated actively and consciously in the intellectual controversies of the time. He was critically acquainted with the works of some of the leading European theorists and architects such as, Viollet-le-Duc, John Ruskin and the contemporary British design reformers. He also had access to the extraordinary bibliographic and photographic resources that the School had acquired since its foundation and which it made available to its students.

 

According to legend, the association between Gaudí and Eusebi Güell began when Güell saw a window display that Gaudí had planned for glove retailer Esteve Comella at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878. But it is more likely that they were introduced by Joan Martorell, architect for the Güell family and Gaudí’s employer. Whichever it was, after the building of the Pedralbes Pavillions, Gaudí became Eusebi Güell’s personal architect. Thus, a relationship was formed between the two that their contemporaries compared to that of the great patrons and artists of the Renaissance, or with that of Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner. The genius's daring has a direct impact on the public recognition of his patron’s liberality, who was the one who approved them.

 

The aristocratic ideology of Eusebi Güell translates into the princely programme that Gaudí designed for him over the years: a palace in the heart of the old city (the Palau Güell), a suburban park (the Park Güell) and a temple (the church of Colonia Güell).

 

With these three works, Gaudí and Güell launched a programme of great symbolic tension and profoundly anti-urban ideology: the palace was the place on which the city founded its “new antiquity”; the park was the ideal image of a mythical land in which the typical Catalan landscape was developed; and the temple, the patriarchal vision of what they then called the “social problem”  —that is, the class struggle, which was settled in sacred, redemptive terms—.

 

In 1910, thanks to the patronage of Eusebi Güell, an exhibition of Gaudí’s work was organised in Paris. The preparation for this exhibition, at which he presented scale plaster models, large format plans and photographs, was done in the workshop of the Sagrada Familia. According to chronicles of the time, Gaudí never appeared to be very enthusiastic about this project, which he delegated to his assistants. The Parisian critics, little used to the eccentricities of an architect like Gaudí, who by then was very popular, was ambiguous. While recognising the originality of his work, they pointed it out as the compendium of “bad taste”. 

1910 is also the year in which, after the “Semana Trágica” (the Tragic Week of 1909 during which many churches in Barcelona were burned), Gaudí would abandon all private commissions to devote himself exclusively to the Sagrada Familia, which he did so until the end of his life. Thus, at the same time that Güell orchestrated an international projection of his work, Gaudí decided to seek refuge in his workshop.

 

After the fires of the Tragic Week, the architect's workshop became a kind of “refuge for the end of the world” from which to organise his redemption.

 

The idea of building a temple dedicated to the Holy Family emerged in the decade of 1870, promoted by a series of deeply conservative people and entities, who interpreted in an apocalyptic way the transformations that had occurred in the previous decades: from the loss of the power of the Pope to the successive revolutions and popular insurrections (the most prominent: The Paris Commune of 1871), to the general liberal drift of the bourgeois governments of the European nations.

 

This perception of being witness to a sort of end-of-the-world reached, in the particular case of Barcelona, the most radical extremes. Let’s not forget that Barcelona was then a city fraught with social violence, known as “the city of bombs” and, later, as “Rosa de Fuego” (the Rose of Fire). 

 

This is the context in which the Association of Devotees of St. Joseph decided to build a temple of atonement in the city. But were the sins to be cleansed the sins derived, precisely, from the class struggle? 

The works were started by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, who abandoned the project in 1883. This same year Gaudí was commissioned to complete the project, who at the time was 31, and whose life from then on would be inextricably linked to the church.

 

Gaudí made the Sagrada Familia the central focus of all his work: he set up his workshop on the premises. Over time, he converted what was initially an eccentricity of a group of Catholics into one of the most important artistic, ideological and symbolic centres of modern Barcelona.

 

The idea explained by the poet Joan Maragall of the unfinished and incomplete temple, of the temple that was always awaiting its altars; of the construction that was at the same time a destruction, fulfils its redemptive mission; and of the visionary architect that gave it shape, was more than fulfilled Gaudí`s lifetime.

 

Upon Gaudí’s death the Sagrada Familia was already, without a doubt, the most popular monument in the city of Barcelona, and remains so to this day.