Domus, Milano

I was ten on the centenary of Gaudí’s birth. I lived in Barcelona, but I have no recollection of any celebrations that might theoretically have taken place. Of course I was only a child, but I do remember most of the details of my youth quite clearly, like walking every morning to the Sarriá train station on calle Provenza to go to school. I would stop to look at a strange, dark, terrible, wavy building that fascinated me. There were always a couple of multicoloured cockatoos basking in the sun on that weird balcony with its glass base and mad balustrade – birds that led passers-by to stop and make ridiculous noises in vain attempts to provoke a response. At that age I could not have imagined I would ever be an architect, look at buildings I enjoy, sketch well and win prizes for my drawings at architecture school. But if there actually had been a fuss on the scale of the one we are witnessing this year, I surely would have noticed. Barely two years later, the Bayreuth Opera visited the Liceu and performed Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Die Walküre for two weeks. I still have a perfect recollection of the entire city festooned in portraits of Wagner. 


    I cannot remember anything like that happening during the centenary of the birth of the 20th century’s greatest architect. There was probably a devout requiem staged by the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, the Expiatory Temple providing that halo of self-sacrificial sanctity that the maestro could never quite shake off. And a tribute from Le Corbusier, one of the few architects of that period able to recognize Gaudí’s achievements, above and beyond passing stylistic fads. 


    When I began to study architecture years later, there had been little real change in the general attitude toward Gaudí. Giedion, in the most authoritative history of modern architecture, which dated the birth of modernism to the end of the 19th century, barely mentioned Gaudí. The great historian of Spanish architecture Carlos Flores regarded him as an accomplished sculptor more than as an architect. Flores’ opinion has subsequently changed substantially, to the point that his unconditional admiration for Gaudí has also embraced Jujol, the only follower who was able to take up some of the maestro’s ingenious madness. Today every notable architect in the world expresses veneration for the great Catalan architect. Yet I cannot help but regard some of these declarations of faith as suspiciously opportunistic. It is as if a leader of the purest line in abstract art were to declare enthusiasm for Velázquez. I’m not sure I can really believe them. 


    Montserrat Roig’s interview with the eminent musician Federic Mompou, which appeared on Catalan television several years ago, was a revelation to me. Montserrat asked whether it was true that Mompou was not fond of Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms. Mompou replied without blinking, ‘Look, young lady, you are a music lover. You can enjoy every period and every style, whereas I have to make music. I have to compose my music. I can’t like everything, and there is a century I am not the least interested in.

    
It’s just bad luck that Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and many other eminent musicians happened to coincide with that time, but it’s not my fault – I’m the one who is missing out’. Great words that should be emblazoned in gold above the head of every creator. And they certainly fit the world’s view of Gaudí. 
At this moment, when we are witnessing both the metaphorical and actual sanctification of Gaudí, it wouldn’t hurt to accept that he can hardly be described as avant-garde, in the sense of leading others who would go on to take the same path, like Mies van der Rohe, for example. Like Picasso, Gaudí did not open up new avenues; he closed them permanently. Remember that while Gaudí was struggling with one of his most ingenious works, La Pedrera, Frank Lloyd Wright was building the Robie House and Larkin offices, with their sheet-metal furniture. 


    By no stretch of the imagination can La Pedrera be regarded as a premonition of architecture to come. In the belief that a work of art can only be judged successful by the degree to which it is ahead of its time, many critics have insisted that this building – with no load-bearing walls or grand stairway leading to the upper floors, relying instead on the lift as the main form of access – is forward-looking. But we must not overlook its structural contradictions. Slender iron pillars hold up stone columns. The facade is not load-bearing, like the curtain walls to come, but it is composed of thick, heavy stone blocks that conceal the rusty metal structure. It is a facade that is so forced structurally that Gaudí seemed to have envisaged the arrival of reinforced concrete, in the same way that his furniture seems to have foreseen the onset of plastics. What really interested him was the evocation of the folds in the Virgin’s mantle that was to crown the building (the version dictated by his pious conscience), or the sensuous waving hair or the woman’s body (the version dictated by his sinful subconscious). 


    When will we recognize, once and for all, the tremendous erotic content in the work of this man, now undergoing beatification? It is not as strange as it might seem – Saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila set an illustrious precedent. Placing the more transcendental aspects to one side, if there was ever an architecture that depended totally on the absolute quality of its craftsmanship, at the completely opposite extreme from mass-production and standardization as promoted by the Bauhaus, it was Gaudí. 


    Gaudí did not establish a school. Gaudí did not leave traces of the architecture to come. Gaudí is impossible to copy or even follow. Gaudí has not left solutions or a rational method for us to use. His legacy is in his tremendous artistic ambition, his constant questioning of established solutions, his continual effort to go one step further, his conviction that every single architectural element could be more logical, more expressive, richer, more decorative and less conventional. A pillar could be different from what we imagine it to be. It could writhe to form spiral shapes, be decorated with weird reliefs reminiscent of incrusted fossils, be coloured with a mosaic containing fragments of glazed kitsch, be tilted to absorb non-vertical forces (it was advisable and expressive to do so), slanted to form tilted Doric columns (as in the outer pillars of the hypostyle esplanade in Güell Park). 


    Excesses of reason give rise to surrealistic objects. 


    One can well understand the fascination with Gaudí in an architect like Enric Miralles. Yet toward the end of his short but brilliant career he would suffer a passionate disenchantment, wondering aloud how we could speak of structural triumph in the crypt of the Colonia Güell, with a mere seven metres between pillars – a distance spanned by any basic commercial girder – or the retaining wall in Güell Park, which he built before back-filling it with earth. One may well understand Le Corbusier’s fascination with the master class in geometry and construction in the hut used as a school on the grounds of the Sagrada Familia, or the enthusiasm expressed by Kenzo Tange, other Japanese architects or, more to the point, Frank Gehry. One may also understand the influence of Gaudíesque furniture on chairs by Carlo Mollino, Vico Magistretti or Ross Lovegrove; jewellery by Elsa Peretti; and so many other modern Catalonian designs. 


    But all the same, how can an architect who resolves a handle with a rectangular section prism come to love the La Pedrera fittings, all adapted to the hand that has to grasp them? They are adapted so perfectly that we are convinced the maestro did not draw them first, but rather modelled them with his own fingers on a clay cast, producing the action of the future user’s hand on the shiny forged brass. How can an architect who resolves a chair with minimalist geometry come to love the Calvet chair, which snakes around to wrap the user in a sinful embrace? How can an architect who resolves the interior/exterior relationship with what seems to be a naked pane of glass come to love the incredibly complex gallery on the rear facade of the Palau Güell, with its set of successive filters, its frames coated in iron, ceramic and wood, its staggered set of shutters and moving concertina blinds triggered from inside by clockwork mechanisms, its concave bench supported on an absurd overhang and its three interior pillars (an expression of the plane of the facade and a light filter), given that they are all structurally superfluous? 


    If this magic game aimed at domesticating the savage midday Mediterranean sun arouses so much passion in him, why doesn’t such a fashionable architect reinterpret such imagination in his own projects, so simplifyingly similar wherever they are built, in Central Europe, North America or the desert? Come on, all you minimalists from Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and so many other places; architects who demand that your homes be photographed totally naked before they are contaminated by your clients’ furniture, paintings, family heirlooms and bibelots; purist artists in a single volume (parallelepiped), material (glass) or colour (white or aluminium). Enough is enough! Get published in all the magazines, take up all the university professorships, win all the important competitions. But don’t come out saying you are wild about Gaudí.

    
Salvador Dalí repeated endlessly, especially in the presence of the great French figures, that modern French art would have got nowhere without Spanish artists. ‘What sort of weight would it have without Juan Gris, Picasso, Miró or the Divine Dalí? It would still be weighed down by that great millstone of French art: le bon goût’.

    
Is it really true that we can only find art profoundly moving if it has a touch of bad taste? Gaudí’s work seems to confirm this theory. Like the output of many great artists, from Murillo to Wagner, it often verges on kitsch. So the constant admiration of Gaudí by Dalí, the most outstanding enthusiast of bad taste, even in his periods of greatest disrepute, should not be at all surprising. Dalí once told me about meeting Le Corbusier. At one point during dinner, Le Corbusier explained that he was very interested in knowing how the great surrealist artists imagined the architecture of the future would be. Unhesitatingly, Dalí replied, ‘The architecture of the future will be like the work of the great Gaudí: soft and fluffy’. 


    Gaudí was not a children’s artist, although he sometimes came brazenly close. The multicoloured lizard on the Park Güell steps, for instance: isn’t it the sublimation, possibly ingenious if you wish, of those little figures that decorate the rockeries and ponds at the bottom of so many back gardens? The sculptures on the Passion facade of the Sagrada Familia, taken from real-life moulds, are not an excusable digression by the maestro – they are pure Gaudí. He was an artist who was capable of designing the incredible abstract finish on his first spires, so incredible they had to be mimetically repeated on the rest of them, despite the fact that this contravened his desire for each one to be unique. 
Yet he was also someone who could produce a mould of a little donkey to represent Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem; an artist who planned to culminate the wonderful sculpted landscape of the La Pedrera terrace with an imaginative figure, several storeys high, of the Virgin. Gaudí was like that. Only his astonishing ingenuity rescued him, unscathed, from such wild ideas, notions that on occasion were of very dubious taste. Gaudì’s work is an ideal case that brings us to the Dalíesque conviction that ingenuity is inevitably at odds with good taste, at least the prevailing concept of good taste in his day. Perhaps it is true that every innovative or ingenious work must inevitably be opposed to the prevailing taste. This axiom has been used to explain the ostracism, the everyday failure of many marked artists, from the impressionists to Van Gogh and others. The problem arises when, at the point of being convinced of this, we pick up a book about Velázquez, Vermeer or Leonardo and discover that the argument is less convincing. It is difficult to believe that, even in their own time, their good taste was ever questioned. 


    So what if we accept that throughout history there have been ingenious artists with appreciably bad taste and others with exquisite taste, and that regardless of his probable canonization, Gaudí was a member of the former group?