Antoni Gaudis Architecture Style

Antoni Gaudis Architecture modeIntroductionIn order to appreciate Antoni Gaudis creative vision we moldiness heart at the context in which he trimed. It seems that previous studies of Gaudi pro vast not researched extensively into placing him within this cultural context and arouse quite preferred to outline him as a l whizly reclusive descriptor or concentrated on his elaborate architectural forms. This dissertation get out explore whether governmental, social and economic developments in the late 19th and twentieth Centuries in Catalonia and Spain proved touchst iodines for the architect, his work and his immediate circle and whether these factors influenced his creative decisions and ready been overlooked done and end-to-end his disembodied spirit.The work is composed of trinity inter-related separates. The first base section will discuss Gaudis Catalan roots, and early social influences. Park G?ell will be used to illustrate this. The second section explores Catal an soilalism, social course of actiones and the rise of Catalan industrial capitalism. It will in like manner examine the political negate and tensions between Castile and Catalonia, including the three Carlist fights, which were fought out on Catalan territory, the disastrous nip-outs after Spains loss of her empire in 1898, and the opposition of sad Week in 1909. It will consider how these snow-cladthorn wee-wee affected Gaudi and his working rationale. This section will be analysed through the theoretical neb of the Casa Mila. The third section will examine Gaudis shift in creed and the impact that this had on his architecture. This will be sh hold through the example of the Sagrada Familia (Holy family) Cathedral.This tidings starts by considering the view declaimed by Clara Gari of the Catalan architects draw nearPerhaps what makes a quick understanding unmanageable in Gaudis work is its daring and fascinating un legitimatety, that range which slips between a rchitectural jurisprudence and body structure. such(prenominal) ambiguity is accentuated much much when the matrixes from which Gaudi extracts a determined stylistic code atomic number 18 not al ways clearly evidenced. But rather they shape up, as often happens, ambiguously confused as a consequence of a sort of intervention, prior to the credence of the chosen code, which by way of a distorted lens, varies the facets and the colour in it, tricking us with a free exclusively embracing conduct, and with an underlying thoton directly emanated from the ethnic heritage which is difficult to simplifyGari seems to be commenting that, despite Gaudis classical education and fosterage as an architect, he could risk being very radical in his use of the accepted architectural codes and structures of his eon. In Gaudis work, codes and structures seem to be passed through the filter of his imagination and his Catalan identity, and atomic number 18 transformed into approximatelythin g which may take care distorted exclusively can give way a powerful effect upon us as observers.Gaudis Catalan roots and early social influencesAntoni self-possessed Guillem Gaudi I Cornet was born in Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain on June 25, 1852, into a family which had do it from a long line of Catalan merchants, miners, farmers, weavers, boilermakers and coppersmiths. Gaudi was introduced to the family craft tradition at an early age when watching his father in his workshop. He was knightly of this heritage and once verbalise I bemuse the quality of spatial apprehension because I am the son, grandson, and the great grandson of coppersmiths All these generations of people gave me preparation. Gaudis predecessors came from a cross-Pyrenean culture that bordered the Mediterranean Sea and were accustomed to absorbing influences from opposite cultures, while somehow retaining their own Catalan identity. The Catalan run-in, for example, is closer to the tongue of Languedoc in France than it is to Castilian which is spoken in roughly of Spain. Joan Bergos explains in his book, Gaudi the man and his works, that Gaudis note thitherfore has deep, if distant roots in central Europe, mixed with the virtues traditionally found among the people of Tarragona, a typically Mediterranean people, passionate, industrious, courageous in the face of adversity and somewhat inclined to irony. The Mediterranean region of Tarragona, with its vivid surroundings and quality of light, be elements of the rural world that Gaudi seems to provide as references to his architectural forms. His love of nature began as a small child, when rheumy arthritis, made bodily exploration and play painful and difficult and he was restricted to riding around on the back of a donkey, fit to family stories, he was able to study his natural surroundings and to establish his own imaginary world. Perhaps because of his difficult start in conduct Gaudi may have developed an cozy world of f antasy, shape, structure and colour, produced by his noesis of the artisans craft and the natural forms found in his milieu.Gaudi came from a deeply apparitional family and received a thorough Catholic phantasmal education generated from the serious continuation of medieval Guilds. This would have included obligatory prayer to the Virgin, Christian doctrine, religious morals and religious tale. By 1874, at the age of 22, Gaudi had moved to Barcelona with his pal Francesc and here he began his preparation to train as an architect at the Escuela Tcnica Superior de Arquitectura (Upper Technical School of Architecture). Here he analyze Spanish architecture which would have focused upon its many cultural traditions, including Phoenician, Roman, Greek, Visigothic, Celtic, Arab, Berber and Jewish. These would have been completely absorbed into the imagineing of contemporary chassis so that at that place was no prejudice against the adoption of Islamic motifs and symbols. mavin c ould imagine how all strategic(predicate) this multi-faceted cultural heritage of Spain would have been for the development of Gaudis own approach to architecture. Gaudi also seemed to share the concerns and ideals that surrounded the dynamic and intellectual atmosphere during his youth, and would have been influenced by the famous intellectuals of the time Pugin, Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc. The latter was responsible for the Gothic revival in France and as a pupil of Le Grand Durand he had influenced Frances adoption of Renaissance models and rationalist approach to city planning, which had put the country at the forefront of European artistic and architectural debate. One could also simulate that Gaudi had read the work of the English writer Ruskin, in which he landed estates, in his book The seven lamps of Architecture I reckon that if men in reality lived like men, their houses would be like temples which we would not dare to violate so easily and in which it would be a pri vilege to live. There intrinsic be some strange dis solving of family affection, a strange ingratitude to struggleds everything that our houses have given us and that our parents have taught us, a strange cognisance of our infidelity with respect and love for our father, or maybe an consciousness that our liveliness is not for making our house consecrated in the eyes of our children, which induces individually one of us to want to build for ourselves, and to build solitary(prenominal) for the lower-ranking revolution of our private tone. I see these miserable concretions of mud and limestone that come in up like mushrooms in the boggy fields around our capitalI look at them not only with the repulsion of the offended view, not only with the pain that is caused by a disfigured landscape, not with the painful foreboding that the roots of our national grandeza mustiness have infected with gangrene chastise down to their tips from the moment that they were planted in su ch an unstable port in out native soil. It seems that Ruskins moral and aesthetic dilemma was one that Gaudi would also experience as a new-fangled professional architect, and he would move between his support of socialist ideals and various privileged connections with the aristocracy and upper middle classes (his possible clients) throughout his life. Gaudi was discovered by the middle class without whom his architecture would not stand today. However it seems he was not sluggish to the social life of his age and its contradictions. Other contemporaries working towards these ideals, were Elies Rogent (1821-1897), whose design of Barcelonas University construction was influenced by the German Rundbogenstil, which was a Neo-classical rounded arch Joan Martorell (1833-1906) who designed the Neo-gothic brick and glazed-tilight-emitting diode church of Saint Francesc de Sales (1885) Josep Vilaseca who collaborated with Lluis Domnech i Montaner (1850-1923) on the Batlo tomb (1885). As his former professor at the Escuela Tcnica Superior de Arquitectura, Lluis Domnech i Montaner was at the forefront of the Catalan Modernist movement, also known as the Renaixenca (or Rebirth), which encouraged art, field of study and literature in the Catalan nomenclature. He was also responsible for intent the Palau de la Musica Catalana which symbolises the coming unitedly of the Catalan nationalist supposition and international culture. It also shows a item connection to Gaudis Colonia Guell, Casa Vicens and Park Guell, though its elaborate ornamentation, sculptures and colourful ceramic mosaics, all of which seem to refer to a deep connection with Catalan nature and nationalism that were apparent at the time. This connection can be seen in the leaf and flower patterns on the facade of the Palau de la Musica Catalana which are inspired by Moorish architecture and followed the curvilinear design seen in Art Nouveau.At the alike time, the civil engineer Ildefons Cerda (18 15-1876) had been given the commission to expand Barcelonas boundaries by wrecking its walls and providing land for new residential areas. It seems that his plans were influenced by Haussmanns redesign of Paris, and were based on a similar grid system. Cerda was shocked that the working classes were paying pro rata more in rent for their confined nutriment accommodation than the stiff paid for their luxurious housing. The design for city, although Neo-classical, was also considered realist because of Cerdas understanding of modern urban sociology and living conditions. It seems that this expansion signalled to an different(prenominal) architects that it was acceptable to explore new ways of designing earthly concern and private plazas. This new sociological attitude towards urban spaces can be seen as the catalyst for the planion of the idea of the garden metropolis. The concept of shot up communities outside cities was started by enlightened industrial philanthropists such as Robert Owen, Titus Salt and George Cadbury, creating small housing projects for their workers in England as far back as 1800. However, the most important of the Garden City movement was Ebenezer Howard whose book Tomorrow A Peaceful Path to rattling Reform, published in 1898, was to become highly influential in townsfolk planning throughout the twentieth century. The Garden City movement is a good example of the changing social attitude towards the built environment and can be seen in the later planning texts of Tony Garnier and of Le Corbusiers ASCORAL, first published as Les Trois Establissements Humains in 1945. In a short text called nones on the family house (Casa Pairal) written by Gaudi between 1878 and 1881, he reflects on the relationship between house and familyThe house is a small nation of the familyThe privately owned house has been given the name of Casa Parial (family home) who among us does not recall, on hearing this expression, some beautiful example in the countryside or in the city? The pursuit of lucre and changes in customs have caused most of these family homes to disappear from the city, and those that remain are in such a terrible state that they cannot last long. The need for a family house is not only limited to one age and one family in particular alone is an enduring need for all families.The text seems to be referring to the superstar of a nation and of its people, it reflects the understanding of an architect who strives for sanitation and well being, as well as the anti-urban feeling which had arisen in England and spread throughout Europe. One could presume that it also reflects Gaudis deep-rooted connection with the rural world, that of peasant and craftsman, a world from which he had come. Maria Antonietta Crippa explains in her book, Living Gaudi thatGaudis attention was not directed immediately to the bourgeois house, but to the needs of everyone. She goes on to say that He does not hide his unease at the excessive , over speed up evolution of cities, which uproot many people from the land of their birth and force them to live in rented houses in the land of emigration. And he applauds the decision to wildness congested city centers for the spacious, light-filled, leafy suburbs. Perhaps this sociological approach is what allowed Gaudi to think up the imaginative design that he created for Park G?ell in 1900. This was a garden city which captured the spirit of the 20th century and followed the modern trend in Europe for creating large enhancive spaces. It was a familiar space which would create a haven out-of-door from industrialisation, where the common man, both(prenominal) wealthy and poor, could exercise and see public events during their new-found leisure hours. It was also designed as a space where nouveau- reconditee families could live comfortably away from the crowded city centre. The park seems to reveal Gaudis extraordinary imagination in what could be seen as an optimistic p hase of his life. Maria Antoietta Crippa explains that Gaudis gardens are resounding of The Rose Garden, evoked in the first of T.S Eliots Four Quartets a go into that arouses memories of childhood, but which is also a symbol of a past and a future that are alive in our present Humankind cannot wear down too much reality. / Time past and time future / what top executive have been and what has been / point to one end, which is always present. She goes on to explain that the garden is a metaphor not just for an earthly paradise, but also of the power of human memory, another expansion of Gaudis inner world. The park draws together urban sociology, his early childhood interest in nature and his concentrated sense of Mediterranean Catalan nationalism and symbolism. Gaudi uses the Moorish art of trencadis, a method of deliberately breaking tiles and re-arranging them into intricate patterns. He uses this technique on the long serpentine bench-balustrade where broken ceramic pieces h ave been arranged into quarrel and symbols with religious and Catalan nationalist connotations. Some historians have also suggested that the doric columns which consist of fluted shafts made of rough stone, covered at the base with white ceramics, and joined to the ceiling by domes which are supported by thinly curving beams, not only evoke the motion of Mediterranean waves but are also reminiscent of the Temple of Delphos and reflect the culture of Greece and the Mediterranean. They believed the structure of these columns existed as a tribute to Greece, which had won its independence from the Turkish Empire, mechanical drawing parallels with the political situation of Catalonia and the Catalans desire for independence.Gaudi arrived in Barcelona at a time of important change in architectural thinking and it seems that he benefited from brush and leading architects of his day, who were involved in the regeneration of Catalan culture, in which, the re-birth of the language had a v ital contribution in Catalans rediscovering their heritage and their common identities. In the journal Tongue tied The role of linguistics in Basque and Catalan Nationalism, Ryan Barnes explains how important the rebirth of the Catalan language was nomenclature has always been an essential element of nationalism, providing a distinctive feature and source of pride for a collective people. The ability to communicate with one another is essential to building bridges between strangers and forging the idea of a nation, which instils the idea of consonance among a people that have never met Moreover, communication brings knowledge with it. Language conveys the ideas of a people or nation through literacy works such as poems or novels, which nationalists can look back on with pride. It seems that Catalan nationals were comparing themselves, not to the intellectuals in the Spanish capital, Madrid, but to artists and designers of other nations in Europe who were more technologically advanc ed, such as England, France and Germany. The Catalan language had been suppressed for many years by Spains central government but now Catalans seemed to take for pride in self-expression, while being conscious of developments from the other side of the Pyrenees, including the redevelopment of Paris and the creation of the London squares with their ornamental gardens. They also seemed aware of the Neo-gothic architecture which was encouraged by intellectuals such as Pugin, the architect of the Houses of Parliament and John Ruskins ideas on workers education and benefits. It seems that Gaudi too was aware of these ideas, and although Catalonia was isolating itself from the decline of Spain, it was also keeping up with new and important influences from abroad. Catalonia was becoming a developed region within an undeveloped country.The history of Catalan nationalism, social classes and the rise of Catalan industrial capitalism and political tensions in Catalonia and Spain.Catalonia ha d become the industrial centre for the rest of Spain during the 19th century, a period when there was increasing unrest in the whole country. During the eighteenth century Catalonia had evolved from an providence based on goods for local consumption to an economy with wider commercial aspirations. This industrialisation took place in a country of untapped raw materials and very low purchasing power. Catalonias manufacturing expansion depended upon its source of energy generated from hydraulic turbines on its irregularly flowing rivers, but in the 20th century the hydroelectric potential of the Pyrenees was finally secured for advancing industrial production. The class system of Catalan society was largely the result of three successive long waves of industrialisation and capital accumulation, with the attendant growth of new factory-linked centres, the coarse importance of the workforce, the consolidation of a skilled working class and a large middle class, together with further advances in the direction of secularisation and urbanisation. These three long waves entailed the following developments the growth of the bourgeois class, the rise of an industrial society based, at first, as in so many other places, on the textile industry, and the establishment of great family fortunes. Karl Marx was writing in rabbit Kapital at this period of time about the expansion of the bourgeoisie in EuropeConstant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, eternal uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeoisie epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated forwards they can ossify The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cites, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and thus rescued a considerable part of the population from rural idiocy. In common with the bourgeoisie across Europe there was an increasing number of newly rich Catalan industrialists such as Eusebi G?ell and Pere Mila i Camps who were seeking the outwards expression of their fortunate position in society. The city culture of Barcelona attracted them because it offered them a style of life that was equivalent to what they witnessed in other European industrialised societies. To express their power, and their love of the new, as Marx discusses, they needed modern fashionable architects who could take advantage of the trends in design that were current in those other countries. close of the architects at this time were drawn into the Capitalist desire to use space as a commodity that could be built on and sold. Gaudi, although volition to offer his considerable talent to industrialists who were acquiring land for building projects, eventually rejected this approach to architecture in favor of a leave to the traditio nal architectural forms, such as church building, as a symbolic representation of Catalan nationhood. According to Maria Antonietta Crippa, Gaudi was already setting out on a different path in impairment of the secularisation of modern architecture, as will be demonstrated in the example of the Casa Mila. In her book, Living Gaudi, The architects complete vision, she suggests that(Gaudis) constructions were built at a time when a utopian, secularising trend was developing in the world of European architecture. This trend, which was radically different from the direction taken by the Catalan architect, proposed the creation of the new urban and residential spaces that would resolve the imbalances caused by the violent growth of cities and by the technological revolution that took place in the second half(a) of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.Despite the apparently luxurious life of Barcelonas bourgeoisie, the political situation in the whole of Spain was i ncreasingly unstable throughout the 19th century. Instead of developing a system of political parties Spain had been confronted by a series of military coups and instead of political debate there were attempts to change the written constitution. Between 1822 and 1875, opposition to liberal capitalism led to five civil wars, which were fought out on Catalan territory. The last three were to be known as the Carlist wars, in which royalists and the military opposed the liberals and republicans, and this conflict continued into the 20th century with increasing brutality and bloodshed. The Third Carlist war ended in 1876 when Gaudi was 24. Gaudi believed that war, offering violence as a solution to any problem, is inevitably demoralising. The Crusades were a failure and many sensible Carlists toss that cause in the face of the behaviour of the Carlist forces. It seems that Gaudi was interested in public affairs and followed developments on the political scene. He once saidI am very like my father. At one point, not long before he died, there had just been elections, and he still had liberal enthusiasm for the subject to ask me to tell him which candidates had been elected He railed against separatism and he defended energetically the ideas of rationalism and a strong and united Spain. Gaudi was one of a large group of intellectuals known as the generation of 98. In 1898 the political decline of Spain worsened when it entered a war with the USA, which it could not impart to fight. America supported the minority of planters in the colony of Cuba, who were making demands for independence from Spain. Following Spanish reprisals against these rebels, and supported by fictitious claims in the US press, America launched an attack on Spanish forces which caused enormous loss of life and led to Cuba beingliberated into an American sphere of influence. The shock of down in Spain was overwhelming, as Gabriel Tortella explains in The Development of Modern Spain, an Econo mic muniment of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuriesthe loss of markets for industry and agriculture, the loss of human life, of physical and military resources and income to the Treasury, the disappearance of various transportation and communication networks, and perhaps the most important, a widespread sense of revulsion and demoralization.For Spanish rulers and people, it seems that such a national humiliation inflicted by a relatively young democratic state would mark their country out as deeply blemished and unstable in the modern age of the early 20th century, and would be linked to decline, political chaos and eventual brutal civil war in 1936-1939. A few years after this catastrophe, Gaudi began work on the Casa Mila, a building six stories high, with eight apartments on each adorn grouped around two internal courtyards, one circular and the other oval. It is designed so that light floods in through the two inner courtyards which are open to the sky. Gaudis idea was tha t the building should be a substructure for an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary accompanied by two angels, which he had hoped would stand 25m above the roof of the building and would have dominated the city. The building seems to reflect Gaudis revulsion at the anti-clerical violence in Spain and loss of uncanny meaning in modern day society. Perhaps he would have agreed with Kandinskys view that the nightmare of materialism, which has cancelled the life of the universe into an evil, ineffective game, is not yet past it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.It seems that Mila I Camps was uneasy about the appearance of the proposed vast statue of the Madonna on the roof of his property, as according to art historian Robert Hughes given the hullabaloo of 1904 it would probably lead to the destruction of his building by infuriated anti-clerical mobs. It seemed that Gaudi was obligate to convey the importance and opulence of the life of this new entrepreneurial class, who d id not look to the past, but only desired one thing to invent their own future. Instead of the statue of the Virgin Mary, Gaudi was compelled to replace it with ventilation towers, chimneys and sculptures. The stair units are topped with crosses with four equal arms and the chimneys are surmounted by small domes similar to warrior heads. According to Maria Antonietta Crippa the resulting sculptures on the roof (carry) a powerful emotive charge. She goes on to say consider, for example, that way that he uses catenary structures and fluted surfaces, or the features that appear in his artificial landscapes and stone gardens these elements all work to create a fantasy world, as in the case of the multitextured, undulating faade of Casa Batllo, or the mysterious ghost world of the roof terrace of Casa Mila. Could these anguished, twisted shapes express Gaudis inner fantasy world? Or indeed his mental state at the time? Could they possibly convey the violence of his times and his persona l bereavements? It is reasonable to consider that the architects creative process is strongly influenced by his unconscious mind, as Karl Jung argues Archetypes are numinous structural elements of the psyche which have a degree of autonomy and energy of their own, which allows them to attract whatever contents of the consciousness that suit them. These are not hereditary depictions, but rather certain innate predispositions to form parallel representations, which I called the collective unconscious. One could repeat that these distorted forms were connected with his distress at the loss of his preferred sacred symbol, the Mother of Christ, but may also have held a more personal significance as a representation of his own mother, who had died 30 years previously along with his brother Francesc. The period following their deaths, in 1876, had caused an all enveloping depression for Gaudi.Reflecting on the Casa Mila it was probably a good idea that Gaudi had not used the building as a living shrine, as violent protests again erupted in the city, and saw the burning of 40 religious schools, convents and monasteries, and 12 Parish churches in 1909, the rioters considering the Church to form part of the smear bourgeois structure. The so-called Tragic Week seemed to affect Gaudi deeply perhaps this is why everything he produced afterwards seemed to be built in the Catholic spirit of somehow making amends for the destruction. Could it be that he was carrying the file of unconscious guilt for his own losses and for those that had devastated the Mother Church? At the same time as dealing with this spiritual crisis, it seems that he was heading with failing physical health. The death of Gaudis patron Don Eusebi G?ell in 1918 ground him to a complete lame, after which it is presumed that he had a mental breakdown. During his last eight years of increasing isolation, perhaps he turned his back on the chaotic events in his country and withdrew into a life of abstinenc e and religiosity. Upon these painful tragic loses, after his fathers death and the death of his sisters miss Rosa, his sense of uncertainty about life and on suffering from bouts of Mediterranean fever. He began his descent into a strict life of religiosity. My closest friends are dead I have no family, no clients, no fortune, nothing. presently I can dedicate myself wholly to my church. Gijs Van Hensbergen summarises the crisis for Gaudis generation when he explains in his book Gaudi the BiographySpains loss of her empire in 1898 and the Tragic Week of 1909 in which convents and churches were burnt down both had strong do on Gaudi, his friends, patrons and completely changed his working patterns. The political situation in Catalonia was a complex, potentially explosive one. Catalonias alliance with Spain (Castile) was one of immense tensionBefore the civil war, some Spanish intellectuals and politicians recognised the dangers, but tragically they didnt have the power to halt th e momentum of the approaching crisis. Few generations have ever been so brutally self analytical as Gaudis. Few have put themselves through such painful discoveryThese political and social tensions between reform and answer provide the subtext and hidden structures of Gaudis work.Shift in faith and its impact on Gaudis architectureThe wish to form something uniquely powerful and symbolic in a time of unpredictable political and social events may be at the heart of Gaudis most famous design, the cathedral. A personal account of Gaudi is given by one of his close friends Joan Bergos who remarked on the transformation in Gaudi during the latter years of his life, when he became completely consumed by his creative masterpiece. Bergos said Faith changed the passionate, impetuous, irascible youth into a serene, balanced, exemplary man, who only on rare occasions gave vent to any temperamental outburst and who radiated such a beneficent aura that he sometimes inspired regeneration and e ven heroic sacrifice in those lives he touched. Furthermore, Mark splenetic suggests in his book Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia Architecture in head The Sagrada Familia is a biography of a singular architects coming to terms with his time, his character and, eventually, his vulnerability.Also one could also consider that Gaudi had been influenced by Viollet-le-Ducs statement that We must find creativity through an accurate knowledge of the works of our ancestors. Not that such knowledge must lead us to imitate them slavishly, but rather it will reveal and make available all the cryptic skills of our predecessors. Perhaps what was important for Gaudi was that a designer must take from the traditional what he has absorbed into his own knowledge and re-interpret and re-work it so that it can appear innovatory and familiar, as well as inspirational.When Gaudi moved to Barcelona as a young man, it seems that he had been impressed with its wealth of historical architecture, wh ich dated back to the pith Ages. He had visited the Basilica Church of Santa Maria del Mar in the Ribera regularize which has three aisles forming a single space with no transepts and no architectural boundary between nave and presbytery. The simple ribbed vault is supported on slender octagonal columns, and daylight streams in through the tall clearstory windows. The foundation stone was laid by King Alfonso IV in 1329 and the whole building was carried out by local people including dockworkers, who accumulate the large stone slabs from near