Antoni Gaudí
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- €13.99
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
An accessible account of the contradictory life and work of the modernist Catalan architect.
The celebrated art nouveau architect Antoni Gaudí was a contradictory figure: a deeply religious, politically right-wing man who nevertheless built revolutionary buildings. This book explores Gaudí’s life, work, and influences from Catalan nationalism to the industrial revolution. Michael Eaude expertly guides readers through Gaudí’s dozen great works, including the Sagrada Família that attracts millions of tourists each year. Gaudí’s life is also chronicled from his provincial upbringing in Reus to his time in Barcelona. He later suffered a nervous breakdown, became obsessively religious, and fused Gothic, Baroque, and Orientalist architecture into his unique style. This brief biography offers an accessible introduction to this perplexing and fascinating life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Eaude (A People's History of Catalonia) delivers an energetic survey of the life and work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Entering the field in the 1870s as Europe shifted away from classical architecture, Gaudí melded late 19th– and early 20th–century Catalan modernisme, an architectural movement that involved curved lines, abundant ornamentation, and medieval influences, with neo-Gothic and Moorish overtones, making for a "passionate architecture full of colour and joy." His buildings, most notably the Sagrada Família, a Catholic church in Barcelona that Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death, were striking for their "plasticity of ironwork, wood and stone." Writing that Gaudí was "consistent in his extremism" across nearly all aspects of his life, Eaude dissects the architect's design influences (he sought "inspiration medieval times, when Catalonia had been a powerful nation"); his obsessive, exacting methods (a "total architect," he often designed his buildings' furnishings and gardens); and the "religious devotion" that intensified throughout his life and nearly caused him to starve to death when fasting for Lent in 1894. Because Gaudí was notoriously private and "wrote only one newspaper article in his life," Eaude hews closely to the work, making for a study that sometimes lacks insight into its subject's motivations. Still, this is a worthy tribute to one of history's great iconoclasts.
