Antoni Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi was born in 1852 in the small Catalan town of Reus, the son of a coppersmith whose workshop taught him, from boyhood, how flat sheets of metal could be bent into three-dimensional forms.A frail child afflicted by rheumatic pains, he was often unable to play with other children and spent long hours in the countryside watching snails, lizards, and the spiral growth of trees, forming the conviction, as he later wrote, that 'nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.

' The first turning point came when his family, despite modest means, sent him to Barcelona to study architecture.He graduated in 1878, and the director of the school, handing him his diploma, famously remarked that he was not sure whether he had just granted the title to a madman or a genius.

Early commissions for the industrialist Eusebi Guell introduced him to Barcelona's rising Catalan bourgeoisie and gave him the freedom to experiment with mosaic, forged iron, and parabolic arches.In 1883, at the age of thirty-one, he took over a half-begun neo-Gothic project called the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, a commission that would consume the rest of his life.

Over the next two decades came the fairy-tale dwellings that defined Catalan Modernism: the undulating facade of Casa Batllo, the great stone quarry of Casa Mila, and the fantastic gardens of Park Guell.His second turning point came in 1914, after the deaths of his niece and his patron Guell, when Gaudi renounced all other commissions to devote himself exclusively to the Sagrada Familia.

He moved into a workshop on the building site, stopped trimming his white beard, ate a spartan diet of lettuce and nuts, and prayed in the church he was building.In his final years he looked so disheveled that on the afternoon of June 7, 1926, when he was knocked down by a tram on his way to confession, passersby took him for a beggar.

He lay uncared for in a pauper's ward for a day before friends recognized him, and he died three days later.Seven of his works are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the Sagrada Familia, still under construction a century after his death, is scheduled for completion in 2026, the centenary of his passing.

“Originality consists of returning to the origin.”

“Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.”