Gaudi in Context

We were in Barcelona, with no specific agenda, thanks to a restless Icelandic volcano. A little Gaudi pilgrimage was noblesse oblige; my father’s brother, an architect, was an ardent devotee. So my wife and I navigated the streets of Barcelona, on foot and in public transport, with the children, with only a hazy plan in mind, to see the Pedrera, Casa Batllo, Parc Guell, and the Sagrada Familia, in situ.

Gaudi’s work - the fluid exterior of the Pedrera, the tile work at Parc Guell, the steepling ant-hills of the Sagrada Familia abuzz with activity, somehow remniscent of a south Indian temple gopuram - was as wonderfully phantasmagorical as ever. What was new was the context, the streets of the Eixample district in which this work is set.

The Eixample is laid out in a perfect geometrical grid.
The streets are perfectly straight. Each city block is a square with the edges trimmed off into an octogon, to let in more air and light, and to help the traffic see around corners. It is controlled, predictable, methodical, and in its own way, beautiful.

The Eixample was designed in 1859 by Ildefons Cedra, a less storied figure than Antonio Gaudi. This was when the textile industry was booming, the population was growing, there was new money around, and Barcelona had clearly outgrown the Old City - Ciutat Vella - around the Mediterranean port. So the ancient city walls, fortifications which went back to Roman times, were demolished. An extension, eixample in Catalan, was built. It must have been a relief to move from the tiny, twisted, messy, over-crowded streets of the Ciutat Vella into the gracious, tree-lined avenues of the Eixample, with schools, shopping and hospitals within easy access.



When the twenty-one year old Gaudi started studying architecture, in 1873, the Eixample was already there, as large as life, business as usual. Been there, done that, to straight lines and perfect octogons. Beauty was no longer about imposing order on unruly nature, or on a chaotic past. Beauty, and spirituality, was now about evoking and celebrating the shapes and irregularities of nature, a nature which is increasingly far away.

Gaudi, of course, responded to this need with spectacular panache. But the context, the framing needed to hold Gaudi's magical world in place, was already there. So the Eixample now has Cedra’s rigid grid enriched with Gaudi’s fanstastic shapes, in a point counter-point rhythm, which is more layered and meaningful than something either Cedra or Gaudi alone might have built.