name	Antoni Gaudí
birth date	June 25, 1852
birth place	Reus, Catalonia, Spain
death date	June 10, 1926
death place	Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
significant buildings	Sagrada Família, Casa Milà, Casa Batlló
significant projects	Parc Güell, Colònia Güell

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet () (Riudoms or Reus, 25 June 1852 – Barcelona, 10 June 1926) was a Spanish Catalan architect and the best-known representative of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works are marked by a highly individual style and the vast majority of them are situated in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, including his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família.

Much of Gaudí's work was marked by the four passions of his life: architecture, nature, religion and his love for Catalonia. Gaudí meticulously studied every detail of his creations, integrating into his architecture a series of crafts, in which he himself was skilled, such as ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork forging and carpentry. He also introduced new techniques in the treatment of the materials, such as his famous ''trencadís'', made of waste ceramic pieces. After a few years under the influence of neo-Gothic art, and certain oriental tendencies, Gaudí became part of the Catalan ''Modernista'' movement which was then at its peak, towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Gaudí's work, however, transcended mainstream ''Modernisme'', culminating in an organic style that was inspired by nature without losing the influence of the experiences gained earlier in his career. Rarely did Gaudí draw detailed plans of his works and instead preferred to create them as three-dimensional scale models, moulding all details as he was conceiving them in his mind.

Gaudí’s work has widespread international appeal, and there are innumerable studies devoted to his way of understanding architecture. Today he is admired by both professionals and the general public: his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família, is one of the most visited monuments in Spain. Between 1984 and 2005 seven of his works were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. He awakened to his Roman Catholic faith during his life and many religious images can be seen in his works, a fact which has led to his being nicknamed "God's Architect" and calls for him to be beatified.

Biography

Birth, childhood and studies

Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852, to the industrial boilermaker Francesc Gaudí i Serra (1813–1906) and Antònia Cornet i Bertran (1819–1876). He was the youngest of five children, of whom three survived to adulthood: Rosa (1844–1879), Francesc (1851–1876) and Antoni. Gaudí’s family origins go back to the Auvergne region in southern France, from where one of his ancestors, Joan Gaudí, a hawker, moved to Catalonia in the 17th century; the origin of his name could be Gaudy or Gaudin.

Gaudís exact birthplace is unknown because no documents stating it were kept, leading to a controversy about whether it was Reus or Riudoms (two neighbouring municipalities of the Baix Camp district. In most of Gaudí's identification documents from both his student and professional years, Reus is given as his birthplace. Nonetheless, Gaudí himself stated on various occasions that it was Riudoms, where his paternal family were from. What is known is that he was baptized in the church of Sant Pere Apòstol in Reus the day after his birth. The name that appears on his baptismal certificate is "Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet". Gaudí felt a deep appreciation for his native land, and his great sense of pride of being from the Mediterranean is a proof of this. It had a notable influence on his architecture: Gaudí used to say that Mediterranean people have an innate sense for art and design, that they are creative and original, whereas Nordic people are more technical and repetitive. In Gaudí’s words:

The time spent in his native land helped Gaudí to get to know and study nature profoundly, above all his summer stays in the Mas de la Calderera, home of the Gaudí family in Riudoms. He liked the contact with nature and because of this he later on became a member of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (1879), an organisation with which he made numerous trips around Catalonia and southern France. Sometimes, he used to horse-ride, or walked around ten kilometres a day.

Young Gaudí was of a sickly nature; he suffered from rheumatism from childhood, which led to his rather reticent and reserved character. This may also have been the reason for his becoming a vegetarian along with Dr. Kneipp’s hygienist theories. Because of these beliefs—and for religious reasons—he sometimes imposed severe fasting on himself. He took this to a point where it became life threatening, such as in 1894, when he fell seriously ill as the result of a lengthy period of fast.

Gaudí’s first studies were at the nursery school run by Francesc Berenguer, whose son, also called Francesc, would later become one of Gaudí’s main assistants. Subsequently, he attended the Piarists school in Reus; his talent for drawing stood out during his participation in the seminar ''El Arlequín'' (the Harlequin). He also worked as an apprentice in the “Vapor Nou” textile mill in Reus for some time. In 1868 he moved to Barcelona to study teaching in the Convent del Carme. During his adolescence he was interested in utopian socialism and with his fellow students Eduard Toda i Güell and Josep Ribera i Sans he planned a restoration of the Poblet monastery that would have transformed it into a Utopian phalanstère.

Between 1875 and 1878, Gaudí completed his compulsory military service in the Infantry regiment in Barcelona as a Military Administrator. He spent the majority of his service on sick leave, which allowed him to continue his studies. Due to his position he was not forced to fight during the Third Carlist War, which took place during this period. In 1876 his mother died at the age of 57, and so did his brother Francesc, 25, who had only recently graduated as a physician; he never got to practice his profession. Gaudí studied architecture at the Llotja School and the Barcelona Higher School of Architecture, from which he graduated in 1878. Apart from his architecture classes, he attended French lectures and studied history, economics, philosophy and aesthetics. His grades were average, some of them were fails; Gaudí cared more about his own interests than those of the official courses’. When handing him his degree, Elies Rogent, director of Barcelona Architecture School, said: ”We have given this academic title either to a fool or a genius. Time will show.”

To finance his studies, Gaudí worked as a draughtsman for various architects and constructors such as Leandre Serrallach, Joan Martorell, Emili Sala Cortés, Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano and Josep Fontserè. Maybe that was why Gaudí, when receiving his degree, said to his friend the sculptor Llorenç Matamala, with his ironical sense of humour:

Adulthood and professional work

Gaudí’s first projects were the lampposts he designed for the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, the unfinished Girossi newsstands and the Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense (Workers' Cooperative of Mataró). He became well known through his first important commission, the Casa Vicens, and subsequently received increasingly more significant requests. At the Paris World Fair in 1878 Gaudí displayed a showcase he had produced for the glove manufacturer Comella. Its ''modernista'' design, which was at the same time functional and aesthetic, impressed the Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell, who later on contacted the architect to request him to carry out various projects he had in mind. This was the starting point of a long friendship and a patronage which bore fruit with some of the most distinguished of Gaudí’s works: the Güell wine cellars, the Güell pavilions, the Palau Güell (Güell palace), the Parc Güell (Güell park) and the crypt of the church of the Colònia Güell. He also became a friend of the marquis of Comillas, the father-in-law of count Güell, for whom he designed "El Capricho" in Comillas. In 1883 Gaudí accepted responsibility for the recently-initiated works of the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family, more commonly referred to in English as the Sagrada Família). Gaudí changed the original project completely, making this his world famous and much-admired masterpiece. From 1915 until his death he devoted himself entirely to this project. Given the number of commissions he began receiving, he had to rely on a professional team to be able to work on various projects simultaneously. His team consisted of professionals from all fields of construction. Several of the architects who worked under him made their own name in the field later on, such as Josep Maria Jujol, Joan Rubió, Cèsar Martinell, Francesc Folguera and Josep Francesc Ràfols. In 1885, Gaudí moved to rural Sant Feliu de Codines to escape the cholera epidemic that was ravaging Barcelona. He lived in Francesc Ullar’s house, for whom he designed a dinner table as a sign of his gratitude.

The 1888 World Fair was one of the major events of the time in the Catalan capital and was a starting point for ''Modernisme''. The leading architects of the time displayed their best works, and Gaudí participated with the building he had designed for the Compañía Trasatlántica (Transatlantic Company). He received a commission to restructure the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council that was not carried out in the end. In the first years of the 1890s, Gaudí received two commissions from outside of Catalonia: one for the Bishop's Palace of Astorga and the other for the Casa Botines in León. These works spread the fame and prestige of the Reus-born architect across Spain. In 1891, he travelled to Málaga and Tangiers to examine the plot of land of a project for Franciscan Catholic Missions that the 2nd marquis of Comillas had requested from him. The project was never executed, but the towers Gaudí had designed for the Missions served him as a model for the towers of the Church of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

In 1899 Gaudí became a member of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc (Saint Luke artistic circle), a Catholic artistic society founded in 1893 by the bishop Josep Torras i Bagesand the brothers Josep and Joan Llimona. He also became a member of the Lliga Espiritual de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat (spiritual league of Our lady of Montserrat), another Catholic Catalan organisation. This demonstrates the conservative and religious character of his political thought, closely linked to the defence of the cultural identity of the Catalan people. Despite the apparent contradiction between the Utopian ideals of his youth and his subsequent change of direction towards more conservative views, this evolution can be considered natural, bearing in mind the profound spirituality of the architect. In Cèsar Martinell’s words, Gaudí “substituted philanthropy with Christian charity”.

At the beginning of the century, Gaudí was working on numerous projects which all reflected the change in his style, which was becoming increasingly more personal and inspired by nature. In 1900, he received an award for the best building of the year from the Barcelona City Council for his Casa Calvet. During the first decade of the century Gaudí dedicated himself to projects like the Casa Figueras (Figueras house), better known as Bellesguard, the Parc Güell, an urbanisation project that had no success, and the restoration of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, for which he visited Majorca several times. Between 1904 and 1910 he constructed the Casa Batlló (Batlló house) and the Casa Milà (Milá house), two of his most emblematic works.

As a result of Gaudi’s increasing fame, in 1902 the painter Joan Llimona chose Gaudí’s features to represent Saint Philip Neri in the paintings in the aisle of the Sant Felip Neri church in Barcelona. Together with Joan Santaló, son of his friend the physician Pere Santaló, he founded a company to make wought iron the same year, a project that failed in the end.

After moving to Barcelona, Gaudí frequently changed his address: as a student he lived in residences, generally in the area of the Gothic Quarter; when he started his career he moved around several rented flats in the Eixample area. Finally, in 1906, he settled in a house in the Güell Park that he owned and which had been constructed by his assistant Francesc Berenguer as a showcase property for the estate. Nowadays it serves as the Gaudí Museum. There he lived with his father (who died in 1906 at the age of 93) and his niece Rosa Egea Gaudí (who died in 1912 at the age of 36). He lived in the house until 1925, a few months before his death, when he set off to reside in the workshop of the Sagrada Família. One of the events that had a profound impact on Gaudí’s personality was the Tragic week in 1909; Gaudí remained in his house in the Güell Park during those days, but given the anticlerical atmosphere and the attacks on churches and convents he was worried about the safety of the Sagrada Família, which fortunately was not affected.

In 1910, an exhibition in the Grand Palais of Paris was devoted to his work, during the annual salón of the Société des Beaux-Arts (fine arts society) of France. Gaudí participated on the invitation of count Güell, displaying a series of pictures, plans and plaster scale models of several of his works. Although he participated hors concours, he received very good reviews from the French press. A large part of this exposition could be seen the following year at the I Salón Nacional de Arquitectura that took place in the municipal exhibition hall of Buen Retiro in Madrid.

During the Paris exposition in May 1910, Gaudí spent a holiday in Vic, where he designed two lampposts made of basalt and wrought iron for the Plaça Major of Vic, for Jaume Balmes’s centenary. The following year he was obliged to spend some time in Puigcerdà due to tuberculosis; during this time he conceived the idea for the façade of the Passion of the Sagrada Família. Due to his state of health, on 9 June he made his will at the office of the notary Ramon Cantó i Figueres; but luckily he recovered completely.

The decade from 1910 was a hard one for Gaudí as it was full of tragedy: the deaths of his niece Rosa in 1912, and his main collaborator Francesc Berenguer in 1914; a severe economic crisis paralysed work on the Sagrada Família in 1915; in 1916 his friend Josep Torras i Bages, bishop of Vic, died; in 1917 the works at the Colonia Güell were interrupted; in 1918 his friend and patron Eusebi Güell died.Perhaps because of all these tragedies he devoted himself entirely the Sagrada Família from 1915, taking refuge in his work. Gaudí confessed to his collaborators:

Gaudí dedicated the last years of his life entirely to the “Cathedral of the poor”, as it was commonly known, for which he even took alms in order to continue the works. Apart from his dedication to this cause, he participated in few other activities, the majority of which were related to religion: in 1916 he participated in a course about Gregorian chant at the Palau de la Música Catalana taught by the Benedictine monk Gregori M. Sunyol.

Gaudí lived his life devoted entirely to his profession, remaining single all his life. It seems that it was only on one occasion that he felt attracted to a woman, Josefa Moreu, teacher at the Mataró Cooperative, in 1884, but this was not reciprocated. From then on, Gaudí took refuge in his deep religiousness, which gave him profound spiritual peace. Gaudí is often depicted as unsociable and unpleasant, a man of gruff reactions and arrogant gestures. However, those who were close to him described him as friendly and polite, pleasant to talk to and faithful to his friends. Among these, his patrons Eusebi Güell and the bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bages, stand out, as well as the writers Joan Maragall and Jacint Verdaguer, the physician Pere Santaló and some of his most faithful collaborators, such as Francesc Berenguer and Llorenç Matamala.

Gaudí’s personal appearance—Nordic features, blond hair and blue eyes—changed radically over the course of time: he was no longer a young man with a dandy appearance (costly suits, well-groomed hair and beard, gourmet taste, frequent visits to the theatre and the opera—he even used to visit his sites in his horse carriage). When older, he became a man of strict simplicity, who ate with frugality, used old, worn-out suits, and neglected his appearance to the extent that sometimes he was taken for a beggar, such as after the accident that caused his death.

Gaudí left hardly any written documents, apart from technical reports of his works required by official authorities, some letters sent to friends (above all to Joan Maragall) and a few journal articles. Some of his quotes collected by his assistants and disciples have been conserved, above all by Josep Francesc Ràfols, Joan Bergós, Cèsar Martinell and Isidre Puig i Boada. The only written document Gaudí left is known as the Manuscrito de Reus (Reus Manuscript) (1873–1878), a kind of student diary in which he collected diverse impressions of architecture and decorating, putting forward his ideas on the subject. His analysis of the Christian church and of his ancestral house stand out, as well as a text about ornamentation and a reminder for the design of a desk.

Gaudí was always in favour of Catalonia; however, he never wanted to get involved in politics. Some politicians, such as Francesc Cambó and Enric Prat de la Riba suggested he run for deputy, but he refused. Nonetheless, he had various arguments with the police. In 1920 he was beaten by police officers in a tumult during the Floral Games celebrations; on 11 September 1924, National Day of Catalonia; during a demonstration against the banning of the Catalan language by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He was also arrested by the Civil Guard, resulting in a short stay in prison, from which he was freed after paying 50 pesetas bail.

Death

On 7 June 1926, Gaudí was walking towards the Sant Felip Neri church, where he went daily to pray and confess with Mosén Agustí Mas i Folch. While walking along the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, between the streets of Girona and Bailén, he was knocked down by a tram and passed out. Assumed to be a beggar because of his lack of identity documents and neglected appearance, with his worn-out old clothes, it was a while until anybody came to his aid. Finally, a policeman stopped a taxi and took him to the Santa Creu Hospital. The next day, the chaplain of the Sagrada Família, Mosén Gil Parés, recognized him. But it was too late and nothing could be done for him. Gaudí died on 10 June 1926, at the age of 73, at the height of his career. He was buried on 12 June. A big crowd was present to bid their farewell to him in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the crypt of the Sagrada Família. His gravestone bears the following inscription: :Antonius Gaudí Cornet. Reusensis. Annos natus LXXIV, vitae exemplaris vir, eximiusque artifex, mirabilis operis hujus, templi auctor, pie obiit Barcinone die X Junii MCMXXVI, hinc cineres tanti hominis, resurrectionem mortuorum expectant. R.I.P.

Subsequent reputation

{|style="float:right" | |} {|style="float:right" | |} After his death, Gaudí suffered a period of neglect and his works were unpopular amongst international critics, who regarded them as baroque and excessively imaginative. In his homeland he was equally disdained by ''Noucentisme'', the new movement which took the place of ''Modernisme''. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Gaudí's workshop in the Sagrada Família was ransacked and a great number of his documents, plans and scale models were destroyed. Gaudí’s reputation was beginning to recover by the 1950s, when his work was defended mainly by Salvador Dalí but also by the architect Josep Lluís Sert. In 1956 a retrospective on Gaudí was organised at the Saló del Tinell in Barcelona, and in 1957 his first international exhibition was held, at the MOMA in New York. Between 1950 and 1960, the studies of international critics like George R. Collins, Nikolaus Pevsner and Roberto Pane disseminated Gaudí’s work widely, while in his homeland it was admired by Alexandre Cirici, Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Oriol Bohigas. It is also worth mentioning the high reputation of Gaudí’s work in Japan, where his work is very much admired, the studies by Kenji Imai and Tokutoshi Torii being particularly notable. Ever since, the appreciation of Gaudí’s work has grown, culminating in 1984 when various works were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

In 1952, the centenary year of the architect’s birth, the Asociación de Amigos de Gaudí (Friends of Gaudí Association) was founded with the aim of disseminating and conserving the legacy of the Catalan artist. In 1956 the Gaudí Chair at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia was created with the purpose of deepening the study of the Gaudi’s works and participating in their conservation. In 1987, King Juan Carlos I awarded it the title ''Real Cátedra Gaudí''. In 1976, on the 50th anniversary of his death, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs organised an exhibition about Gaudí that went around the world.

Profoundly religious as he was and a man of ascetic habits, Gaudí’s beatification has been proposed, and the process was initiated in 1998 by the archbishop of Barcelona, Ricard Maria Carles, a move which was authorised by the Vatican in 2000. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Gaudí’s birth, a number of official ceremonies, concerts, shows and conferences were held, and several books were published. On 24 September of the same year, the musical ''Gaudí'' had its premiere in the Palau dels Esports de Barcelona. The authors of the piece were Jordi Galceran, Esteve Miralles and Albert Guinovart. In 2008 in his honour the Gaudí Awards were launched, organised by the Catalan Film Academy to honour the best Catalan films of the year.

Style

Gaudí and ''Modernisme''

The course of Gaudí's professional life was unique in that he never ceased to investigate mechanical structures of buildings. Early on, Gaudí was inspired by oriental arts (India, Persia, Japan) through the study of the historicist architectural theoreticians, such as Walter Pater, John Ruskin and William Morris. The influence of the Oriental movement can be seen in works like the Capricho, the Güell Palace, the Güell Pavilions and the Casa Vicens. Later on, he adhered to the neo-Gothic movement that was in fashion at the time, following the ideas of the French architect Viollet-le-Duc. This influence is reflected in the Colegi de les Teresianes, the bishop's palace in Astorga, the Casa Botines and the Bellesguard house as well as in the crypt and the apse of the Sagrada Família. Eventually, Gaudí embarked on a more personal phase, with the individualistic, organic style inspired by nature in which he would build his major works.

During his time as a student, Gaudí was able to study a collection of photographs of Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Mayan, Chinese and Japanese art owned by the School of Architecture. The collection also included Moorish monuments in Spain, which left a deep mark on him and served as an inspiration in many of his works. He also studied the book ''Plans, elevations, sections and details of the Alhambra'' by Owen Jones, which he borrowed from the School’s library. He took various structural and ornamental solutions from nazarí and mudéjar art, which he used with variations and stylistic freedom in his works. A noteworthy observation that Gaudí made of Islamic art is the spatial uncertainty, the concept of structures with limitless space; taking on a feeling of sequence, fragmented, with holes and partitions, which create a divide without ruining the feeling of open space by closing it in with barriers.

Without doubt the style that most influenced him was the Gothic Revival, which was promoted in the latter half of the 19th century by the theoretical works of Viollet-le-Duc. The French architect called for studying the styles of the past and adapting them in a rational manner, taking into account both the structure and design. Nonetheless, for Gaudí the Gothic style was "imperfect", because despite the effectiveness of some of its structural solutions it was an art that had yet to be "perfected”. In his own words:

After these initial influences, Gaudí moved towards ''Modernisme'', which was then in its heyday. ''Modernisme'' in its earlier stages was inspired by historic architecture, as for its practitioners the return to the past was a response to the industrial forms imposed by the new technological advances that the Industrial Revolution produced. The use of these styles from the past represented a moral regeneration that allowed the bourgeoisie to identify with values they regarded as their cultural roots. The ''Renaixença'' (rebirth), the revival of Catalan culture that began in the second half of the 19th century, brought more Gothic forms into the Catalan “national” style that aimed to combine nationalism and cosmopolitanism while at the same time integrating into the European modernizing movement.

Some essential features of ''Modernisme'' were: an anticlassical language inherited from Romanticism with a tendency to a certain lyricism and subjectivity; the determined connection of architecture with the applied arts and artistic work that produced a remarkably ornamental style; the use of new materials from which emerged a mixed constructional language, rich in contrasts, that sought a plastic effect for the whole; a strong sense of optimism and faith in progress that produced an impassioned and emphatic art that reflected the atmosphere of prosperity of the time, above all of the bourgeoisie.

The quest for a new architectural language

Gaudí is usually considered the great master of Catalan Modernism, but his works go beyond any style or classification. They are imaginative works that find their main inspiration in nature. Gaudí studied organic and anarchic geometric forms of nature thoroughly, searching for a language to give expression to these forms in architecture. Some of his greatest inspirations came from the mountain of Montserrat, the caves of Mallorca, the saltpetre caves in Collbató), the crag of Fra Guerau in the Prades Mountains behind Reus, the Pareis mountain in the north of Mallorca and Sant Miquel del Fai in Bigues i Riells, all of them places that Gaudí had visited.

This study of nature translated into his use of ruled geometrical forms such as the hyperbolic paraboloid, the hyperboloid, the helicoid and the cone, which reflect the forms Gaudí would find in nature. Ruled surfaces are forms generated by a straight line known as the generatrix, as it moves over one or several lines known as directrices. Gaudí found abundant examples of them in nature, for instance in rushes, reeds and bones; he used to say that there is no better structure than the trunk of a tree or a human skeleton. These forms are at the same time functional and aesthetic, and Gaudí would use them wisely, knowing how to adapt the language of nature to the structural forms of architecture. He used to assimilate the helicoid form to movement and the hyperboloid to light. Concerning ruled surfaces, he would say the following:

Another element widely used by Gaudí was the catenary curve. He had studied geometry thoroughly when he was young, studying numerous articles about engineering, a field that praised the virtues of the catenary curve as a mechanical element, one which at that time, however, was used only in the construction suspension bridges. Gaudí was the first one to use this element in common architecture. The use of these catenary arches in works like the Casa Milà, the School of the Teresianas, the crypt of the Colònia Güell and the Sagrada Família allowed Gaudí to add an element of great strength to his structures, given that the catenary distributes the weight it regularly carries evenly, being affected only by tangential forces that cancel each other out.

With the use of these elements, Gaudí went from plane to spatial geometry, to ruled geometry. These constructional forms are highly suited to the use of cheap materials such as brick. Gaudí frequently used brick laid with mortar in successive layers, as in the traditional Catalan vault. This quest for new structural solutions culminated between 1910 and 1920, when he put all his research and experience into his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Gaudí conceived this church as if it were the structure of a forest, with a set of tree-like columns divided into various branches to support a structure of intertwined hyperboloid vaults. He inclined the columns so they could put up better with the perpendicular pressures on their section. He also gave them a double turn helicoid shape (right turn and left turn), as in the branches and trunks of trees. This created a structure that is nowadays known as fractal. Together with a modulation of the space that divides it into small, independent and self-supporting modules, it creates a structure that perfectly supports the mechanical traction forces without need for buttresses, as required by the neo-Gothic style. Gaudí thus achieved a rational, structured and perfectly logical solution adapted to nature, creating at the same time a new architectural style that was original, simple, practical and aesthetic. This new constructional technique allowed Gaudí to achieve his greatest architectural goal; to perfect and go beyond Gothic style. The hyperboloid vaults have their centre where the Gothic had their keystone, and the hyperboloid allows for a hole in this space to let natural light in. In the intersection between the vaults, where Gothic vaults have their ribs, the hyperboloid allows for holes as well, which Gaudí made use of to give the impression of a starry sky.

Gaudí complemented this organic vision of architecture with a unique spatial vision that allowed him to conceive his designs tridimensionally, unlike the dimensionally flat design of traditional architecture. He used to say that he had acquired this spatial sense as a boy by looking at the drawings his father made of the boilers and stills he produced. Because of this spatial conception, Gaudí always preferred to work with casts and scale models or even improvise on site as the works progressed. Reluctant to draw plans, only on rare occasions did he sketch his works, in fact only when required by official authorities.

One of Gaudí’s many innovations in the technical realm was the use of a scale model to calculate structures: for the church of the Colònia Güell, he built a big scale model (1:10) with a height of four meters in a shed next to the building. There, he set up a model that had strings with little bags full of bullets hanging from them. On a drawing board that was attached to the ceiling he drew the floor of the church, and he hung the strings (for the catenaries) with the bullets (for the weight) from the supporting points of the building—columns, intersection of walls. These weights produced a catenary curve both in the arches and vaults. At that point, he took a picture that—inverted—showed the structure for columns and arches that Gaudí had been looking for. Gaudí would then paint over these photographs with gouache or pastel. The outline of the church defined, he recorded every single detail of the building; architectural, stylistic and decorative.

Gaudís position in the history of architecture is that of a great creative genius who—inspired by nature—developed a style of his own that attained great technical perfection as well as a cultivated aesthetic value, and bore the mark of his strong character. Gaudí’s structural innovations were to a certain extent the result of his having passed through various styles, from Doric to Baroque via Gothic, his main source of inspiration. It could be said that these styles culminated in the work of Gaudí, who reinterpreted and perfected them. Gaudí passed through the historicism and eclecticism of his generation without connecting with other architectural movements of the 20th century that, with their rationalist postulates, derived from the Bauhaus School, and represented an antithetical evolution to that initiated by Gaudí, given that it later on marked the disdain and the initial lack of comprehension of the work of the ''modernista'' architect. Other factors that led to the initial neglect of the Catalan architect's work was that despite having numerous assistants and helpers, Gaudí did not create a school of his own and never taught, nor did he leave behind many any written documents. Some of his subordinates followed his footsteps closely, above all Francesc Berenguer and Josep Maria Jujol; others, like Cèsar Martinell, Francesc Folguera and Josep Francesc Ràfols graduated towards Noucentisme, leaving the master’s trail. Despite this, a degree of Gaudí's influence can be discerned in some architects that either formed part of the ''Modernista'' movement or departed from it and who had had no direct contact with Gaudí, such as Josep Maria Pericas (Casa Alòs, Ripoll), Bernardí Martorell (Olius cemetery) and Lluís Muncunill (Masía Freixa, Terrassa). Nonetheless, Gaudí left a deep mark on 20th century architecture: masters like Le Corbusier have declared themselves admirers of his work, and the works of other architects like Pier Luigi Nervi, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Oscar Niemeyer, Félix Candela, Eduardo Torroja and Santiago Calatrava were inspired by the new style Gaudí had invented. Frei Otto used Gaudi’s forms in the construction of the Munich Olympic Stadium. In Japan, the work of Kenji Imai bears evidence of Gaudi’s influence, as can be seen in the Memorial for the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan in Nagasaki (Japanese National Architecture Award in 1962), where the use of Gaudí's famous “trencadís" stands out. Art critics in research and teaching positions since 1950 have given the artist a well-deserved position of relevance within 20th-century architecture.

Design and craftsmanship

During his student days, Gaudí used to attend various craft workshops, such as those taught by Eudald Puntí, Llorenç Matamala and Joan Oñós, where he learnt the basic aspects of all techniques relating to architecture, including sculpture, carpentry, wrought ironwork, stained glass, ceramics, plaster modelling, etc. He also took on new technological developments, integrating into his technique the use of iron and reinforced concrete in construction. All this is due to the global vision Gaudí had of architecture as a multifunctional design, in which every single detail in an arrangement has to be harmoniously made and well proportioned. This knowledge not only allowed him to design architectural projects but also to design all the elements of the works he created, from furnishings to illumination to wrought ironwork. Gaudí was also an innovator in the realm of craftsmanship, conceiving new technical and decorative solutions with the materials he used, as for example his way of designing ceramic mosaics made of waste pieces (“trencadís”) in original and imaginative combinations. For the restoration of Mallorca Cathedral he invented a new technique to produce stained glass, which consisted of juxtaposing three glass panes of primary colours, and sometimes a neutral one, varying the thickness of the glass in order to graduate the intensity of the light.

This was how he personally designed many of the Sagrada Família’s sculptures, applying a curious method he himself had conceived. To start with, he would thoroughly study the anatomy of the figure, concentrating on gestures. For this purpose, he attentively studied the human skeleton and sometimes used dummies made of wire to test the appropriate posture of the figure he was about to sculp. In a second step, he would take photographs of the models, using a mirror system that provided multiple perspectives. He would then make plaster casts of the figures, both of people and animals (on one occasion he made a donkey stand up so it would not move). He would modify the proportions of these casts to obtain the desired appearance of the figure, depending on its place in the church (the higher up, the bigger it would be). Eventually, he would sculpt the figures in stone.

Apart from architecture, Gaudí also designed urban settings and landscaping, always aiming to place his works in the most appropriate surroundings, both natural and architectural. He studied the location of his constructions thoroughly, trying to integrate them into their surroundings naturally. For this purpose, he often used the material that was most common in these surroundings, such as the slate of Bellesguard and the grey granit of Bierzo in the Bishop’s Palace of Astorga. Many of his projects included gardens, like the Casa Vicens or the Güell Pavilions, or were even gardens themselves, like the Güell Park or the Can Artigas Gardens. A perfect example of this integration into nature was the First Mystery of the Glory of the Rosary at Montserrat,, where the architectural framework is nature itself—here the Montserrat rock—that encircles the group of sculptures that adorned the path to the Holy Cave.

Equally, Gaudí stood out as interior decorator, taking care of the decoration of most of his buildings personally, from the design of the furnishings to the smallest details. In each case he knew how to apply stylistic particularities, personalising the decoration according to the owner’s taste, the predominant style of the arrangement or its place in the surroundings—whether urban or natural—and depending on its type, secular or religious. Many of his works were related to liturgical furnishing. From the design of a desk for his office at the beginning of his career to the furnishings designed for the Sobrellano Palace of Comillas, he designed all furnishing of the Vicens, Calvet, Battló and Milà houses, of the Güell Palace and the Bellesguard Tower, and finally also the liturgical furnishing of the Sagrada Família. It is noteworthy that Gaudí studied some ergonomy in order to adapt his furnishings to the human anatomy in an optimal way. Many of the furnishings he designed are currently exhibited at the Gaudí Museum in the Güell Park.

Another aspect to mention is the intelligent distribution of space, always with the aim of creating a comfortable, intimate atmosphere in the interior of all his buildings. For this purpose, Gaudí would divide the space into different sections, adapted to their specific use, by means of low walls, dropped ceilings, sliding doors and wall closets. Apart from taking care of every single detail of all structural and ornamental elements, he would make sure his constructions had good lighting and ventilation. For this purpose, he would study the orientation of the building in detail with respect to the cardinal points, as well as the climate of the region and its place in the surrounding natural setting. At that time, there was an increasing demand for more domestic comfort, with piped water and gas and the use of electric light, all of which Gaudí expertly incorporated into his constructions. For the Sagrada Família, for example, he carried out thorough studies on acoustics and illumination, in order to optimise them. He used to say the following with regard to light: ”Light achieves maximum harmony at an inclination of 45°, since it resides on objects in a way that is neither horizontal nor vertical. This can be considered medium light, and it offers the most perfect vision of objects and their most exquisite nuances. It is the Mediterranean light.”

Lighting also served Gaudí for the organisation of space, which required a careful study of the gradient of light intensity to adequately adapt to each specific environment. He achieved this with different elements such as skylights, windows, shutters and blinds; a notable case is the gradation of colour used in the atrium of the Casa Batlló to achieve uniform distribution of light throughout the interior. He also tended to build south-facing houses to maximise sunlight.

Works

Gaudí’s work is difficult to classify. It is normally classed as ''modernista'', and it undoubtedly belongs to this movement on account of its eagerness to renovate—though without breaking with tradition; its quest for modernity; the ornamental sense applied to works; and the multidisciplinary character of its undertakings, where craftsmanship plays a central role. To this, Gaudí adds a dose of the baroque, adopts technical advances and continues to use traditional architectural language. Together with his inspiration from nature and the original touch of his works, this is the amalgam that gives his works their personal and unique character in the history of architecture. Chronologically, it is difficult to establish guidelines that illustrate the evolution of Gaudí’s style faithfully. Although he moved on from his initially historicist approach to immerse himself completely in the ''modernista'' movement which arose so vigorously in the last third of the 19th century in Catalonia, before finally attaining his personal, organic style, this process did not consist of clearly-defined stages with boundaries between one stage and another: rather, at every stage there are reflections of all the earlier ones, as he gradually assimilated them and surpassed them. One of the best descriptions of Gaudí’s work was made by his disciple and biographer Joan Bergós, according to plastic and structural criteria. Bergós establishes five periods in Gaudi’s productions: preliminary period, mudéjar-morisco (Moorish/mudéjar art), emulated Gothic, naturalist and expressionist, and organic synthesis.

Early works

Gaudís first works both from his student days and the time just after his graduation stand out for the great precision of their details, the use of superior geometry and the prevalence of mechanical considerations in the calculations of the structures.

During his studies, Gaudí designed various projects, among which the following stand out: a cemetery gate (1875), a Spanish pavilion for the Philadelphia World Fair of 1876, a quay-side building (1876), a courtyard for the Diputació de Barcelona (1876), a monumental fountain for the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona (1877) and a university assembly hall (1877).

{| style="margin:1em auto; padding:2px; border: 1px solid #BBB; text-align:center; font-size:90%" ! colspan="4" style="background:#EEE" |Student works |- | | | | |-style="background:#EEE" | Cemetery gate (1875). | Quay-side building (1876). | Fountain in Plaça Catalunya (1877). | University assembly hall (1877). |}

Antoni Gaudí started his professional career while still pursuing his university studies. To pay for his studies, he worked as a draughtsman for some of the most outstanding architects in Barcelona at the time, such as Joan Martorell, Josep Fontserè, Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano, Leandre Serrallach and Emili Sala Cortés. Gaudí had a long-standing relationship with Josep Fontserè, since his family was also from Riudoms and they had known each other for some time. Despite not having a degree in architecture, Fontserè received the commission from the city council of Barcelona for the Parc de la Ciutadella development, carried out between 1873 and 1882. In this project, Gaudí was in charge of the design of the entrance gate of the park, the balustrade of the band-stand and the water project for the monumental fountain, where he designed an artificial cave that already shows his liking for nature and the organic touch he would give his architecture.

Gaudí worked for Francisco de Paula del Villar on the apse of the Montserrat monastery, designing the niche for the image of the Black Virgin of Montserrat in 1876. Later on, he would substitute Villar in the works of the Sagrada Família. With Leandre Serrallach, he worked on a project for a tram line to Villa Arcadia in Montjuïc. Eventually, he collaborated with Joan Martorell working on the Jesuit church on Carrer Casp and the Salesian convent in Passeig de Sant Joan, as well as the Villaricos church (Almería). He also carried out a project for Martorell for the competition for a new façade for Barcelona cathedral, which was eventually not approved. His relationship with Martorell, whom he always considered one of his main and most influential masters, brought him unexpected luck; it was Martorell that recommended Gaudí for the Sagrada Família.

After his graduation as an architect in 1878, Gaudí's first works were a set of lampposts for the Plaça Reial, the project for the Girossi newsstands and the Mataró cooperative, which was his first important work. He received the request for the set of lampposts from the city council of Barcelona in February 1878, when he had graduated but not yet received his degree, which was sent from Madrid on 15 March of the same year. For this commission he designed two different types of lampposts: one with six arms, of which two were installed in the Plaça Reial, and another with three, of which two were installed in the Pla del Palau, opposite the Civil Government. The lampposts were inaugurated during the Mercè festivities in 1879. Made of cast iron with a marble base, they have a decoration in which the caduceus of Mercury is prominent, symbol of commerce and emblem of Barcelona.

The project of the Girossi newsstands, which was never carried out, was a commission from the tradesman Enrique Girossi de Sanctis. It would have consisted of 20 newsstands, spread out throughout Barcelona. Each of them would have included a public lavatory, a flower stand and glass panels for advertisements as well as a clock, a calendar, a barometer and a thermometer. Gaudí conceived a structure with iron pillars and marble and glass slabs, crowned by a large iron and glass roof, with a gas illumination system.

The Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense (Mataró Workers' Cooperative) was Gaudí’s first big project, on which he worked from 1878 to 1882, for Salvador Pagès i Anglada. The project, for the cooperative’s head office in Mataró, comprised a factory, a housing estate for the workers, a social centre and a services building, though only the factory and the services building were completed. In the factory roof Gaudí used the catenary arch for the first time, with a bolt assembly system devised by Philibert de l'Orme. He also used ceramic tile decoration for the first time in the services building. Gaudí laid out the site taking account of solar orientation, another signature of his works, and included landscaped areas in the project. He even designed the Cooperative’s banner, with the figure of a bee, symbol of industriousness.

In May 1878 Gaudí designed a display cabinet for the Esteban Comella glove factory, which was exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition that year. It was this work that attracted the attention of the entrepreneur Eusebi Güell, visiting the French capital; he was so impressed that he wanted to meet Gaudí on his return, beginning a long friendship and professional collaboration, Güell being Gaudí’s main patron and sponsor of many of his large projects.

The first task that Güell gave to Gaudí, that same year, was the design of the furniture for the pantheon chapel of the Palacio de Sobrellano in Comillas, which was then being constructed by Joan Martorell, Gaudí’s teacher, at the request of the Marquis of Comillas, Güell’s father in law. Gaudí designed a chair, a bench and a prayer stool: the chair was upholstered with velvet, finished with two eagles and the Marquis’ coat of arms; the bench stands out with the motif of a dragon, designed by Llorenç Matamala; the prayer stool is decorated with plants.

Also in 1878 he drew up the plans for a theatre in the former town of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles (now a district of Barcelona); Gaudí did not take part in the subsequent construction of the theatre, which no longer exists. The following year he designed the furniture and counter for the Gibert Pharmacy, with marquetry of Arab influence. The same year he made five drawings for a procession in honour of the poet Francesc Vicent Garcia i Torres in Vallfogona de Riucorb, where which this celebrated 17th-century writer and friend of Lope de Vega was the parish priest . Gaudí’s project was centred on the poet and on several aspects of agricultural work, such as reaping and harvesting grapes and olives; however, as a result of organisational problems Gaudí’s ideas were not carried out.

Between 1879 and 1881 he drew up a project for the decoration of the church of Sant Pacià, belonging to the Colegio de Jesús-María in Sant Andreu del Palomar: he created the altar in a Gothic style, the monstrance with Byzantine influence, the mosaics and the lighting, as well as the school’s furniture. The church caught fire during the Tragic Week of 1909, and now only the mosaics remain, of “opus tesselatum”, probably the work of the Italian mosaicist Luigi Pellerin. He was given the task of decorating the church of the Colegio de Jesús-María in Tarragona (1880–1882): he created the altar in white Italian marble, and its front part, or antependium, with four columns bearing medallions of polychrome alabaster, with figures of angels; the ostensory with gilt wood, the work of Eudald Puntí, decorated with rosaries, angels, tetramorph symbols and the dove of the Holy Ghost; and the choir stalls, which were destroyed in 1936.

In 1880 he designed an electric lighting project for Barcelona’s Muralla de Mar, or sea wall, which finally was not carried out. It consisted of eight large iron street lamps, profusely decorated with plant motifs, friezes, shields and names of battles and Catalan admirals. The same year he participated in the competition for the construction of the San Sebastián social centre (now town hall), won by Luis Aladrén Mendivi and Adolfo Morales de los Ríos; Gaudí submitted a project that was a synthesis of several of his earlier studies, such as the fountain for the Plaça Catalunya and the courtyard of the Provincial Council.

A new task of the Güell-López’s for Comillas was the gazebo for Alfonso XII’s visit to the Cantabrian town in 1881. Gaudí designed a small pavilion in the shape of a Hindu turban, covered in mosaics and decorated with an abundance of small bells which jingled constantly. It was subsequently moved into the Güell Pavilions.

In 1882 he designed a Benedictine monastery and a church dedicated to the Holy Spirit in Villaricos (Cuevas de Vera, Almeria) for his former teacher, Joan Martorell. It was of neo-Gothic design, similar to the Convent of the Salesians that Gaudí also planned with Martorell. Ultimately it was not carried out, and the project plans were destroyed in the looting of the Sagrada Família in 1936. The same year he was tasked with constructing a hunting lodge and wine cellars at a country residence known as La Cuadra, in Garraf (Sitges), property of baron Eusebi Güell. Ultimately the lodge was not built, only the wine cellars some years later. With Martorell he also collaborated in three other projects: the church of the Jesuit School in Carrer Caspe; the Convent of the Salesians in Passeig de Sant Joan, a neo-Gothic project with an altar in the centre of the crossing; and the façade project for Barcelona cathedral, for the competition convened by the cathedral chapter in 1882, ultimately won by Josep Oriol Mestres and August Font i Carreras.

Gaudí’s collaboration with Martorell was a determining factor in Gaudí’s recommendation for the Sagrada Família. The church was the idea of Josep Maria Bocabella, founder of the Devotees of Saint Joseph Association, which acquired a complete block of Barcelona’s Eixample district. The project was originally entrusted to Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano, who planned the construction of a neo-Gothic church, on which work began in 1882. However, the following year Villar resigned due to disagreements with the construction board, and the task went to Gaudí, who completely redesigned the project, apart from the part of the crypt that had already been built. Gaudí devoted the rest of his life to the construction of the church, which was to be the synthesis of all of his architectural discoveries.

Orientalist period

During these years Gaudí completed a series of works with a distinctly oriental flavour, inspired by the art of the Middle and Far East (India, Persia, Japan), as well as Islamic-Hispanic art, mainly Mudejar and Nazari. Gaudí used ceramic tile decoration abundantly, as well as Moorish arches, columns of exposed brick and pinnacles in the shape of pavilions or domes.

Between 1883 and 1888 he constructed the Casa Vicens, commissioned by stockbroker Manuel Vicens i Montaner. It was constructed with four floors, with façades on three sides and an extensive garden, with a monumental brick fountain. The house was surrounded by a wall with iron gates, decorated with palmetto leaves, work of Llorenç Matamala. The walls of the house are of stone alternated with lines of tile, which imitate yellow flowers typical of this area; the house is topped with chimneys and turrets. In the interior the polychrome wooden roof beams stand out, adorned with floral themes of papier maché; the walls are decorated with vegetable motifs, as well as paintings by Josep Torrescasana; finally, the floor consists of Roman-style mosaics of "opus tesselatum". One of the most original rooms is the smoking room, notable the ceiling, decorated with Moorish honeycomb-work, reminiscent of the Generalife in the Alhambra in Granada.

In the same year, 1883, Gaudí designed the Santísimo Sacramento chapel for the parish church of San Félix de Alella, as well as some topographical plans for the Can Rosell de la Llena country residence in Gelida. He also received a commission to build a small annex to the Palacio de Sobrellano, for the Baron of Comillas, in the Cantabrian town of the same name. Known as El Capricho, it was commissioned by Máximo Díaz de Quijano and constructed between 1883 and 1885. Cristòfor Cascante i Colom, Gaudí’s fellow student, directed the construction. In an oriental style, it has an elongated shape, on three levels and a cylindrical tower in the shape of a Persian minaret, faced completely in ceramics. The entrance is set behind four columns supporting depressed arches, with capitals decorated with birds and leaves, similar to those that can be seen at the Casa Vicens. Notable are the main lounge, with its large sash window, and the smoking room with a ceiling consisting of a false Arab-style stucco vault.

Gaudí carried out a second commission from Eusebi Güell between 1884 and 1887, the Güell Pavilions in Pedralbes, now on the outskirts of Barcelona. Güell had a country residence in Les Corts de Sarrià, consisting of two adjacent properties known as Can Feliu and Can Cuyàs de la Riera. The architect Joan Martorell had built a Caribbean-style mansion, which was demolished in 1919 to make way for the Royal Palace of Pedralbes. Gaudí undertook the task of refurbishing the house and constructing a wall and porter's lodge. He completed the stone wall with several entrances, the main entrance with an iron gate in the shape of a dragon, with a symbology allusive to the myths of Hercules and the Garden of the Hesperides. The buildings consist of a stable, covered longeing ring and porter's lodge: the stable has a rectangular base and catenary arches; the longeing ring has a square base with a hyperboloid dome; the porter's lodge consists of three small buildings, the central one being polygonal with a hyperbolic dome, and the other two smaller and cubic. All three are topped by ventilators in the shape of chimneys faced with ceramics. The walls are of exposed brick in various shades of reds and yellows; in certain sections prefabricated cement blocks are also used. The Pavilions are now the headquarters of the Real Cátedra Gaudí, of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

In 1885 Gaudí accepted a commission from Josep Maria Bocabella, promotor of the Sagrada Família, for an altar in the oratory of the Bocabella family, who had obtained permission from the Pope to have an altar in their home. The altar is made of varnished mahogany, with a slab of white marble in the centre for relics. It is decorated with plants and religious motifs, such as the Greek letters alpha and omega, symbol of the beginning and end, gospel phrases and images of Saint Francis of Paola, Saint Teresa of Avila and the Holy Family and closed with a curtain of crimson embroidery. It was made by the cabinet maker Frederic Labòria, who also collaborated with Gaudí on the Sagrada Família.

Shortly after, Gaudí received an important new commission from Güell: the construction of his family house, in the Carrer Nou de la Rambla in Barcelona. The Palau Güell (1886–1888) continues the tradition of large Catalan urban mansions such as those in Carrer Montcada. Gaudí designed a monumental entrance with a magnificent parabolic-arched entrance and iron gates, decorated with the Catalan coat of arms and a helmet with a winged dragon, the work of Joan Oñós. A notable feature is the triple-height entrance hall; it is the core of the building, surrounded by the main rooms of the palace, and it is remarkable for its double dome, parabolic within and conical on the outside, a solution typical of Byzantine art. For the gallery on the street facade Gaudí used an original system of catenary arches and columns with hyperbolic capitals, a style he used neither before nor afterwards. He designed the interior of the palace with great care, with a sumptuous Mudejar-style decoration, where the wood and iron coffered ceilings stand out. The chimneys on the roof are a highly remarkable feature, faced in vividly-coloured ceramic tiles, as is the tall spire in the form of a lantern tower, which is the external termination of the dome within, and is also faced with ceramic tiles and topped with an iron weather vane.

On the occasion of the World Expo held in Barcelona in 1888, Gaudí constructed the pavilion for the Compañía Trasatlántica, property of the Marquis of Comillas, in the Maritime Section of the event. He created it in a Granadinian Nazari style, with horseshoe arches and stucco decoration; the building survived until the Passeig Marítim was opened up in 1960. In the wake of the event he received a commission from Barcelona Council to restore the Saló de Cent and the grand stairs in Barcelona City Hall, as well as a chair for the queen Maria Cristina; only the chair was made, and Mayor Francesc Rius i Taulet presented it to the Queen.

Neo-Gothic period

During this period Gaudí was inspired above all by medieval Gothic art, but wanted to improve on its structural solutions. Neo-gothic was one of the most successful historicist styles at that time, above all as a result of the theoretical studies of Viollet-le-Duc. Gaudí studied examples in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Roussillon in depth, as well as Leonese and Castillian buildings during his stays in León and Burgos, and became convinced that it was an imperfect style, leaving major structural issues only partly resolved. In his works he eliminated the need of buttresses through the use of ruled surfaces, and abolishing crenelations and excessive openwork.

The first example was the Colegio de las Teresianas (1888–1889), in Barcelona’s Carrer Ganduxer, commissioned by San Enrique de Ossó. Gaudí fulfilled the wish of the order that the building should be austere, in keeping with their vows of poverty. He designed a simple building, using bricks for the exterior and some brick elements for the interior. Wrought ironwork, one of Gaudí's favourite materials,is also used on the facades, the building is crowned by a row of merlons which suggest a castle, a possible reference to Saint Teresa’s ''Interior Castle''. On the corners are brick pinnacles topped by helicoidal columns and culminating in a four-armed cross, typical of Gaudí’s works, and with ceramic shields bearing various symbols of the order. In the interior there is a corridor which is famous for the series of catenary arches that it contains. These elegant arches are not merely decorative, but are there to support the ceiling and the floor above. For Gaudí, the parabolic arch was an ideal constructional element, capable of supporting great loads with slender masonry .

Gaudí received his next commission from a clergyman who had been a boyhood friend in his native Reus. When he was appointed bishop of Astorga, Joan Baptista Grau i Vallespinós asked Gaudí to design a new episcopal palace for the city, as the previous building had caught fire. Constructed between 1889 and 1915, in a neo-Gothic style with four cylindrical towers, it was surrounded by a moat. The stone with which it was built (grey granite from the El Bierzo area) is in harmony with its surroundings, particularly with the cathedral in its immediate vicinity, as well as with the natural landscape, which in late 19th-century Astorga was more visible than it is today. The porch has three large flared arches, built of ashlar and separated by sloping buttresses. The structure of the building is supported by columns with decorated capitals and by ribbed vaults on pointed arches, and topped with Mudejar-style merlons. Gaudí resigned from the project in 1893, at the death of Bishop Grau, due to disagreements with the Chapter, and it was finished in 1915 by Ricardo García Guereta. It currently houses a museum about the Way of Saint James, which passes through Astorga

Another of Gaudí’s projects outside of Catalonia was the Casa de los Botines, in León(1891–1894), commissioned by Simón Fernández Fernández and Mariano Andrés Luna, textile merchants from Leon, who were recommended Gaudí by Eusebi Güell, with whom they did business. Gaudí’s project was an impressive neo-Gothic style building, which bears his unmistakable ''modernista'' imprint. The building was used to accommodate offices and textile shops on the lower floors, as well as apartments on the upper floors. It was constructed with walls of solid limestone. The building is flanked by four cylindrical turrets surmounted by slate spires, and surrounded by an area with an iron grille. The Gothic facade style, with its cusped arches, has a clock and a sculpture of Saint George and the Dragon, the work of Llorenç Matamala. It is now the headquarters of the Caja España.

In 1892 Gaudí was commissioned by Claudio López Bru, second Marquis of Comillas, with the Franciscana Catholic Missions for the city of Tangier, in Morocco (at the time a Spanish colony). The project included a church, hospital and school, and Gaudí conceived a quadrilobulate ground-plan floor structure, with catenary arches, parabolic towers, and hyperboloid windows. Ultimately the project was not carried out, something Gaudí deeply regretted, always keeping his design with him. In spite of this, the project influenced the works of the Sagrada Família, in particular the design of the towers, with their paraboloid shape like those of the Missions.

In 1895 he designed a funerary chapel for the Güell family at the abbey of Montserrat, but little is known about this work, which was never built. That year, construction finally began on the Bodegas Güell, the 1882 project for a hunting lodge and some wineries at La Cuadra de Garraf (Sitges), property of Eusebi Güell. Constructed between 1895 and 1897 under the direction of Francesc Berenguer, Gaudí’s aide, the wineries have a triangular end facade, a very steep stone roof, a group of chimneys and two bridges that join them to an older building. It has three floors: the bottom one for a garage, an apartment and a chapel with catenary arches, with the altar in the centre. It was completed with a porter’s lodge, notable for the iron gate in the shape of a fishing net.

In the township of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles (now a district of Barcelona), Gaudí was given a commission by the widow of Jaume Figueras to renovate the Torre Bellesguard (1900–1909), former summer palace of King Martin I the Humane. Gaudí designed it in a neo-Gothic style, respecting the former building as much as possible, and tried as always to integrate the architecture into the natural surroundings. This influenced his choice of local slate for the construction. The building's ground-plan measures 15m x 15m, with the corners oriented to the four cardinal points. Constructed in stone and brick, it is taller than it is wide, with a spire topped with the four-armed cross, the Catalan flag and the royal crown. The house has a basement, ground floor, first floor and an attic, with a gable roof.

Naturalist period

During this period Gaudí perfected his personal style, inspired by the organic shapes of nature, putting into practice a whole series of new structural solutions originating from his deep analysis of ruled geometry. To this he added a great creative freedom and an imaginative ornamental style. His works acquired a great richness of structure, with shapes and volumes devoid of rational rigidity or any classic premise.

Commissioned by the company Hijos de Pedro Mártir Calvet, Gaudí built the Casa Calvet (1898–1899), in Barcelona’s Carrer Casp. The façade is built of Montjuïc stone, adorned with wrought iron balconies and topped with two pediments with wrought iron crosses. Another notable feature of the facade is the gallery on the main floor, decorated with plant and mythological motifs. For this project Gaudí used a Baroque style, visible in the use of Solomonic columns, decoration with floral themes and the design of the terraced roof . In 1900 he won the award for the best building of the year from Barcelona City Council.

A virtually unknown work by Gaudí is the Casa Clapés (1899–1900), in Carrer Escorial 125, commissioned by the painter Aleix Clapés, who collaborated on occasion with Gaudí, such as in decorating the Palau Güell and the Casa Milà. It has a ground floor and three apartments, with stuccoed walls and cast-iron balconies. Due to its lack of decoration or original structural solutions its authorship was unknown until 1976, when the architect’s plans signed by Gaudí were discovered. In 1900 he renovated the house of Dr. Pere Santaló, in Carrer Nou de la Rambla 32, a work of equally low importance. Santaló was a friend of Gaudí's, whom he accompanied during his stay in Puigcerdà in 1911.It was he who recommended him to do manual work for his rheumatism.

Also in 1900 he designed two banners: for the Orfeó Feliuà (of Sant Feliu de Codines), made of brass, leather, cork and silk, with ornamental motifs based on the martyrdom of San Félix (a millstone), music (a staff and clef) and the inscription “Orfeó Feliuà”; and Our Lady of Mercy of Reus, for the pilgrimage of the Reus residents of Barcelona, with an image of Isabel Besora, the shepherdess to whom the Virgin appeared in 1592, work of Aleix Clapés and, on the back, a rose and the Catalan flag. In the same year, for the shrine of Our Lady of Mercy in Reus, Gaudí outlined a project for the renovation of the church’s main façade, which ultimately was not undertaken, as the board considered it too expensive. Gaudí took this rejection quite badly, leaving some bitterness towards Reus, possibly the source of his subsequent claim that Riudoms was his place of birth. Between 1900 and 1902 Gaudí worked on the Casa Miralles, commissioned by the industrialist Hermenegild Miralles i Anglès; Gaudí designed only the wall near the gateway, of undulating masonry, with an iron gate topped with the four-armed cross. Subsequently, the house for Señor Miralles was designed by Domènec Sugrañes, associate architect of Gaudí.

Gaudí’s main new project at the beginning of the 20th century was the Parc Güell (1900–1914), commissioned by Eusebi Güell. It was intended to be a residential estate in the style of an English garden city. The project was unsuccessful: of the 60 plots into which the site was divided only one was sold. Despite this, the park entrances and service areas were built, displaying Gaudí’s architectural genius and putting into practice many of his innovative structural solutions, which are emblematic of the organic style that culminates in the Sagrada Família. The Parc Güell is situated in Barcelona’s Càrmel district, a rugged area, with steep slopes that Gaudí negotiated with a system of viaducts integrated into the terrain. The main entrance to the park has a buildings on each side, intended as a porter’s lodge and an office, and the site is surrounded by a stone and glazed-ceramic wall. These entrance buildings are an example of Gaudí at the height of his powers, with Catalan vaults that form a parabolic hyperboloid. Having passed through the gate, there are steps leading to higher levels, decorated with sculpted fountains, notably the dragon fountain, which has become a symbol of the park and one of Gaudí’s most recognised emblems. These steps lead to the Hypostyle Hall, which was to have been the residents’ market, constructed with large Doric columns. Above this chamber is a large plaza in the form of a Greek theatre, with the famous undulating bench covered in broken ceramics ("trencadís"), the work of Josep Maria Jujol. The park’s show home, the work of Francesc Berenguer, was Gaudí’s residence from 1906 to 1926, and currently houses the Casa-Museu Gaudí.

During this period Gaudí contributed to a group project, the Rosary of Montserrat (1900–1916). Located on the way to the Holy Cave of Montserrat, it was a series of groups of sculptures that evoked the mysteries of the Virgin, who tells the rosary. This project involved the best architects and sculptors of the era, and is a curious example of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí designed the First Mystery of Glory, which represents the Holy Sepulcher, with a statue of Christ Risen, the work of Josep Llimona, and the Three Marys sculpted by Dionís Renart. Another monumental project designed by Gaudí for Montserrat was never carried out: it would have included crowning the summit of El Cavall Bernat (one of the mountain peaks) with a viewpoint in the shape of a royal crown, incorporating a 20 m high Catalan coat of arms into the wall.

In 1901 Gaudí decorated the house of Isabel Güell López, Marchioness of Castelldosrius, and daughter of Eusebi Güell. Situated at 19 Carrer Junta de Comerç, the house had been built in 1885 and renovated between 1901 and 1904; it was destroyed by a bomb during the Civil War. The following year Gaudí took part in the decoration of the Bar Torino, property of Flaminio Mezzalana, located at 18 Passeig de Gràcia; Gaudí designed the ornamentation of el Salón Árabe of that establishment, made with varnished Arabian-style cardboard tiles (which no longer exist).

A project of great interest to Gaudí was the restoration of the Cathedral of Santa Maria in Palma de Mallorca (1903–1914), commissioned by the city’s bishop, Pere Campins i Barceló. Gaudí planned a series of works including removing the baroque altarpiece, revealing the bishop's throne, moving the choir-stalls from the centre of the nave and placing them in the presbytery, clearing the way through chapel of the Holy Trinity, placing new pulpits, fitting the cathedral with electrical lighting, uncovering the Gothic windows of the Royal Chapel and filling them with stained glass, placing a large canopy above the main altar and completing the decoration with paintings. This was coordinated by Joan Rubió i Bellver, Gaudí’s assistant. Josep Maria Jujol and the painters Joaquín Torres García, Iu Pascual and Jaume Llongueras were also involved. Gaudí abandoned the project in 1914 due to disagreements with the Cathedral chapter.

One of Gaudí’s largest and most striking works is the Casa Batlló (1904–1906). Commissioned by Josep Batlló i Casanovas to renovate an existing building erected in 1875 by Emili Sala Cortés, Gaudí focused on the façade, the main floor, the patio and the roof, and built a fifth floor for the staff. For this project he was assisted by his aides Domènec Sugrañes, Joan Rubió and Josep Canaleta. The façade is of Montjuïc sandstone cut to create warped ruled surfaces; the columns are bone shaped with vegetable decoration. Gaudí kept the rectangular shape of the old building’s balconies—with iron railings in the shape of masks—giving the rest of the façade an ascending undulating form. He also faced the facade with ceramic fragments of various colours ("trencadís"), which Gaudí obtained from the waste material of the Pelegrí glass works. The interior courtyard is roofed by a skylight supported by an iron structure in the shape of a double T, which rests on a series of catenary aches. The helicoidal chimneys are a notable feature of the roof, topped with conical caps, covered in clear glass in the centre and ceramics at the top, and surmounted by clear glass balls filled with sand of different colours. The façade culminates in catenary vaults covered with two layers of brick and faced with glazed ceramic tiles in the form of scales (in shades of yellow, green and blue), which resemble a dragon’s back; on the left side is a cylindrical turret with anagrams of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and with Gaudi’s four-armed cross.

In 1904, commissioned by the painter Lluís Graner i Arrufí, he designed the decoration of the Sala Mercè, in the Rambla dels Estudis, one of the first cinemas in Barcelona; the theatre imitated a cave, inspired by the Coves del del Drac (Dragon's Caves) in Mallorca. Also for Graner he designed a detached house in the Bonanova district of Barcelona, of which only the foundations and the main gate were built, with three openings: for people, vehicles and birds; the building would have had a structure similar to the Casa Batlló or the porter's lodge of the Parc Güell.

The same year he built a workshop, the Taller Badia, for Josep and Lluís Badia Miarnau, blacksmiths who worked for Gaudí on several of his works, such as the Batlló and Milà houses, the Parc Güell and and the Sagrada Família; located at 278 Carrer Nàpols, it was a simple stone building. Around that time he also designed hexagonal hydraulic floor tiles for the Casa Batlló, they were eventually not used at this location but were used for the Casa Milà; they were a green colour and were decorated with seaweed, shells and starfish. These tiles were subsequently chosen to pave Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia.

Also in 1904 he built the Chalet de Catllaràs, in La Pobla de Lillet, for the Asland cement factory, owned by Eusebi Güell. It has a simple structure though very original, in the shape of a pointed arch, with two semi-circular flights of stairs leading to the top two floors. This building fell into ruin when the cement works closed, and when it was eventually restored its appearance was radically altered, the ingenious original staircase being replaced with a simpler metal one. In the same area he created the Can Artigas Gardens between 1905 and 1907, in an area called Font de la Magnesia, commissioned by the textile merchant Joan Artigas i Alart; men who had worked the Parc Güell were also involved on this project, similar to the famous park in Barcelona.

In 1906 he designed a bridge over the Torrent de Pomeret, between Sarrià and Sant Gervasi. This river flowed directly between two of Gaudí’s works, Bellesguard and the Chalet Graner, and so he was asked to bridge the divide. Gaudí designed an interesting structure composed of juxtapositioned triangles that would support the bridge’s framework, following the style of the viaducts that he made for the Parc Güell. It would have been built with cement, and would have had a length of 154m and a height of 15m; the balustrade would have been covered with glazed tiles, with an inscription dedicated to Santa Eulàlia. The project was not approved by the Town Council of Sarrià.

The same year Gaudí apparently took part in the construction of the Torre Damià Mateu, in Llinars del Vallès, in collaboration with his disciple Francesc Berenguer, though the project’s authorship is not clear or to what extent they each contributed to it. The style of the building evokes Gaudí’s early work, such as the Casa Vicens or the Güell Pavilions; it had an entrance gate in the shape of a fishing net, currently installed in the Parc Güell. The building was demolished in 1939. Also in 1906 he designed a new banner, this time for the Guild of Metalworkers and Blacksmiths for the Corpus Christi procession of 1910, in Barcelona Cathedral. It was dark green in colour, with Barcelona’s coat of arms in the upper left corner, and an image of Saint Eligius, patron of the guild, with typical tools of the trade. The banner was burned in July 1936.

Another of Gaudí’s major projects and one of his most admired works is the Casa Milà, better known as La Pedrera (1906–1910), commissioned by Pere Milà i Camps. Gaudí designed the house around two large curved courtyards, with a structure of stone, brick and cast-iron columns steel beams. The whole façade is built of limestone from Vilafranca del Penedès, apart from the upper level, which is covered in white tiles, evoking a snowy mountain. It has a total of five floors, plus a loft—made entirely of catenary arches—and the roof, as well as two large interior courtyards, one circular and one oval. Notable features are the staircases to the roof, topped with the four-armed cross, and the chimneys, covered in ceramics and with shapes that suggest mediaeval helmets. The interior decoration was carried out by Josep Maria Jujol and the painters Iu Pascual, Xavier Nogués and Aleix Clapés. The façade was to have been completed with a stone, metal and glass sculpture with Our lady of the Rosary accompanied by the archangels Michael and Gabriel, 4m in height. A sketch was made by the sculptor Carles Mani, but due to the events of the Tragic Week in 1909 the project was abandoned.

In 1907, to mark the seventh centenary of the birth of king James I, Gaudí designed a monument in his memory. It would have been situated in the Plaça del Rei, and would have also meant the renovation of the adjacent buildings: new roof for the cathedral, as well as the completion of its towers and cupola; placement of three vases above the buttresses of the Chapel of Santa Àgada, dedicated to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as the figure of an angel on top of the chapel's tower; finally, the opening of a large square next to the walls (now the Plaça Ramon Berenguer el Grand). The project was not executed because the city council disliked it.

In 1908 Gaudí devised a project for a skyscraper hotel in New York, the Hotel Atraction, commissioned by two American entrepreneurs whose names are unknown. It would have been 360m high (taller than the Empire State Building), with a taller parabolic central section, topped with a star, and flanked by four volumes containing museums, art galleries and concert halls, with shapes similar to the Casa Milà. Inside it would have had five large rooms, one dedicated to every continent.

The last project for his great patron Eusebi Güell was the church for the Colònia Güell, an industrial village in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, of which only the crypt was constructed (known today as Crypt of the Colònia Güell) (1908–1918). The project began in 1890, and the factory, service buildings and housing for the workers were constructed. What would have been the colony’s church was designed by Gaudí in 1898, though the first stone was not laid until 4 October 1908. Unfortunately only the crypt was built, as Güell’s sons abandoned the project after his death in 1918. Gaudí designed an oval church with five aisles, one central aisle and two at either side. He conceived it as fully integrated into nature, reflecting his concept of architecture as organic structure. A porch of hyperbolic paraboloid vaults precedes the crypt, the first time that Gaudí used this structure and the first use of paraboloid vaults in the history of architecture. In the crypt the large hyperboloid stained glass windows stand out, with the shapes of flower petals and butterfly wings. Inside, circular brick pillars alternate with slanted basalt columns from Castellfollit de la Roca.

Final period: the culmination of his style

During the last years of his career, dedicated almost exclusively to la Sagrada Família, Gaudí reached the culmination of this naturalistic style, creating a synthesis of all of the solutions and styles he had tried until then. Gaudí achieved perfect harmony between structural and ornamental elements, between plastic and aesthetic, between function and form, between container and content, achieving the integration of all arts in one structured, logical work.

The first example of his final stage can be seen in a simple but very ingenious building, the Sagrada Família schools, a small school for the workers’ children. Built in 1909, it has a rectangular ground plan of 10m x 20m, and contained three classrooms, a vestibule and a chapel. It was built of exposed brick, in three overlapping layers, following the traditional Catalan method. The walls and roof have an undulating shape, giving the structure a sense of lightness but also strength. The Sagrada Família schools have set an example of constructive genius and have served as a source of inspiration for many architects, such is their simplicity, strength, originality, functionality and geometric excellence.

In May 1910 Gaudí paid a short visit to Vic, where he was tasked to design the lampposts for the city’s Plaça Major, in commemoration of the first centenary of the birth of Jaume Balmes. They were obelisk-shaped lamps, with basalt rock bases from Castellfollit de la Roca and wrought iron arms, topped with the four-armed cross; they were decorated with vegetable themes and included the birth and death dates of Balmes. They were demolished in 1924 due to poor maintenance.

The same year, on the occasion of Eusebi Güell's obtaining the title of count, Gaudí designed a coat of arms for his great patron: he devised a shield with the lower part in a catenary shape, typical of Gaudí; he divided it into two parts with the lantern of the Palau Güell, placing a dove with a gear-wheel on the right—an allusion to the Colònia Güell in Santa Coloma de Cervelló (''coloma'' is Catalan for dove), with the words ''ahir pastor'' (yesterday Shepherd), and on the left an owl perched on a half-moon—symbol of prudence and wisdom—with the words ''avuy senyor'' (today Lord). The shield is surmounted by a helmet with the count's coronet and the dove symbol of the Holy Spirit.

In 1912 he built two pulpits for the church of Santa Maria in Blanes: the one on the Gospel side had a hexagonal base, decorated with the dove of the Holy Spirit and the names in Latin of the four evangelists and the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit; the pulpit of the Epistle side had the names of the apostles who wrote epistles (Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint John the Evengelist, Saint Judas Thadeus and Saint James the Great), with the three theological virtues and the flames of Pentecost. These pulpits were burned in July 1936.

From 1915 Gaudí devoted himself almost exclusively to his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família, a synthesis of his architectural evolution. After completion of the crypt and the apse, still in Gothic style, the rest of the church is conceived in an organic style, imitating natural shapes with their abundance of ruled surfaces. The interior is intended to resemble a forest, with inclined columns like branching trees, helicoidal in form, creating a simple but sturdy structure. Gaudí applied all of his previous experimental findings in the Sagrada Família, from works such as the Parc Güell and the crypt of the Colònia Güell, creating a church that is at once structurally perfect, harmonious and aesthetically satisfying.

The Sagrada Família has a cruciform plan, with a five-aisled nave, a transept of three aisles, and an apse with seven chapels. It has three façades dedicated to the birth, passion and glory of Jesus, and when completed it will have eighteen towers: four at each side making a total of twelve for the apostles, four on the transept invoking the evangelists and one on the apse dedicated to the Virgin, plus the central tower in honour of Jesus, which will reach 170m in height. The church will have two sacristies adjacent to the apse, and three large chapels: one for the Assumption in the apse, and the Baptism and Penitence chapels at the west end; also, it will be surrounded by a cloister designed for processions and to isolate the building from the exterior. Gaudí used highly symbolic content in the Sagrada Família, both in architecture and sculpture, dedicating each part of the church to a religious theme. During Gaudí’s life only the crypt, apse and part of the Nativity façade were completed. On this death his assistant took over the construction, Domènec Sugrañes; thereafter it was directed by various architects, with Jordi Bonet i Armengol being responsible from 1987. Artists such as Llorenç and Joan Matamala, Carles Mani, Jaume Busquets, Joaquim Ros i Bofarull, Etsuro Sotoo and Josep Maria Subirachs (creator of the Passion façade) have worked on the sculptural decoration.

During the last years of his life, apart from his devotion to the Sagrada Família, Gaudí participated only in minor projects which were not completed: in 1916, on the death of his friend bishop Josep Torras i Bages, he designed a monument in his honour, which he wanted to place in front of the Passion façade of the Sagrada Família. He made a sketch of the project, which ultimately was not carried out, and made a plaster bust of the bishop, the work of Joan Matamala under the instruction of Gaudí; it was put in the Sagrada Família–it would have formed part of the church–but was destroyed in 1936. Another commemorative monument project, also not carried out, was dedicated to Enric Prat de la Riba, which would have been situated in Castellterçol, birthplace of this Catalan politician. The project dates from 1918, and would have consisted of a tall tower with two porticos and a spire topped with an iron structure flying the Catalan flag. The sketch of the project was done by Lluís Bonet i Garí, Gaudí’s assistant.

In 1922 Gaudí was commissioned, by the Franciscan Padre Angélico Aranda, to construct a church dedicated to the Assumption in Rancagua (Chile). Gaudí apologised and said that he was occupied exclusively with the Sagrada Família, but sent some sketches of the Assumption chapel which he had designed for the apse of the Sagrada Família, which more or less coincided with what Padre Aranda had asked for. Unfortunately this project was not carried out, though there are currently plans to take it up again—by the Chilean architect Christian Matzner—and to finally construct a work designed by Gaudí on the New Continent.

The same year Gaudí was consulted about the construction of a monumental train station for Barcelona (the future Estació de França). Gaudí suggested an iron structure in the form of a large suspended awning, a solution quite ahead of its time; perhaps for this reason, it put the head engineers off, and they declined Gaudí’s offer. The last known projects by the architect are the chapel for the Colónia Calvet in Torelló, of 1923, and a pulpit for Valencia (the exact location is unknown), of 1924. From then on, Gaudí worked exclusively on the Sagrada Família, until the fateful day of the accident which caused his death.

Major works

Work	! Dates	! Location
Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense	1878–1882	Mataró
El Capricho	1883–1885
Casa Vicens	1883–1888
Sagrada Família	1883–1926
Güell Pavilions	1884–1887
Palau Güell	1886–1890
Colegio de las Teresianas	1888–1889
Episcopal Palace, Astorga	Episcopal Palace of Astorga	1889–1915
Casa Botines
Bodegas Güell	1895–1897
Casa Calvet	1898–1900
Bellesguard	1900–1909
Parc Güell	1900–1914
Casa Batlló	1904–1906
Artigas Gardens	1905–1906
Casa Milà	1906–1910
Church of Colònia Güell	1908–1915

World Heritage

Several of Gaudí's works have been granted World Heritage status by UNESCO: in 1984 the Parc Güell, the Palau Güell and the Casa Milà; and in 2005 the Nativity façade, the crypt and the apse of the Sagrada Família, the Casa Vicens and the Casa Batlló in Barcelona, together with the crypt of the Colònia Güell in Santa Coloma de Cervelló.

The declaration of Gaudí's works as World Heritage aims to recognise his outstanding universal value. According to the citation:

The work of Antoni Gaudí represents an exceptional and outstanding creative contribution to the development of architecture and building technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gaudí’s work exhibits an important interchange of values closely associated with the cultural and artistic currents of his time, as represented in el Modernisme [sic] of Catalonia. It anticipated and influenced many of the forms and techniques that were relevant to the development of modern construction in the 20th century.

Gaudí’s work represents a series of outstanding examples of the building typology in the architecture of the early 20th century, residential as well as public, to the development of which he made a significant and creative contribution.

See also

Barcelona

Catalan Modernism

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

Cèsar Martinell – ''Antoni Gaudí'', Barcelona, 1975 (English edition).

Frederike Müller, Lars Wendt: ''The Architect Antoni Gaudí. Myth and Reality'', DVD 70 mins., English subtitles, wendtfilm & Ciné Canard, Germany 2006

Rainer Zerbst – ''Antoni Gaudí'', Taschen, 2002.

External links

Gallery of Gaudi's works

Casa Batlló (multilingual; requires Adobe Flash)

Sagrada Família (multilingual)

La Pedrera (multilingual; requires Adobe Flash)

Other Gaudi works

Gaudi: Designer , ,

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet

Guell Palace Site (multilingual)

Church of Colònia Güell virtual visit (multilingual; requires Adobe Flash)

Gaudí Tours

Gaudí Center Reus

Gaudi and Mallorca's Cathedral

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Category:1852 births Category:1926 deaths Category:Architects of Roman Catholic churches Category:Art Nouveau Category:Art Nouveau architects Category:Burials at the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Barcelona Category:Catalan architects Category:Spanish ecclesiastical architects Category:Modernisme architects Category:19th-century architects Category:20th-century architects Category:Organic architecture Category:People from Reus Category:Spanish architects Category:Spanish Roman Catholics Category:Spanish vegetarians

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name	Philip Glass
background	non_performing_personnel
born	January 31, 1937Baltimore, Maryland, United States
genre	Minimalist, Classical, Contemporary classical, Ambient
occupation	Composer
years active	1956–present
label	Virgin RecordsCBS RecordsNonesuch/Elektra RecordsSony Classical/SME RecordsOrange Mountain Music
notable instruments	Farfisa organ }}

Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American music composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (along with precursors such as Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein).

Although his music is often (controversially) described as ''minimalist'', for his later work he distances himself from this label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called 'minimalist', he has since evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.

Glass is a prolific composer: he has written works for his own musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (with which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, ten concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.

Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close), writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (including Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and many others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Joan LaBarbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, Andrew Shapiro, John Moran, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly). Among recent collaborators are Glass's fellow New Yorker Woody Allen, Stephen T. Colbert, and poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Life and work

:''For a list of works, see List of compositions by Philip Glass''

Beginnings, early education and influences (1937–1964)

Glass is Jewish, and was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Ida (née Gouline) and Benjamin Charles Glass, and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His father owned a record store, and consequently Glass's record collection consisted to a large extent of unsold records, including modern music (such as Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich) and Western classical music (including Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartets and Schubert's B Piano Trio, which he cites as a "big influence"), at a very early age. He then studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago at the age of 15, where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. In Chicago he discovered the serialism of Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio. In 1954 Glass went to Paris for the first time, encountering the films of Jean Cocteau, which made a lasting impression on him. He visited artists' studios and saw their work; "the bohemian life you see in [Cocteau's] Orphée was the life I ... was attracted to, and those were the people I hung out with."

Glass then went on to the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard became his main instrument. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma, while fellow students included Steve Reich. During this time, in 1959, he was a winner in the BMI Foundation's BMI Student Composer Awards, one of the most prestigious international prizes for young composers. In the summer of 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the summer school of the Aspen Music Festival and composed a Violin Concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild. After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber and orchestral music.

Paris (1964–1966)

In 1964, Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Paris, where he studied with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger from autumn of 1964 to summer of 1966. Glass's years in Paris as a student made a lasting impression and influenced his work ever since, as the composer admitted in 1979: "The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart."

Glass later stated in his autobiography ''Music by Philip Glass'' (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's ''Domaine Musical'' concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him (with the notable exceptions of music by John Cage and Morton Feldman), but he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. He encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which ignored the rules set by an older generation of artists., and Glass made friends with American visual artists (the sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves), actors and directors (JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom Glass later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines). Together with Akalaitis (they married in 1965), Glass in turn attended performances by theatre groups including Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, The Living Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble in 1964 to 1965. These significant encounters resulted in a collaboration with Breuer for which Glass contributed music for a 1965 staging of Samuel Beckett's ''Comédie'' (''Play'', 1963). The resulting piece (written for two soprano saxophones) was directly influenced by the play's open-ended, repetitive and almost musical structure and was the first one of a series of four early pieces in a minimalist, yet still dissonant, idiom. After ''Play'', Glass also acted in 1966 as music director of a Breuer production of Brecht's ''Mother Courage and Her Children'', featuring the theatre score by Paul Dessau.

In parallel with his early excursions in experimental theatre, Glass worked in winter 1965 and spring 1966 as a music director and composer on a film score (''Chappaqua'', Conrad Rooks, 1966) with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, which added another important influence on Glass's musical thinking. His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive. He renounced all his compositions in a moderately modern style resembling Milhaud's, Aaron Copland's, and Samuel Barber's, and began writing pieces based on repetitive structures of Indian music and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett: a piece for two actresses and chamber ensemble, a work for chamber ensemble and his first numbered string quartet (No.1, 1966).

Glass then left Paris for northern India in 1966, where he came in contact with Tibetan refugees and began to gravitate towards Buddhism. He met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972, and has been a strong supporter of the Tibetan independence ever since.

Minimalism: From ''Strung Out'' to ''Music in 12 Parts'' (1967–1974)

Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich (including the ground-breaking minimalist piece ''Piano Phase''), which left a deep impression on him; he simplified his style and turned to a radical "consonant vocabulary". Finding little sympathy from traditional performers and performance spaces, Glass eventually formed an ensemble with fellow ex-students Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and others, and began performing mainly in art galleries and studio lofts of SoHo. The visual artist Richard Serra provided Glass with Gallery contacts, while both collaborated on various sculptures, films and installations; from 1971 to 1974 he became Serra's regular studio assistant.

Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including ''Strung Out '' (for amplified solo violin, composed in summer of 1967), Gradus (for solo saxophone, 1968), ''Music in the Shape of a Square'' (for two flutes, composed in May 1968, an homage to Erik Satie), ''How Now '' (for solo piano, 1968) and ''1+1'' (for amplified tabletop, November 1968) which were "clearly designed to experiment more fully with his new-found minimalist approach". The first concert of Philip Glass's new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque (Anthology Film Archives) in September 1968. This concert included the first work of this series with ''Strung Out'' (performed by the violinist Pixley-Rothschild) and ''Music in the Shape of a Square'' (performed by Glass and Gibson). The musical scores were tacked on the wall, and the performers had to move while playing. Glass's new works met with a very enthusiastic response by the audience which consisted mainly of visual and performance artists who were highly sympathetic to Glass's reductive approach.

Apart from his music career, Glass had a moving company with his cousin, the sculptor Jene Highstein, and worked as a plumber and cab driver (in 1973 to 1978). During this time he made friends with other New York based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, and Chuck Close, who created a now famous portrait of Glass. (Glass returned the favour in 2005 with ''A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close'' for piano.)

With ''1+1'' and ''Two Pages'' (composed in February 1969) Glass turned to a more "rigorous approach" to his "most basic minimalist technique, additive process", pieces which were followed in the same year by ''Music in Contrary Motion'' and ''Music in Fifths'' (a kind of homage to his composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who pointed out "hidden fifths" in his works but regarded them as cardinal sins). Eventually Glass's music grew less austere, becoming more complex and dramatic, with pieces such as ''Music in Similar Motion'' (1969), and ''Music with Changing Parts'' (1970). These pieces were performed by The Philip Glass Ensemble in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, often encountering hostile reaction from critics,; but Glass's music was also met with enthusiasm from younger artists such as Brian Eno and David Bowie (at the Royal College of Art ca. 1970). Eno described this encounter with Glass's music as one of the "most extraordinary musical experiences of [his] life", as a "viscous bath of pure, thick energy", concluding "this was actually the most detailed music I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy, exotic harmonics". In 1970 Glass returned to the theatre, composing music for the theatre group Mabou Mines, resulting in his first minimalist pieces employing voices: ''Red Horse Animation'' and ''Music for Voices'' (both 1970, and premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery).

After differences of opinion with Steve Reich in 1971, Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble (while Reich formed Steve Reich and Musicians), an amplified ensemble including keyboards, wind instruments (saxophones, flutes), and soprano voices.

Glass's music for his ensemble culminated in the four-hour-long ''Music in Twelve Parts'' (1971–1974), which began as a single piece with twelve instrumental parts but developed into a cycle that summed up Glass's musical achievement since 1967, and even transcended it – the last part features a twelve-tone theme, sung by the soprano voice of the ensemble. "I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules", according to Glass. Though he finds the term minimalist inaccurate to describe his later work, Glass does accept this term for pieces up to and including ''Music in 12 Parts'', excepting this last part which "was the end of minimalism" for Glass. As he pointed out: "I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end."

Another Look at Harmony: The Portrait Trilogy (1975–1979)

Glass continued his work with a series of instrumental works, called '' Another Look at Harmony '' (1975–1977). For Glass this series demonstrated a new start, hence the title: "What I was looking for was a way of combining harmonic progression with the rhythmic structure I had been developing, to produce a new overall structure. (...) I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put in—a process that would occupy me for several years to come." Parts 1 and 2 of "Another Look at Harmony" were included in a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a piece of musical theater that was later designated by Glass as the first opera of his portrait opera trilogy: ''Einstein on the Beach''. Composed in Spring to Fall of 1975 in close collaboration with Wilson, Glass's first opera was first premiered in summer 1976 at the Festival d'Avignon, and in November of the same year to a mixed and partly enthusiastic reaction from the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Scored for the Philip Glass Ensemble, solo violin, chorus, and featuring actors (reciting texts by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson), Glass's and Wilson's essentially plotless opera was conceived as a "metaphorical look at Albert Einstein: scientist, humanist, amateur musician—and the man whose theories (...) led to the splitting of the atom", evoking nuclear holocaust in the climactic scene, as critic Tim Page pointed out. As with ''Another Look at Harmony'', "''Einstein'' added a new functional harmony that set it apart from the early conceptual works". Composer Tom Johnson came to the same conclusion, comparing the solo violin music to Johann Sebastian Bach, and the "organ figures (...) to those Alberti basses Mozart loved so much". The piece was praised by the Washington Post as "one of the seminal artworks of the century."

''Einstein on the Beach'' was followed by further music for projects by the theatre group Mabou Mines such as ''Dressed like an Egg'' (1975), and again music for plays and adaptations from prose by Samuel Beckett, such as ''The Lost Ones'' (1975), ''Cascando'' (1975), ''Mercier and Camier'' (1979). Glass also turned to other media; two multi-movement instrumental works for the Philip Glass Ensemble originated as music for film and TV: ''North Star'' (1977 for the Documentary "Mark di Suvero, sculptor" by Francois de Menil and Barbara Rose) and four short cues for Jim Henson's TV-series for children, ''Sesame Street'', named ''Geometry of Circles'' (1977).

Another series, ''Fourth Series'' (1977–79), included music for chorus and organ ("Part One", 1977), organ and piano ("Part Two" and "Part Four", 1979), and music for a radio adaption of Constance DeJong's novel ''Modern Love'' ("Part Three", 1978). Part Two and Part Four were used (and hence renamed) in two dance productions by choreographer Lucinda Childs (who had already contributed to and performed in ''Einstein on the Beach''). "Part Two" was included in ''Dance'' (a collaboration with visual artist Sol LeWitt, 1979), and "Part Four" was renamed as ''Mad Rush'', and performed by Glass on several occasions such as the first public appearance of the 14th Dalai Lama in New York City in Fall 1981. The piece demonstrates Glass's turn to more traditional models: the composer added a conclusion to an open-structured piece which "can be interpreted as a sign that he [had] abandoned the radical non-narrative, undramatic approaches of his early period", as the pianist Steffen Schleiermacher points out.

In Spring 1978, Glass received a commission from the Netherlands Opera (as well as a Rockefeller Foundation grant) which "marked the end of his need to earn money from non-musical employment." With the commission Glass continued his work in music theater, composing his opera ''Satyagraha'' (composed in 1978–1979, premiered in 1980 at Rotterdam), based on the early life of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.. For ''Satyagraha '', Glass worked in close collaboration with two "SoHo friends": the writer Constance deJong, who provided the libretto, and the set designer Robert Israel. This piece was in other ways a turning point for Glass, as it was his first work since 1963 scored for symphony orchestra, even if the most prominent parts were still reserved for solo voices and chorus. Shortly after completing the score in August 1979, Glass met the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who he helped prepare for performances in Germany (using a piano-four-hands version of the score); together they started to plan another opera, to be premiered at the Stuttgart State Opera.

Completing the Portrait Trilogy: Akhnaten and beyond (1980–1986)

While planning a third part of his "Portrait Trilogy", Glass turned to smaller music theatre projects such as the non-narrative ''Madrigal Opera'' (for six voices and violin and viola, 1980), and ''The Photographer'', a biographic study on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1982). Glass also continued to write for the orchestra with his most famous film score to date, ''Koyaanisqatsi'' (Godfrey Reggio, 1981–1982). Some pieces which were not used in the film (such as ''Facades'') eventually appeared on the album ''Glassworks'' (1982, CBS Records), which brought Glass's music to a wider public.

The "Portrait Trilogy" was completed with ''Akhnaten'' (1982–1983, premiered in 1984), a vocal and orchestral composition sung in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Ancient Egyptian. In addition, this opera featured an actor reciting ancient Egyptian texts in the language of the audience. ''Akhnaten'' was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera in a production designed by Achim Freyer. It premiered simultaneously at the Houston Opera in a production directed by David Freeman and designed by Peter Sellars. At the time of the commission, the Stuttgart Opera House was undergoing renovation, necessitating the use of a nearby playhouse with a smaller orchestra pit. Upon learning this, Glass and conductor Dennis Russell Davies visited the playhouse, placing music stands around the pit to determine how many players the pit could accommodate. The two found that they could not fit a full orchestra in the pit. Glass decided to eliminate the violins, which had the effect of "giving the orchestra a low, dark sound that came to characterize the piece and suited the subject very well." As Glass remarked in 1992, ''Akhnaten'' is significant in his work since it represents a "first extension out of a triadic harmonic language", an experiment with the polytonality of his teachers Persichetti and Milhaud, a musical technique which Glass compares to "an optical illusion, such as in the paintings of Josef Albers".

Glass again collaborated with Robert Wilson on another opera, ''the CIVIL warS'' (1983, premiered in 1984), which also functioned as the final part ("the Rome section) of Wilson's epic work by the same name, originally planned for an "international arts festival that would accompany the Olympic Games in Los Angeles". (Glass also composed a highly prestigious work for chorus and orchestra for the opening of the Games, ''The Olympian: Lighting of the Torch and Closing ''). The premiere of ''The CIVIL warS'' in Los Angeles never materialized and the opera was in the end premiered at the Opera of Rome. Glass's and Wilson's opera includes musical settings of Latin texts by the 1st-century-Roman playwright Seneca and allusions to the music of Giuseppe Verdi and from the American Civil War, featuring the 19th century figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Lee as characters.

In the mid-1980s, Glass produced "works in different media at an extraordinarily rapid pace". Projects from that period include music for dance (''Dance Pieces'', Jerome Robbins, 1983, and ''In the Upper Room'', Twyla Tharp, 1986), and music for theatre productions ''Endgame'' (1984), and ''Company'' (1983). Beckett vehemently disapproved of the production of ''Endgame'' at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), which featured Joanne Akalaitis's direction and Glass's ''Prelude'' for timpani and double bass, but in the end, he authorized the music for ''Company'', four short, intimate pieces for string quartet that were played in the intervals of the dramatization. This composition was initially regarded by the composer as a piece of Gebrauchsmusik ('music for use')—"like salt and pepper (...) just something for the table”, as he noted. Eventually ''Company'' was published as Glass's String Quartet No.2 and in a version for string orchestra, being performed by ensembles ranging from student orchestras to renowned ones such as the Kronos Quartet and the Kremerata Baltica.

This interest in writing for the string quartet and the string orchestra led to a chamber and orchestral film score for ''Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters'' (Paul Schrader, 1984–85), which Glass recently described as his "musical turning point" that developed his "technique of film scoring in a very special way".

Glass also dedicated himself to vocal works with two sets of songs, ''Three Songs for chorus'' (1984, settings of poems by Leonard Cohen, Octavio Paz and Raymond Levesque), and a song cycle initiated by CBS Masterworks Records: ''Songs from Liquid Days'' (1985), with texts by songwriters such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, in which the Kronos Quartet is featured (as it is in ''Mishima'') in a prominent role. Glass also continued his series of operas with adaptations from literary texts such as ''The Juniper Tree'' (an opera collaboration with composer Robert Moran, 1984), Edgar Allan Poe's ''The Fall of the House of Usher'' (1987), and also worked with novelist Doris Lessing on the opera ''The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8'' (1985–86, and performed by the Houston Grand Opera and English National Opera in 1988).

Operas and the turn to symphonic music (1987–1991)

Compositions such as ''Company'', ''Facades'' and String Quartet No.3 (the last two extracted from the scores to ''Koyaanisqatsi'' and ''Mishima'') gave way to a series of works more accessible to ensembles such as the string quartet and symphony orchestra, in this returning to the structural roots of his student days. In taking this direction his chamber and orchestral works were also written in a more and more traditional and lyrical style. In these works, Glass often employs old musical forms such as the chaconne and the passacaglia – for instance in ''Satyagraha'', the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987), Symphony No. 3 (1995), ''Echorus'' (1995) and also recent works such as Symphony No. 8 (2005), and ''Songs and Poems for Solo Cello'' (2006).

A series of orchestral works that were originally composed for the concert hall commenced with the 3-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987). This work was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and written for and in close collaboration with the violinist Paul Zukofsky and the conductor Dennis Russel Davies, who since then has encouraged the composer to write numerous orchestral pieces. The Concerto is dedicated to the memory of Glass's father: "His favorite form was the violin concerto, and so I grew up listening to the Mendelssohn, the Paganini, the Brahms concertos. (...) So when I decided to write a violin concerto, I wanted to write one that my father would have liked." Among its multiple recordings, in 1992, the Concerto was performed and recorded by Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This turn to orchestral music was continued with a symphonic trilogy of "portraits of nature", commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: ''The Light'' (1987), ''The Canyon'' (1988), and ''Itaipu'' (1989).

While composing for symphonic ensembles, Glass also composed music for piano, with the cycle of five movements titled ''Metamorphosis'' (adapted from music for a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's ''The Metamorphosis'', and for the Errol Morris film ''The Thin Blue Line'', 1988]). In the same year Glass met the poet Allen Ginsberg by chance in a book store in the East Village of New York City, and they immediately "decided on the spot to do something together, reached for one of Allen's books and chose ''Wichita Vortex Sutra''", a piece for reciter and piano which in turn developed into a music theatre piece for singers and ensemble, ''Hydrogen Jukebox'' (1990).

Glass also turned to chamber music; he composed two String Quartets (No.4 and No.5, for the Kronos Quartet, 1989 and 1991), and chamber works which originated as incidental music for plays, such as ''Music from "The Screens"'' (1989/1990). This work originated in one of many theater music collaborations with the director Joanne Akalaitis, who originally asked the Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso "to do the score [for Jean Genet's "The Screens"] in collaboration with a western composer". Glass had already collaborated with Suso in the film score to Powaqqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1986). ''Music from "The Screens"'' is on occasion a touring piece for Glass and Suso, and individual pieces found its way to the repertoire of Glass and the cellist Wendy Sutter. Another collaboration was a collaborative recording project with Ravi Shankar, initiated by Peter Baumann (a member of the band Tangerine Dream), which resulted in the album ''Passages'' (1990).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Glass's projects also included two highly prestigious opera commissions, based on the life of two explorers, Christopher Columbus (''The Voyage'' [1990], commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang), and Vasco da Gama (''White Raven'') [1991], a collaboration with Robert Wilson and composed for the opening of the Expo '98). Especially in ''The Voyage'', the composer "explore[d] new territory", with its "newly arching lyricism", "Sibelian starkness and sweep", and "dark, brooding tone (...) a reflection of its increasingly chromatic (and dissonant) palette", as one commentator put it.

The Cocteau Trilogy and Symphonies (1991–1996)

After these operas, Glass began working on a symphonic cycle, commissioned by the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who told Glass at the time: "I'm not going to let you (...) be one of those opera composers who never write a symphony". Glass responded with two 3-movement symphonies (''"Low"'' [1992]), and Symphony No.2 [1994]); his first in an ongoing series of symphonies is a combination of the composer's own musical material with themes featured in prominent tracks of the David Bowie/ Brian Eno album ''Low'' (1977), whereas Symphony No.2 is described by Glass as a study in polytonality. He referred to the music of Honegger, Milhaud, and Villa-Lobos as possible models for his symphony. With the Concerto Grosso (1992), Symphony No. 3 (1995), a Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra (1995) (all commissioned by conductor Dennis Russel Davies), and ''Echorus'' (1994/95), a more transparent, refined, and intimate chamber-orchestral style paralleled the excursions of his large-scale symphonic pieces. In the four movements of his Third Symphony, Glass treats a 19-piece string orchestra as an extended chamber ensemble. In the third movement, Glass re-uses the chaconne as a formal device; one commentator characterized Glass's symphony as one of the composer's "most tautly unified works" The third Symphony was closely followed by a fourth, subtitled ''Heroes'' (1996), commissioned the American Composers Orchestra. Its six movements are symphonic reworkings of themes by Glass, David Bowie, and Brian Eno (from their album ''"Heroes"'', 1977); as in other works by the composer, it is also a hybrid work and exists in two versions: one for the concert hall, and another, shorter one for dance , choreographed by Twyla Tharp. Another commission by Dennis Russell Davies was a second series for piano, the ''Etudes'' for Piano (dedicated to Davies as well as the production designer Achim Freyer); the complete first set of ten Etudes has been recorded and performed by Glass himself. Bruce Brubaker and Dennis Russell Davies have each recorded the original set of six. Most of the Etudes are composed in the post-minimalist and increasingly lyrical style of the times: "Within the framework of a concise form, Glass explores possible sonorities ranging from typically Baroque passagework to Romantically tinged moods". Some of the pieces also appeared in different versions such as in the theatre music to Robert Wilson's ''Persephone'' (1994, commissioned by the Relache Ensemble) or ''Echorus'' (a version of Etude No.2 for two violins and string orchestra, written for Edna Mitchell and Yehudi Menuhin 1995).

Glass's prolific output in the 1990s continued to include operas with an opera triptych (1991–1996), which the composer described as an "homage" to writer and film director Jean Cocteau, based on his prose and cinematic work: ''Orphée'' (1949), ''La Belle et la Bête'' (1946), and the novel ''Les Enfants Terribles'' (1929, later made into a film by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950). In the same way the triptych is also a musical homage to the work of the group of French composers associated with Cocteau, Les Six (and especially to Glass's teacher Darius Milhaud), as well as to various 18th century composers such as Gluck and Bach whose music featured as an essential part of the films by Cocteau.

The inspiration of the first part of the trilogy, ''Orphée'' (composed in 1991, and premiered in 1993 at the American Repertory Theatre) can be conceptually and musically traced to Gluck's opera ''Orfeo ed Euridice'' (''Orphée et Euridyce'', 1762/1774), which had a prominent part in Cocteau's 1949 film ''Orphee''. One theme of the opera, the death of Eurydice, has some similarity to the composer's personal life: the opera was composed after the unexpected death in 1991 of Glass's wife, artist Candy Jernigan: "(...) One can only suspect that Orpheus' grief must have resembled the composer's own", K. Robert Schwartz suggests. The opera's "transparency of texture, a subtlety of instrumental color, (...) a newly expressive and unfettered vocal writing" was praised, and ''The Guardian's'' critic remarked "Glass has a real affinity for the French text and sets the words eloquently, underpinning them with delicately patterned instrumental textures".

For the second opera, ''La Belle et la Bête'' (1994, scored for either the Philip Glass Ensemble or a more conventional chamber orchestra), Glass replaced the soundtrack (including Georges Auric's film music) of Cocteau's film, wrote "a new fully operatic score and synchronize[d] it with the film". The final part of the triptych returned again to a more traditional setting with the "Dance Opera" ''Les Enfants Terribles'' (1996), scored for voices, three pianos and dancers, with choreography by Susan Marshall. The scoring of the opera evokes Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords, but in another way also "the snow, which falls relentlessly throughout the opera (...) bearing witness to the unfolding events. Here time stands still. There is only music, and the movement of children through space" (Glass).

Symphonies, opera, and concertos (1997–2004)

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Glass's lyrical and romantic styles peaked with numerous projects: operas, theatre and film scores (Martin Scorsese's ''Kundun'', 1997, Godfrey Reggio's ''Naqoyqatsi'', 2002, and Stephen Daldry's ''The Hours'', 2002), a series of five concerti, and three symphonies centered on orchestra-singer and orchestra-chorus interplay. Two symphonies, Symphony No.5 "Choral" (1999) and Symphony No.7 "Toltec" (2004), and the song cycle ''Songs of Milarepa'' (1997) are thematically meditative. The operatic Symphony No.6 ''Plutonian Ode'' (2002) for soprano and orchestra was commissioned by the Brucknerhaus, Linz, and Carnegie Hall in celebration of Glass's sixty-fifth birthday, and originated as Glass's collaboration with Allen Ginsberg (poet, piano – Ginsberg, Glass), based on his eponymous poem.

Besides writing for the concert hall, Glass continued his ongoing operatic series with adaptions from literary texts: ''The Marriages of Zones 3, 4 and 5'' ([1997] story-libretto by Doris Lessing), ''In the Penal Colony'' (2000, after the novella by Franz Kafka), and the chamber opera ''The Sound of a Voice'' (2003, with David Henry Hwang), which features the Pipa, performed by Wu Man at its premiere. Glass also collaborated again with the co-author of ''Einstein on the Beach'', Robert Wilson, on ''Monsters of Grace'' (1998), and created a biographic opera on the life of astronomer Galileo Galilei (2001).

In the early 2000s, Glass started a series of five concerti with the ''Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra'' (2000, premiered by Dennis Russell Davies as conductor and soloist), and the ''Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra'' (2000, for the timpanist Jonathan Haas). The ''Concerto for Cello and Orchestra'' (2001) had its premiere performance in Beijing, featuring cellist Julian Lloyd Webber; it was composed in celebration of his fiftieth birthday. These concertos were followed by the concise and rigorously neo-baroque ''Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra'' (2002), demonstrating in its transparent, chamber orchestral textures Glass's classical technique, evocative in the "improvisatory chords" of its beginning a toccata of Froberger or Frescobaldi, and 18th century music. Two years later, the concerti series continued with ''Piano Concerto No. 2: After Lewis and Clark'' (2004), composed for the pianist Paul Barnes. The concerto celebrates the pioneers' trek across North America, and the second movement features a duet for piano and Native American flute. With the chamber opera ''The Sound of a Voice'', Glass's Piano Concerto No. 2 might be regarded as bridging his traditional compositions and his more popular excursions to World Music, also found in ''Orion'' (also composed in 2004).

''Songs and Poems'' (2005–2007)

''Waiting for the Barbarians'', an opera from J.M. Coetzee's novel (with the libretto by Christopher Hampton), had its premiere performance in September 2005. Glass defined the work as a "social/political opera", as a critique on the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a "dialogue about political crisis", and an illustration of the "power of art to turn our attention toward the human dimension of history". While the opera's themes are Imperialism, apartheid, and torture, the composer chose an understated approach by using "very simple means, and the orchestration is very clear and very traditional; it's almost classical in sound", as the conductor D. Russell Davies notes.

Two months after the premiere of this opera, in November 2005, Glass's Symphony No.8, commissioned by the Bruckner Orchester Linz, was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. After three symphonies for voices and orchestra, this piece was a return to purely orchestral and abstract composition; like previous works written for the conductor Dennis Russell Davies (the 1992 Concerto Grosso and the 1995 Symphony No.3), it features extended solo writing. Critic Allan Kozinn described the symphony's chromaticism as more extreme, more fluid, and its themes and textures as continually changing, morphing without repetition, and praised the symphony's "unpredictable orchestration", pointing out the "beautiful flute and harp variation in the melancholy second movement". Alex Ross, remarked that "against all odds, this work succeeds in adding something certifiably new to the overstuffed annals of the classical symphony. (...) The musical material is cut from familiar fabric, but it’s striking that the composer forgoes the expected bustling conclusion and instead delves into a mood of deepening twilight and unending night."

''The Passion of Ramakrishna '' (2006), was composed for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Chorale and the conductor Carl St. Clair. The 45 minutes choral work is based on the writings of Indian Spiritual leader Sri Ramakrishna, which seem "to have genuinely inspired and revived the composer out of his old formulas to write something fresh", as one critic remarked, whereas another noted that "The musical style breaks little new ground for Glass, except for the glorious Handelian ending (...) the "composer’s style ideally fits the devotional text".

A Cello Suite, composed for the cellist Wendy Sutter, "Songs and Poems for Solo Cello" (2005–2007), was equally lauded by critics. It was described by Lisa Hirsch as "a major work, (...) a major addition to the cello repertory" and "deeply Romantic in spirit, and at the same time deeply Baroque". Another critic, Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, noted that the suite "maintains an unusual degree of directness and warmth"; she also noted a kinship to a major work by Johann Sebastian Bach: "Digging into the lower registers of the instrument, it takes flight in handfuls of notes, now gentle, now impassioned, variously evoking the minor-mode keening of klezmer music and the interior meditations of Bach's cello suites". Glass himself pointed out that "in many ways it owes more to Schubert than to Bach".

In 2007, Glass also worked alongside Leonard Cohen on an adaptation of Cohen's poetry collection ''Book of Longing''. The work, which premiered in June 2007 in Toronto, is a piece for seven instruments and a vocal quartet, and contains recorded spoken word performances by Cohen and imagery from his collection.

''Appomattox'', an opera surrounding the events at the end of the American Civil War, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered on October 5, 2007. As in ''Waiting for the Barbarians'', Glass collaborated with the writer Christopher Hampton, and as with the preceding opera and Symphony No.8, the piece was conducted by Glass's long-time collaborator Dennis Russell Davies, who noted that "in his recent operas the bass line has taken on an increasing prominence,(...) (an) increasing use of melodic elements in the deep register, in the contrabass, the contrabassoon—he's increasingly using these sounds and these textures can be derived from using these instruments in different combinations. (...) He's definitely developed more skill as an orchestrator, in his ability to conceive melodies and harmonic structures for specific instrumental groups. (...) what he gives them to play is very organic and idiomatic."

Apart from this large-scale opera, Glass added a work to his catalogue of theater music in 2007, and continuing—after a gap of twenty years—to write music for the dramatic work of Samuel Beckett. He provided a "hypnotic" original score for a compilation of Beckett's short plays ''Act Without Words I'', ''Act Without Words II'', ''Rough for Theatre I'' and ''Eh Joe'', directed by JoAnne Akalaitis and premiered in December 2007. Glass's work for this production was described by ''The New York Times'' as "icy, repetitive music that comes closest to piercing the heart".

Chamber music, concertos and symphonies (2008–present)

2008 to 2010 Glass continued to work on a series of chamber music pieces which started with "Songs and Poems": the ''Four Movements for Two Pianos'' (2008, premiered by Dennis Davies and Maki Namekawa in July 2008), a ''Sonata for Violin and Piano'' composed in "the Brahms tradition" (completed in 2008, premiered by violinist Maria Bachman and pianist Jon Klibonoff in February 2009); a ''String sextet'' (an adaption of the Symphony No.3 of 1995 made by Glass' musical director Michael Riesman) followed in 2009, and ''Pendulum'' (2010, a one-movement piece for piano trio) is a recent entry in the series. Other projected pieces include a second Suite of cello pieces for Wendy Sutter.

Other works for the theatre were a score for Euripides' ''The Bacchae'' (2009, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis), and ''Kepler'' (2009), yet another operatic biography of a scientist/explorer. The opera is based on the life of 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler, against the background of the Thirty Years' War, with a libretto compiled from Kepler's texts and poems by his contemporary Andreas Gryphius. It is Glass's first opera in German, and was premiered by the Bruckner Orchester Linz and Dennis Russell Davies in September 2009. LA Times critic Mark Swed and others described the work as 'oratorio-like'; Swed pointed out that the work is Glass' 'most chromatic, complex, psychological score': 'The orchestra dominates (...) I was struck by the muted, glowing colors, the character of many orchestral solos and the poignant emphasis on bass instruments'.

In 2009 and 2010, Glass returned to the concerto genre. Violin Concerto No. 2 in four movements was commissioned by violinist Robert McDuffie, and subtitled "The American Four Seasons" (2009), as an homage to Vivaldi's set of concertos "Le quattro stagioni". It premiered in December 2009 by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and was subsequently performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in April 2010. The Double Concerto for Violin and Cello and Orchestra (2010) was composed for soloists Maria Bachmann and Wendy Sutter and also as a ballet score for the Nederlands Dans Theater. Other orchestral projects of 2010 are short orchestral scores for films; to a multimedia presentation based on the novel ''Icarus at the Edge of Time'' by theoretical physicist Brian Greene, which premiered on June 6, 2010, and the score for the Brazilian film ''Nosso Lar'' (released in Brazil on September 3, 2010). Glass also donated a short work, ''Brazil'', to the video game ''Chime'', which was released on February 3, 2010.

In January 2011, Glass performed at the MONA FOMA festival in Hobart, Tasmania. The festival promotes a broad range of art forms, including experimental sound, noise, dance, theatre, visual art, performance & new media.

In August 2011, Glass will present a series of music, dance, and theater performances as part of the Days and Nights Festival. Along with the Philip Glass Ensemble, scheduled performers include Molissa Fenley and Dancers, John Moran with Saori Tsukada, as well as a screening of ''Dracula'' with Glass' score. Glass hopes to present this festival annually, with a focus on art, science, and conservation.

Glass' major new works are a ''Partita for solo violin'' for violinist Tim Fain (2010, first performance of the complete work 2011), Symphony No.9 (2010–2011), Symphony No.10 (2011) and the opera ''The Lost'' (2011). Glass' Ninth Symphony was co-commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, the Bruckner Orchester Linz and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The symphony's first performance is scheduled for January 1, 2012 (in Linz, Austria); the American premiere will be on January 31, 2012 (Glass' 75th birthday), at Carnegie Hall, and the West Coast premiere under the baton of John Adams on April 5. ''The Lost'' is based on a play by Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, ''Die Spuren der Verirrten'' (2006). It will be premiered in 2013 in Linz (Austria), conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and directed by David Pountney, who pointed out that the English translation of the original German title means "traces of those who lost their way": "[So] not knowing where you are going, let alone where you came from, seems to be a pre-condition. It is also, perhaps, the way we are? Philip’s music is perfect for this kind of abstraction".

Influences and connections

Aside from composing in the Western classical tradition, his music has ties to rock, ambient music, electronic music, and world music. Early admirers of his minimalism include musicians Brian Eno and David Bowie, who attended an early performance of the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1973. In the 1990s, Glass composed the aforementioned symphonies ''Low'' (1992) and ''Heroes'' (1996), thematically derived from the Bowie-Eno collaboration albums ''Low'' and ''"Heroes"'' (composed in late 1970s Berlin).

Philip Glass has collaborated with recording artists such as Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne, Uakti, Natalie Merchant, and Aphex Twin (yielding an orchestration of ''Icct Hedral'' in 1995 on the Donkey Rhubarb EP). Glass's compositional influence extends to musicians such as Mike Oldfield (who included parts from Glass's ''North Star'' in ''Platinum''), and bands such as Tangerine Dream and Talking Heads. Philip Glass and his sound designer Kurt Munkacsi produced the American post-punk/new wave band Polyrock (1978 to the mid-1980s), as well as the recording of John Moran's ''The Manson Family (An Opera)'' in 1991, which featured punk legend Iggy Pop, and a second (unreleased) recording of Moran's work featuring poet Allen Ginsberg.

In 1970, Glass and Klaus Kertess (owner of the Bykert Gallery) formed a record label named ''Chatham Square Productions'' (named after the location of the studio of a Philip Glass Ensemble member Dick Landry). In 1993 Glass formed another record label, Point Music; in 1997, Point Music released ''Music for Airports'', a live, instrumental version of Eno's composition of the same name, by Bang on a Can All-Stars. In 2002, Glass and his producer Kurt Munkacsi and artist Don Christensen founded the Orange Mountain Music company, dedicated to "establishing the recording legacy of Philip Glass" and, to date, have released sixty albums of Philip Glass's music.

Music for film

Glass has composed many film scores, starting with the orchestral score for ''Koyaanisqatsi'' (1982), and continuing with two biopics, ''Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters'' (1985, resulting in the String Quartet No.3) and ''Kundun'' (1997) about the Dalai Lama, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination.

The year after scoring ''Hamburger Hill'' (1987), Glass began a collaboration with the filmmaker Errol Morris with his music for Morris's celebrated documentary ''The Thin Blue Line''. He continued composing for the Qatsi trilogy with the scores for ''Powaqqatsi'' (1988) and ''Naqoyqatsi'' (2002). In 1995 he composed the theme for Reggio's short independent film ''Evidence''. He even made a cameo appearance in Peter Weir's ''The Truman Show'' (1998), which uses music from ''Powaqqatsi'', ''Anima Mundi'' and ''Mishima'', as well as three original tracks by Glass (who is actually briefly visible performing at the piano in the film itself). In the 1990s, he also composed scores for the thriller ''Candyman'' (1992) and its sequel, ''Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh'' (1995), plus a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's ''The Secret Agent'' (1996).

In 1999, he finished a new soundtrack for the 1931 film ''Dracula''. ''The Hours'' (2002) earned him a second Academy Award nomination, and was followed by another Morris documentary, ''The Fog of War'' (2003). In the mid-2000s Glass provided the scores to films such as ''Secret Window'' (2004), ''Neverwas'' (2005), ''The Illusionist'' and ''Notes on a Scandal'', garnering his third Academy Award nomination for the latter. Glass's most recent film scores include ''No Reservations'' (Glass makes a brief cameo in the film sitting at an outdoor cafe), ''Cassandra's Dream'', ''No Regrets'' and ''Mr Nice'' (2009). In 2009 Glass composed original theme music for Transcendent Man about the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil by filmmaker Barry Ptolemy.

In the 2000s Glass's work from the 1980s again became known to wider public through various media. In 2005 his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1987) was featured in the surreal French thriller, ''La Moustache'', providing a tone intentionally incongruous to the banality of the movie's plot. ''Metamorphosis for Piano'' (1988) was featured in the reimagined ''Battlestar Galactica'' in the episode "Valley of Darkness", and in 2008, Rockstar Games released ''Grand Theft Auto IV'' featuring Glass's "Pruit Igoe" (from ''Koyaanisqatsi''). "Pruit Igoe" and "Prophecies" (also from ''Koyaanisqatsi'') were used both in a trailer for ''Watchmen'' and in the film itself. ''Watchmen'' also included two other Glass pieces in the score: "Something She Has To Do" (from ''The Hours'') and "Protest (Act II Scene 3)" (from ''Satyagraha'').

Personal life

Glass describes himself as "a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist", and he is a supporter of Tibetan independence. In 1987 he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere. Glass is a vegetarian.

Glass has four children and one granddaughter. Juliet (b. 1968) and Zachary (b. 1971) are his children from his first marriage, to theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (married 1965, divorced 1980). Granddaughter Zuri (b.1989) is Zachary's daughter. His second marriage to Luba Burtyk was dissolved. Marlowe and Cameron are Glass's sons with his fourth wife, Holly Critchlow (from whom Glass is divorced). His third wife, the artist Candy Jernigan, died of liver cancer in 1991, aged 39. Glass lives in New York and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has been romantically involved with cellist Wendy Sutter since 2005.

Glass is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, host of the nationally syndicated radio show ''This American Life''. Philip once appeared as a guest on ''This American Life'' and his piece ''Metamorphosis One'' is often used on the show. Philip Glass's cousin is Ira Glass's father.

According to an interview, Franz Schubert is Glass' favorite composer.

Films about Philip Glass

1976–''Music With Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television''. Tape 2: Philip Glass. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley.

1983–''Philip Glass''. From ''Four American Composers''. Directed by Peter Greenaway.

1985–''A Composer's Notes: Philip Glass and the Making of an Opera''. Directed by Michael Blackwood.

1986–''Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera''. Directed by Mark Obenhaus.

2005–''Looking Glass''. Directed by Éric Darmon.

2007–''glass: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts''. Directed by Scott Hicks.

Awards and nominations

Golden Globe Awards

Best Original Score

Nominated: ''Kundun'' (1998)

Won: ''The Truman Show'' (1999)

Nominated: ''The Hours'' (2002)

BAFTA Awards

Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music

Won: ''The Hours'' (2002)

Academy Awards

Best Original Score

Nominated: ''Kundun'' (1997)

Nominated: ''The Hours'' (2002)

Nominated: ''Notes on a Scandal'' (2006)

Other

2010 NEA Opera Honors Award

18th International Palm Springs Film Festival Award

References

Further reading

William Duckworth (1995, 1999). ''Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers''. New York, New York: Da Capo Press.

Philip Glass, Robert T. Jones (ed.) (1987, 1995). ''Music by Philip Glass''. New York, New York: DaCapo Press.

Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) (1997). ''Writings on Glass. Essays, Interviews, Criticism''. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Robert Maycock (2002). ''Glass: A Biography of Philip Glass''. Sanctuary Publishing.

Potter, Keith (2000). ''Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass''. Music in the Twentieth Century series. Cambridge, UK; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.

John Richardson (1999). ''Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass's "Akhnaten"''. Wesleyan University Press.

K. Robert Schwarz (1996). ''Minimalists''. 20th-Century Composers Series. London: Phaidon Press.

Bartman, William and Kesten, Joanne (editors). ''The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of his subjects'', New York: A.R.T. Press, 1997

Knowlson, James (2004). ''Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett'', New York: Grove Press.

External links

Philip Glass Q&A;

NewMusicBox cover: Philip Glass (includes video)

Art of the States: Philip Glass ''Piece in the Shape of a Square'' (1967)

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