Introduction

Gaudi was known as god’s architect. Barcelona without gaudi is unthinkable like a
peacock with a bald backside. Few architects or artists have ever shaped up a section of a
city so completely or created works so symbolic of their culture. In Barcelona, he had
admirers but no really successful imitators. His work created no schools. He is still an
enigma but a very deep one. He was celibate who designed some of the most sensuous
buildings ever known. His work looks extraordinarily new and yet it was deeply infused
with history, especially the history of his own place, Catalonia. What defined gaudi and
made him so distinctive, was his love of nature. Everything structural or ornamental an
architect could imagine was already there in world in natural form. gaudi came to
understand nature around the countryside near Tarragona. He was passionately curious
about plants and animals. This love of nature was invented in a patriotic culture to an
obsessive degree. gaudi certainly felt passionately about nature and Catalonia, and his
work ,his architecture reneged a natural form probably more intensely and more
metaphorically ,fiercely than any other architect a the end of nineteenth century .

Work and inspiration

His richest source of metaphor was trees the structure of tree was everywhere in his
work.- in the column designs for the sagrada familia and in the colonia guell crypt grove
of stone and brick trunks mimicking not only the natural lean of trees but their grain and
surface too. His personal life was austere. His homes were totally sensuous. Their
sensuousness was that of nature itself. Gaudi’s belief that nature should be architecture’s
language freed him from the corporate realm of the compass and the square from
whatever seemed unnatural to him. It gave him entry to a vastly more complex world of
growth and form. Gaudi believed that architecture had to be an extension of nature. The
spectacle of architecture that just spoke through form without colour was a tremendous
inspiration to a man who later would do almost nothing but speak through form and
colour. It was like seeing the skeleton before the body. Barcelona was a town flush with
money, an industrial town. He scoured the history books in the library absorbing the
architecture of other cultures.
Gaudi was a tremendous decorative detailer and the elements of his detailing came from
all over the world. They came from Egypt, India, Mesopotamia and the Middle East. He
had never been to any of these places. He did his voyaging through books. He did it
through the medium of the luxurious albums that were being put out from the mid
nineteenth century on showing the wonders of different kinds of architecture that were
not European. Without them Gaudi could not have achieved the tremendous mixture and
synthesis and exoticism that characterized his work. Though he had never been to the
Middle East, he loved the exotic forms of its domes, arches and prayer towers with their
vibrant tile decoration.
Architectural style and method of working
From architecture we satisfy the desire for shelter. But architecture gives us something
we can come into. It relates very strongly, more strongly than we consciously imagine, to
the cave. And this is one of the things that gaudi exploits so magnificently, and so
ruthlessly, the idea that his buildings are caves but they are caves with god in it.
Gaudi’s working methods to say the least were unorthodox, unlike most architects;
he made a model before he did a plan. He could not see why architects imagined their
buildings in 3D and then draw them in 2D. His models looks old fashioned like a mad
man’s dream of a chandelier but they were three quarters of a country ahead of design
and ideas which only computers would make possible. Gaudi hung a string from each
point where a column would stand to see how it would transfer the thrust of the building
into the foundations. He joined these hanging strings with cross strings to simulate arches
and vaults. Attached to each string was a bag full of birdshot scaled to the actual load on
each column and arch and vault. And finally he used mirrors and photographs to turn this
virtual building right way up and show what shapes the loads created. Nobody in the
history of architecture had ever used this way of designing. The Crypt of the colonia guell
was a laboratory for ideas that would be perfected in the project dearest to him, his
expiatory temple, the sagrada familia. The decoration of his work was intensely original
too. He revived the art of the originally Moorish way of deliberately breaking and
rearranging tiles into new patterns. He used it over and over, fascinated by the mosaics
and shifting colour under changing light.

Conclusion
Gaudi was a tremendously pious individual. He gave architecture a narrative. The idea
that a building can tell a story. His architecture feels raw and primitive and yet it is
immensely sophisticated. He had learned he said to produce the miracle of volume out of
the benignity of flatness by watching his father beat out sheets of copper in the workshop.
Nature’s elements, form, colour, wind and light were all to act on the observer. Gaudi
was a religious symbologist to the very core. He would never have thought of being an
abstract artist and yet he does belong among the pioneers of abstract sculpture.