Antonio Gaudi - Research Paper Example

? Antoni Gaudi: The Nature of Architecture and Number Antoni [Antonio] Gaudi, the Spanish architect and representative extraordinaire of Catalonian modernism, had an innate sense of the geometry and volume of design, as well the imaginative capacity to project this into his work. He rarely carried out detailed plans of his works, preferring instead the use of three-dimensional models. Following natural instincts, he sometimes, to the frustrations of collaborators, improvised. An architectural artist,with a strong intuition and creative capacity, Gaudi conceived his buildings in a global form, attending to the structural solutions both functional and decorative. Using modern decorative tools of ceramics, glass and color of the Art Nouveau school, he introduced innovative techniques in the processing of materials. By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Gaudi had secured his place as an architect beyond orthodox modernism, creating a personal style based on the observation of nature, using its geometric patterns as well as color, texture and structural and decorative allusions to emulate nature in architecture. Now, nearly one hundred and sixty years after his birth, and over seventy since his tragic death in a street accident, Gaudi has finally transcended his local fame as a Spanish icon and become internationally recognized as the prime architect of the modern city of Barcelona. His famed Sagrada Familia, a cathedral of enormous architectural and landmark proportions, is recognized not only as a design phenomenon of universal importance, but as a major contribution to modern ideas regarding religious architectural representation. While Gaudi’s work was initially met with incomprehension, mockery and outright hostility from both the professional architectural world and the populace of Barcelona, the passing of time and further scrutiny has been kinder. His work now is considered the prime example of nature combined with architecture in its purest, most original and spectacular forms. Evidence of this is replete in his major works. A Dedication to Natural Form Religiously dedicated to the extreme from childhood, plagued by rheumatic ailments from an early age, Gaudi, unable to play with other children, spent time observing the world around him and drawing what he saw. It was during this time that he developed his keen observation of the elements in nature destined to later influence his architectural designs. Somewhat of a mathematical genius, throughout his life Gaudi also studied nature's angles and curves and incorporated them into his designs and mosaics. Hyperboloids and paraboloids he borrowed from nature were easily reinforced by steel rods, allowing his designs to resemble elements from the environment. In Gaudi’s view, “Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the Creator.”1 Given this, and his religious bent coupled with a childhood spent ill, isolated and contemplative in the country, it is not surprising that Gaudi’s design sense would reflect his intense interrelationship with God and nature. The elements found in Gaudi’s nature-inspired work--sometimes alluded to as biomimetic, are obvious to the informed structural observer: catenary arches, spiral stairways, conoid-shaped roofs, and a new type of tree-inspired column that uses hyperbolic paraboloids as its base. Ornamental aspects have their own identifiers: honeycomb gates, vine-inspired frieze, diatom-shaped windows, gargoyles depicting animals displaced by the church’s construction, and pinnacles in the form of grasses and pyrite crystals. Gaudi’s dedication to nature is always reflected in his insistence upon color, “as nature does not present us with any object that is monochrome or completely uniform in colour.”2 Following in that vein, the artist went well beyond color in his quest for the incorporation and refection of natural elements. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gaudi for his models worked with natural elements such as clay, using “live plants, animals, and humans as references”3 in an effort to replicate nature’s perfection. Ahead of his time, his methods, which used fewer raw materials, would be praised today as environmentally sound. One example, the roof on the grounds of the architectural school of the Sagrada Familia is shaped similar to a Magnolia leaf, in the form of a geometric conoid. The conoid creates a naturally occurring wave shape, channeling rainwater away from the building.4 The materials, strong and thin, required fewer elements. Examining his major works, we see his dedication to nature and the inclusion of nature in all of them. Parc Guell Originally planned as a housing “development” designed on the concept of an English garden or park, Gaudi never actually saw the dream to fruition. Yet, evidence of his overall concept of nature and architecture survive in the two buildings he completed and their settings. This is most evident in the Colonial Guell Chapel, where "’tree-like’" structures result from the architect's tendency to build with piers that are not necessarily vertical and which fan out at the top to support, rather than being interconnected by conventional arches and vaults.” 5 Entering the park, a winding stairway twists through natural paths and viaducts “that merge with nature...[in a way]... Clara Gari believes... is infrequent in our western architecture.”6 Curved passages of continuous walls, adapted to the shape of the hill and supported by tree-like monolithic columns [violently tilted and bent] made of rough-cut stones or brick of brownochre colour...[reminiscent of] a petrified forest...”7 Again adhering to color as intrinsic, broken pieces of colorful ceramics--called trencadis--put together randomly, as in nature, decorate the surfaces of the main Hall’s entrance. The Colonia Guell Chapel is, in spite of its unfinished condition, one of the most structurally interesting of Gaudi's Parc Guell buildings. Hyperbolic paraboloid in form, warped surfaces throughout, reflect, as in nature, a natural imperfect flow. Overall, the peace and calm of the surrounding park is complimented by architecture. Though both the hall and chapel flank the entrance and are starkly original in the true Gaudi sense, their shapes, colors and textures complement the gardens--beautiful, brilliant yet strangely inconspicuous as a biological oddity in a deep natural forest. Seen by a visitor or architectural student, the unfinished village seems out of Tolkien’s imagination of hobbits living nestled in a wood. In these woods there are also animals. “The vaulted roofs of the porter's lodge... swell like an enormous colored and shimmering Portuguese man-of-war... The outline of the parapet...seems like the petrified curved line of a wave which the receding sea might have left imprinted upon the sands of a shore” 8 Residences: Casas Batllo and Mila Gaudi had established his trademark designs, ornate ironwork with motifs from nature, early in his career. This design would be repeated and developed throughout his career, including in the exterior grillwork of Casa Batllo. For Gaudi it was important that all of his work reflect nature, including the structures in which people lived. Casa Batllo, Casa dels ossos or House of Bones, an apartment building, sits on the famous Passeig de Gracia in the prestigious Eixample district of Barcelona. It is typical of Gaudi’s reflection of nature in his architecture in its most gruesome form—death. Viewing the structure one is struck by its skeletal organic quality, offset in the Gaudi tradition by color and a facade liberally decorated in multicolored tiles. Beyond these elusions to nature, Gaudi in Batllo playfully incorporates the animal kingdom, “the windows...organic, undulating shapes...remind us of a wide open lion’s jaw, and the roof top looks like a multicolored serpent’s back." 9 Casa Mila appears a wave-like mass of rough natural stone in similarly nature color, its doors and windows seemingly dug out of sand. The exterior parapet of the outer edge of the facade beneath the attic level terminates this movement of the rising and falling, “like the horizon of hilly ground...The Casa Mila has quite correctly been compared with dune formations, and the abstract sculptural decorations of the balcony railings look like frozen sea spume found on a beach after a storm.” 10 This marine feel continues in the interior of the building with railings resembling seaweed and glass portals with design aspects resembling coral. There are no partitions to speak of in the interior, this in homage to the openness of nature, perhaps undersea. The Sagrada Familia: Architectural Homage to Nature Nowhere is Gaudi’s obsession with nature is it more obvious than in his final architectural masterpiece, the magnificent cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. In it is the culmination of nature in architecture Gaudi had tested and perfected in previous projects. Deeply religious, Gaudi had become by this time increasingly convinced that a mystic symbolism similar to that in nature also inhabits the forms of architecture. “The facade of the transept of the Nativity was erected according to an entirely new plan...three stalactite-like gables over the portals... its clouds like canopies of snow dripping icicles and its swarm of snail-shaped figures... towers rise like hollow anthills or infinitely elongated beehives... In spite of their "cubistically" sharp edges, they seem to be made of organic matter, and are not unlike the arms of an octopus with their honeycomb design of ornaments looking like suckers. 11 As in Casa Mila, there are aquatic scenes throughout. “...gargoyles appear in the form of huge lizards, snakes, sea-shells, salamanders, and snails... connected to the building with tube-like drainpipes that look like umbilical cords.” 12 Perhaps the most obvious of the designs connecting the architecture with nature appear in the interior of the building. Each design practiced in the early days gave Gaudi an opportunity to find solutions for stress support problems that had impeded architects for centuries, and that had so intrigued him in adolescence with his study of geometry. Through the study of angles and curves of natural structures, he had begun analyzing the forms that allow trees and humans to stand upright, a discovery that would come to its ultimate and most spectacular fruition in the interior of the Sagrada Familia. Using a design concept from the Parc Guell as previously described, Gaudi in the Sagrada uses columns or piers designed as tree trunks topped with gloriously colorful “foliage.” The trunks, tilted inward “toward the center of gravity, counteract the thrust of the vault”13, thus eliminating the need for other more ungainly and inappropriately unnatural props, giving the illusion of a massive ceiling supported by a forest of trees. \ Conclusion In conclusion we see Gaudi’s quest to instill natural design laws into the art of architecture as singular and seminal. No one before him had dared, with such obvious radical tendencies and designs, to insist that buildings reflect the natural world and its functions. There are those, undoubtedly, who call his designs unpalpable and unfeasible modern minimalist architectural tastes. This, however, is irrelevant to the proposal that Gaudi, as an artist and innovator in twentieth century architecture, brought forms and notions to the profession rarely if ever considered before or since with such passion, dedication, expertise and glorious result. Bibliography Conrads, Ulrich and Sperlich, Hans. The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times. Translated by Christiane Crasemann Collins and George R. Collins. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. Gaudi, Antoni. “Brainyquote.com". 2001-2011. Available from: Raventos-Pons, Esther. “Gaudi's Architecture: A Poetic Form.” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (2002):199+, from: www.questia.com. Schmutzler, Robert. Art Nouveau. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962. Sennott, Stephen. Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture. Volume: 2. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2004. Page Number: 489. “Visions of Gingerbread: The Sweetest Architects” Stanford Museum and Nature Center Web site, 2009.< http://www.stamfordmuseum.org/nativearts.html>. Accessed February 8, 2011. Yarnell, Kaitlin and Baptista, Fernando G. “Gaudi’s Masterpiece: Nature Inspirted Architecture.” Sustainable Cities Collective, December 15, 2010, Read More