Antoni Gaudí

Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the Creator.Gaudí

There's an entire Gaudí industry in Barcelona: he's the architect everyone loves, whose works everyone comes to see—with very good reason. All of which sometimes obscures what a revolutionary genius he was, far beyond any other in the international Art Nouveau movement—an improvising sculptor, a poet of the material world with a limitless imagination who explored the deep structures of nature itself.

The son, grandson and great grandson of coppersmiths in Reus near Tarragona, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926) grew up watching his father create cauldrons and volumes out of flat sheets. As a child he was plagued with rheumatic fevers, and he spent long periods on his own, messing about outside, fascinated by forms in nature.