On August 19, 1936, the surrealist Salvador Dali wrote a postcard to his contemporary, Pablo Picasso, which read:

“In Barcelona the other day, a friend of mine saw Mr. Antoni Gaudí crossing Via Laietana in the afternoon. He was dragged with a rope around his neck and looked quite bad, which was to be expected in his condition, since he had just been exhumed. He’s aged quite a bit, although he was embalmed after all.”

The postcard was typical of Dali’s teasing, since years earlier Picasso had stated to the press, “Send Gaudí and the Sagrada Família to hell.” English novelist George Orwell agreed, describing the Sagrada Família as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” adding that “the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.”

Gaudí had died a decade before Dali wrote the postcard, so gaunt and disheveled that the local authorities didn’t recognize him after he was struck by a streetcar. Dismissed as a beggar, he was eventually brought to a hospital where he received only minimal care, and died two days later. As the Spanish Civil War helmed by Franco’s Nationalist forces raged in July 1936, fifty years and thousands of hours of Gaudi’s work went up in smoke. The Federación Anarquista Ibérica burned his workshop, destroying the architect’s modular drawings, designs, intricate models, and fragile plaster sculptures.  A student later crept into the ruins of the studio after dark and salvaged a few remnants, reconstructing Gaudí’s 3D models based on the surviving blueprints.

The massive (and massively controversial) project to which the artist devoted his life exclusively in his last decade remains unfinished today. In the 1950s, prominent architects Le Corbusier, Subirachs, and Walter Gropius signed a petition to halt the construction.

In the 1990s, a group of architects and urban planners who collaborated with Oriol Bohigas i Guardiola fiercely opposed continuing work on Gaudí’s interrupted masterpiece, a sentiment echoed as recently as 2008 by a group of 400 modern art notables.

However, the flame that consumed the last years of Gaudí’s life had not been extinguished. In the 1980s, New Zealand-based architect and scholar Mark Burry accepted the role of Executive Architect and Researcher for the project and discovered that existing computer-aided design (CAD) lacked the facility to model the complexity of the Sagrada Família. Burry then adapted aeronautical engineering software to pick up where the artist left off. Today, the restored model workshop hums with activity as Gaudí’s models continue to be reconstructed from thousands of fragments with the help of computers. The current goal is to complete the construction in 2026, a century after Gaudí’s death, financed entirely by private donations.

What possible explanation is there for the animosity triggered by the Sagrada Família, the monomaniacal obsession of a Catalán artist who began life as a sickly child kept out of school by rheumatic fever, going on to enjoy early success as an architect and artist, who attracted wealthy patrons to support his work, then shed the glossy life of a local celebrity for devout Catholic ascetism? An animosity so violent that Franco’s anarchists desecrated his tomb in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, breaking open the stone lid to drag out his embalmed remains?

Although Gaudí was not openly political, he did defy the law of the Golden Ratio, the mathematical basis for what is judged to be universally pleasing, especially in the West: a + b is to A as A is to B.  The Golden Ratio, Golden Mean or Golden Rectangle organizes space, such as the proportions of a building, to loosely align with the dimensions of the human face and body. For this reason, rooms and structures designed in harmony with the Golden Ratio instantly, viscerally feel comfortable and familiar.

Those that do not align – elongated, attenuated Gothic architecture, for example – feel less cozy, even threatening. In the original sense, Gaudí’s work is grotesque, a descriptive derived from the word “grotto”, cave: “grotto”-esque is grotesque. This reference conjures the fantastic and terrible beauty of the underworld, where centuries of dissolving minerals construct glittering towers and chandeliers, drip by drip, and statue-silent pools of what appear to be fallen stars, or crystalline sea urchins from a distant galaxy.

Gaudí’s signature style, later dubbed Catalán Modernism, is voluptuous and irreverent, a still-surprising visual idiom for the buildings he stated were more important than any others: churches. Initially, its writhing sensuousness links the work with Art Nouveau masters including Lalique, Mucha, and Beardsley. Surfaces appear to be melting, decaying, pooling, squirming, pulsing, condensing, seeping, undulating and exploding, perhaps suggesting the deepest Dionysian roots of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. Roofs ripple like the blue-scaled backs of serpents, or fossilized ocean waves, or like the cake someone left out in the rain, all the sweet green icing flowing down. Scooped windows and doorways defy geometry, as though emerging from the center of the earth. Unusual tracery, irregular forms and flowing sculpted stone-work pair with balconies that jut from the sides of edifices like Jedi helmets, masks, or skulls, inspiring locals to nickname his Casa Batlló , Casa dels Ossos or “The House of Bones.”

His genius was nourished by a strong bond with his Catalán ancestry, the local landscape, and a sense of terroir: he often built with rasilla, a form of thin, hollow brick native to the region, and shocked formalists with his mastery of trencadis (meaning “chopped” in Catalán), the free-form mosaic technique of covering surfaces, especially difficult curves, with irregular shards of broken ceramic pieces. The curving arches of Parc Güell required that the artist break up the tiles, which he augmented with fragments of shattered cups and plates. In other projects like the Casa Batlló, Gaudí arranges ceramic splinters into hypnotic, shimmering surges that suggest Monet’s waterlilies.

This technique, perhaps familiar to contemporary art-lovers in Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and the giantesses of Nikki Saint Phalle, veers far from the mosaics of antiquity which used uniform square tiles called tesserae. Traditional mosaic artisans took pride in their ability to create fantastically curvaceous shapes using only precisely fitted squares and triangles; the last glimpse of this Old World tile artistry may be observed beneath the grime of New York City subway station walls. By comparison, trencadis is as wildly playful as the then-shocking jazz standards that had just begun to rock the radio airwaves.

Students of the Kabbalah may sense an aspect of Tikkun Olam in some of Gaudí’s creations, although it is doubtful that the artist had knowledge of these esoteric teachings. Tikkun Olam means “world-repair” and is often discussed as the shattering of vessels, and the gathering of sparks. The reference alludes to the time before time, when the Almighty YHWH existed before creation. Desiring company, the Almighty set about to create the universe, but there was no space: he would need to make himself smaller in order to allow creation to exist. In compressing his godliness, the Almighty sought ways to contain the unspeakable energy that this compression produced, so cherubim and seraphim provided vessels. But the energy was too vast, and blew the vessels to bits, scattering sparks of divine knowledge throughout the cosmos. These sparks, shards of the Creator, are often hidden in plain sight, and must be faithfully retrieved in order for the world to be made whole once again. For observant Jews, this retrieval is accomplished by loving obedience to G-d’s law, starting with the observance of 613 mitzvoht (laws) throughout the year, and atonement on Yom Kippur for those which have inevitably been disobeyed or simply overlooked.

Did Gaudí know any of this? Unlikely. But much of his genius rests in an otherworldly awareness of a collective, archetypal human consciousness of the sacred. His trencadis suggests that the broken may be made whole, also summoning comparison with kintsugi or kintsukuroi, the Japanese art called “golden joinery” which mends broken pottery with seams of gold. Again, although the artist probably was unaware of the syncretism, the Japanese understanding that breakage and repair need not be disguised would resonate with Gaudí’s belief in divine forgiveness and redemption.

         “Gothic” began as a term of derision during the Renaissance. Florentine architect, painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574) coined the word, referring to the Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire in the first centuries of the Common Era. The specific reference was to the daring, even outlandish architectural features that departed from the Golden Rectangle which served as the foundation for classical art.

         Although hordes of hairy, hooting Saxons had nothing to do with the sometimes-eerie look of the Gothic, the medieval form threw down the gauntlet for Gaudí in terms of a supreme engineering challenge. With all due respect to Sly & The Family Stone and Tina Turner, the message of the Gothic is this: “I Wanna Take You Higher”. The goal was to span in stone ever-wider surfaces from ever-greater heights. For this reason, the Gothic spire may be compared to a particle-accelerator, driving the prayers of the faithful up, up and away into hyperspace like a heaven-bound holy missile. Earlier Romanesque churches, with their thick walls and limited loft, allowed for only a small interior and tiny windows in order to keep the structure stable. From about 1100 CE onward, architects took more risks and experimented in removing load-bearing walls, to create larger and more inspiring inner space. The pointed arch which defines Gothic style produces a lesser lateral thrust than the Romanesque round arch (actually perfected by the Etruscans long before the Romans) and is easily adaptable to openings of varying widths and heights. These iconoclasts also developed a system of stone ribs to disperse weight onto columns all the way to the ground, allowing them to use lighter stone to produce thinner walls, accommodating ever-larger windows. With the perfection of flying buttresses in the 1170s CE, the building’s weight was further absorbed in such a way that its exterior masonry shell could be reduced to a mere skeletal framework.

This new, vertical architectural grammar created a clear spatial distribution and organic lightness, objectives of primary importance to Gaudí. He further complicated the challenge of gaining altitude by using materials of varying strengths, elevating the logistical demands of construction in the general direction of the impossible. One of his essential innovations, “leaning columns” which do not stand at right angles to the floor or ceiling, continue to dazzle architects today for their technical virtuosity.

“Warped Gothic” is a description now applied to Gaudí’s work. The architect himself rejected the label, along with all others, stating “Gothic art is imperfect, only half-resolved; it is a style created by the compasses, a formulaic industrial repetition. Its stability depends on constant propping up by the buttresses: it is a defective body held up on crutches…The proof that Gothic works are of deficient plasticity is that they produce their greatest emotional effect when they are mutilated, covered in ivy and lit by the moon.”

In this sense, Gaudí is akin to Bach and his Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites. In those musical compositions, Bach challenges the cello to express a music which it cannot fully voice. This deliberate defiance of capacity gives the Suites a quality of intense yearning. Modern architectural analysis of Gaudí resonates with the imagery of dissolution, perhaps because his improbable creations always seem of the verge of collapse. In academic architectural analysis, the literature references arches “born” of pillars that are said to “die” in transition ribs. The distinct saddle-shape of the hyperbolic paraboloid used in Gaudí’s calculations is often discussed in terms of “decomposition.”

To understand the difficulty of his work, a quick review of basic physics leads us to funicular design and the catenary. A familiar illustration is the Gateway Arch of St. Louis, which is a weighted catenary, because the bases of its arches are thicker than the arch at the curve’s highest point. “Catenary” comes to us from the Latin word for a hanging chain or cord. When the chain is supported only at its ends in a uniform gravitational field – picture the velvet plush rope suspended between its two brass standards at a theatre—this is a catenary, the strongest possible arch shape under gravity. By taking the profile of the hanging chain and inverting it, you obtain a shape that is structurally ideal for an arch. In the case of a true catenary, this U-shaped suspension is stable and supports itself.

Gaudí will never be the easy favorite among art-lovers. To begin with, there was his Catalán pride which teetered on hubris. The artist’s blonde hair, fair, rosy skin and blue eyes suggested Nordic origins to some admirers, a suggestion he often rebuffed. He said of his heritage, “We Mediterraneans own the image. Fantasy comes from the ghosts. Fantasy is what people in the North own. We are concrete. The image comes from the Mediterranean.”

There is a Catalán saying: “Gent de camp, gent de lamp”— meaning that Iberian country folk are hot-tempered, a reputation which Gaudí embodied. As soon as he achieved success, he seemed to reject it. After a few years of high living, flashy dressing and opera-going, his religious calling intensified. His lifestyle became ascetic and solitary; he fasted often in penitence, and observed a strict vegetarian diet, often eating only a lettuce leaf dipped in milk. He moved his residence to the half-built shell of the Sagrada Família, so as not to miss a minute of opportunity to work on the passion-project which possessed his soul until the day of this death (including on the afternoon was struck by the tram). Reclusive, devout, obsessed, reported to be aloof, unkempt, scorned by many of his fellow artists, he nonetheless was honored by the people of Barcelona, who dressed in black to mourn his sudden passing at the age of 74.

His vision of the sacred has an aspect of the hallucinatory, suggesting that perhaps Paradise is not a stately place but rather a wild, overgrown garden, a playground brimming with noisy life. Gaudí was an Icarus who flew too close to the sun in his quest for that vision, and paid the price.

Diagram of funicular catenary modeling supplied by PEXELS, credited to the Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture: Meirelles, Beraldo, Nazareth. All other photos courtesy of PEXELS, UNSPLASH, Wikimedia Commons.