The date is well known. At around six in the evening on 7 June 1926, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was on his way to his daily mass in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri: a tucked-away corner in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter where the dwindling local community – embodied by the schoolchildren from a nearby school playing in this improvised courtyard – puts up resistance to the 26.1 million tourists who flock to the city every year, many of them coming to enjoy the legacy of the quintessential Catalan architect.
Fittingly, on the centenary of his death, Pope Leo XIV will be in Barcelona for the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus at the Sagrada Família, his greatest work, which has been under construction for more than 140 years.
Contemporary accounts relate how, as the Tarragona-born architect was crossing Gran Via between the corners of Bailèn and Girona, two trams on the line between Plaça de Tetuán and Passeig de Gràcia crossed paths. Gaudí stepped back to avoid one of them but was hit by the second. The site of the accident lies exactly midway, a 20-minute walk, between two of his most emblematic works: Casa Milà (better known as La Pedrera) and the Basilica of the Sagrada Família.
The accident left him with concussion and several broken ribs, and he was taken first to a first-aid clinic in Sant Pere Més Alt (as he was not recognised by the two passers-by who helped him) and then to the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, where he died some 48 hours later at the age of 74. He was buried in the Chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in the crypt of his best-known, unfinished work.
Known for his Catholic devotion and claimed as a symbol by the pro-independence right, Jordi Pujol himself (who, like Gaudí, is impossible to disentangle from the identity of contemporary Catalonia) went so far as to tell Queen Sofía, the queen emerita, at a commemorative event in 2002 that Gaudí was not just “a builder of buildings”, but also “a shaper of Catalonia’s collective soul”, as reported at the time by Catalina Serra in her piece for El País.
It is no coincidence that Gaudí’s most prolific period unfolded in parallel with the Renaixença: the cultural movement that led to a boom in Catalan literature, among other artistic disciplines, in the late 19th century. It formed part of the Romantic current that swept across the European continent in that century (as in the case of the Galician Rexurdimento) and would sow the seeds of many nationalist movements in the Old World.
The beginnings of a legend: from La Calderera to the Mataronense
Historian Josep Maria Tarragona recounts how the small and sickly Antoni, the youngest son of a modest family of coppersmiths, who from 1852 grew up between the city of Reus and the village of Riudoms (Tarragona), learned his father’s trade during frequent bouts of rheumatic fever that kept him from going to school.
Catalonia, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in Spain, was undergoing profound economic and urban transformation: two years after Gaudí’s birth, Barcelona’s medieval walls were torn down and Ildefons Cerdà’s revolutionary Eixample plan was implemented, improving public hygiene and reuniting the walled city with neighbouring municipalities such as Gràcia. Just four years earlier, in 1848, the state had inaugurated its first railway line between Mataró and Barcelona.
The Gaudí i Cornet clan, Tarragona relates, were determined not to miss this train and moved to Barcelona in 1868 to ensure their sons could go to university, for which they had to sell off several properties and mortgage Mas de la Calderera, the farmhouse that several of the architect’s acquaintances claim as his birthplace.
Antoni, however, would not be admitted to the School of Architecture until 1874, owing to the prior academic requirements and the family’s limited means. By then he was working as a draughtsman and shortly afterwards began to sign off his first projects, such as the hydraulic system for the monumental waterfall in the Ciutadella (1875) under the supervision of Josep Fontserè.
This work was created for Barcelona’s 1888 Universal Exposition and is one of the earliest examples of Catalan modernism, the architectural strand of the Renaixença, characterised by an exuberant, curving style and forms inspired by nature, such as floral motifs. From the outset, then, his stamp would be tied to Barcelona right up to the present day.
A supporter of the Glorious Revolution that led to the Democratic Six Years and the government of Juan Prim (also from Reus), Gaudí worked between 1878 and 1882 on another decidedly political project: the Mataró Workers’ Cooperative.
It was conceived as a social hub comprising the factory itself and the facilities that would serve the workers (affordable housing, gardens and a services building), at the height of the utopian socialist current and of working-class demands in the late 19th century. Gaudí even fell in love with one of the teachers at the school, Pepeta Moreu, although she turned him down, saying she was already engaged.
With an impressive CV behind him and a capital beginning to treat him as a public figure, the architect and director of the School, Elies Rogent, declared when handing him his degree in 1879: “I don’t know whether we’ve just given a degree to a madman or a genius; time will tell.”
Work begins on the Sagrada Família
By now Gaudí was fully integrated into the bourgeois society of what was to become a booming metropolis: he took part in Renaixença associations such as the Catalanist Association for Scientific Excursions and mixed with contemporaries like the poet and priest Jacint Verdaguer and the industrialist Eusebi Güell, who would become one of his best clients and closest friends.
In 1883 he was commissioned to continue work on the project of his life, the Sagrada Família. Gaudí chose to rework the initial design and embark on a colossal scheme centred on the origin of the project, the crypt of the Catholic church where he would end up buried, which he would never see completed and which, even now, despite progress on the central tower, still has a decade to go before it is finished in line with its creator’s wishes.
From that year until 1887 he also focused on developing the Güell pavilions, commissioned by Eusebi. It was here that the architect, who had been experimenting with neo-Mudejar elements, used for the first time the trencadís technique: one of his most recognisable inventions, a mosaic cladding made up of fragments of ceramic, glass or marble, generally in bright colours.
His design also spawned an anecdote linked to the workshop of ceramicist Lluís Bru. In a fit of irritability or ADHD as he watched his colleague patiently laying the tiles one by one, Gaudí grabbed a tile and hurled it to the floor, allegedly exclaiming: “You have to put them down by the handful or we’ll never finish!”
This flash of anger is reflected today in many of the monuments that bear witness to this period and that still stand in his city, but also beyond Barcelona. From this period, for example, comes Villa Quijano (“El Capricho”), in the Cantabrian town of Comillas, designated a Site of Common Interest.
Maximalism and compounded loss: the final chapter
Gaudí would markedly accentuate the colour contrasts on the façades of his creations, leaving an unmistakable stamp on some of his best-known works, such as Casa Calvet, Park Güell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. Nature imposes its designs through helicoidal shapes and slanting columns, and this evolution would ultimately be reflected in the project that obsessed him and absorbed his attention almost exclusively from 1915 onwards: the unfinished basilica.
The master suffered a series of bereavements (his niece Rosa; Francisco Berenguer, his main collaborator; his friends José Torras y Bages and none other than Eusebi Güell) that deepened his religious fervour and his isolation as he strove to complete his life’s work. After the death in 1925 of another collaborator, the sculptor and modeller Llorenç Matamala, Gaudí moved into a small room in his workshop at the Sagrada Família and devoted himself entirely to his work.
Witnesses recall that, at the start of the evening on 7 June 1926, Gaudí was working on some lamps for the crypt and, as the working day ended and before heading, as he did every day, to the church of Sant Felip Neri, he called over one of the workers assisting him: “Vicente, come early tomorrow, we’re going to do some very beautiful things.” A beauty left unfinished that Leo XIV himself will have the chance to admire this Wednesday, 10 June, when he visits the work, home and tomb of the Catalan master.
