BBC_Robert Hughes Visions of Space_1of3_Antoni Gaudi Gods Architect
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00:00On the 10th of June 1926, the soul of Antoni Gaudí ascended to heaven.
00:11God's architect had left his beloved Barcelona to meet his patron.
00:17While crossing the Gran Via on his way to church, an old man in a frayed suit was hit by a tram.
00:27No one recognised him at first, but then it emerged that the dying man was Spain's most noted architect.
00:34Thousands turned out for his funeral in Barcelona.
00:38One newspaper editorial announced the death of a saint.
00:45No architect has ever used so small a stage to achieve such global recognition.
00:51Today, Gaudí's work is revered worldwide, but it wasn't always so.
00:57I'm going back to the city I fell in love with in the 60s
01:00to revisit the work of one of the 20th century's most innovative and radical architects.
01:21Barcelona without Gaudí is unthinkable, like a peacock with a bald backside.
01:46Few artists have ever shaped our perception of a city so completely
01:49or created work so symbolic of their culture.
01:55In Barcelona, he had admirers, but no really successful imitators.
02:01His work created no school.
02:05He is still an enigma, but a very deep one.
02:09He was a celibate who designed some of the most sensuous buildings ever known.
02:15His work looks extraordinarily new, and yet it was deeply infused with history,
02:20especially the history of his own place, Catalunya.
02:28What defined Gaudí and made him so distinctive was his love of nature.
02:38Everything structural or ornamental an architect could imagine
02:42was already there in the world in natural form.
02:52Gaudí came to understand nature around the countryside near Tarragona.
03:01He was passionately curious about plants and animals.
03:05His only known schoolboy essay was a piece in praise of bees.
03:13This love of nature was embedded in a patriotic culture to an obsessive degree.
03:21The great obsession for many, many Catalans towards the end of the 19th century
03:26was an emotion which they called enyoranza, longing, nostalgia,
03:31something that you felt when you were away from Catalunya.
03:35In fact, they were so intensively preoccupied with this form of love
03:39and so intensively preoccupied with this form of patriotism about their own part of Spain
03:46that they were even capable of feeling enyoranza to an acute degree
03:50when they were actually in Catalunya.
03:53They had a cult of the uniqueness of Catalan nature,
03:59not only the trees, the flowers, the butterflies and the bushes,
04:02but particularly the landforms.
04:05Gaudí certainly felt passionately about this,
04:08and his work, his architecture, relates to natural form
04:13probably more intensely and more metaphorically fiercely
04:20than any other architect at the end of the 19th century.
04:28His richest source of metaphor was trees.
04:32He used to say, ìYou know who my teacher is?
04:36My teacher is the tree outside the window.î
04:39And he wasnít kidding. That was his teacher, nature.
04:47The structure of trees is everywhere in his work,
04:51in the column designs for the Sagrada Familia
04:55and in the whale crypt grove of stone and brick trunks,
04:59mimicking not only the natural lean of trees, but their grain and their surface too.
05:07MUSIC
05:18His personal life was austere.
05:21His forms were totally sensuous.
05:25Their sensuousness was that of nature herself.
05:30Gaudíís belief that nature should be architectureís language
05:34freed him from the corporate grid, the compass and the square,
05:38from whatever seemed unnatural to him.
05:42It gave him entry to a vastly more complex world of growth and form.
06:00MUSIC
06:08Every artist, every architect, writer, has something like a sacred text,
06:13you know, that gets them going, that seems in some way to justify
06:17the peculiar idea of becoming an artist.
06:20And this building here, the Monastery of Poblet,
06:24the enormous and beautiful 13th century Cistercian monastery in Catalonia,
06:30was such a building for Gaudí.
06:33To understand its significance to Catalonia,
06:36you have to remember that itís where the kings of Catalonia were buried.
06:41Itís a kind of combination of St Paulís and Westminster Abbey.
06:47MUSIC
06:49Gaudí first explored Poblet as a teenager in the 1860s.
06:54The mastery of craftsmanship that Poblet represented
06:58was for Gaudí an ideal of structural purity,
07:02plainness, magnificence and piety.
07:06Thereís an incredible wealth of beautifully organised natural motifs
07:12and these chimed in perfectly with Gaudíís own belief
07:16that architecture had to be an extension of nature.
07:23The spectacle of architecture that just spoke through form without colour
07:28was a tremendous inspiration to a man who later
07:32would do almost nothing but speak through form and colour.
07:36It was like seeing the skeleton before you see the body.
07:40This was what he conceived of as being his first inspiration
07:46for being an architect,
07:48and you cannot exaggerate the importance of Poblet to Gaudí.
07:59In 1868, the 17-year-old Gaudí was on his way to Barcelona
08:04to study architecture, a course that would take ten years to complete.
08:10On graduation, the school director said of his difficult pupil,
08:14ìGentlemen, we are here today either in the presence of a genius or of a madman.î
08:23Gaudí lived during a time of enormous change brought about by industrialisation.
08:30Barcelona was Spainís first industrial city.
08:34It was flushed with money.
08:36A new elite of Catalan businessmen cherished patriotic dreams of urban renewal.
08:42This climate was key to Gaudíís ambitions.
08:52His entrance into Barcelona society was helped
08:55by joining various private clubs, of which the city had many.
09:00Its culture depended upon clubs,
09:03everything from music to painting to pigeon-fancy.
09:07As a member of this one, the Athenaeum,
09:10he rubbed shoulders with future clients,
09:12and in the library he scoured its history books,
09:15absorbing the architecture of other cultures.
09:19Gaudí was a tremendous decorative detailer,
09:22and the elements of his detailing came from all over the world.
09:26They came from Egypt, India, Ceylon.
09:29They came from Mesopotamia, from anywhere in the Middle East,
09:34and heíd never been to any of these places.
09:37He did his voyaging in books.
09:39He did it through the medium of the luxurious albums
09:43that were being put out from the mid-19th century on,
09:47showing the wonders of different kinds of architecture that were not European.
09:51Without them, Gaudí could not have achieved
09:54the tremendous mixture and synthesis and exoticism
09:58that characterised his early work.
10:07His first private commission in Barcelona, at the age of 31,
10:12was for a wealthy tile manufacturer, Don Manuel Vicenz.
10:17You could hardly imagine a more extravagant debut for a young architect.
10:23Casa Vicenz was Gaudíís first full essay in a Moorish style.
10:29Though heíd never been to the Middle East,
10:32he loved the exotic forms of its domes, arches and prayer towers
10:36with their vibrant tile decoration.
10:39Don Manuelís own factories provided the tiles,
10:43so his own house promoted his business.
10:47And what did you see in the Middle East,
10:50apart from camels and pyramids?
10:53Palms.
11:16This house has always been part of the Juventus family.
11:20My name is Antonio Herrero.
11:23Iím a doctor.
11:25My speciality was gynaecology.
11:29Iíve lived in this house since I got married,
11:3253 years ago.
11:35We got married here, in this house.
11:39We went on a honeymoon,
11:42and we came to live directly in this house.
11:45Weíve always lived here.
11:48All my children were born here.
11:51All four of my children were born here.
11:55I think heís an extraordinary man.
11:58I have an architect son, and I have a grandson.
12:03They have also instilled in me the merit of Gaudí.
12:08Gaudí created a mechanism
12:12that allowed all the doors to be opened
12:15to pass through the receiver.
12:18All the doors.
12:21This has a lot of merit.
12:24Now itís normal, but not at that time.
12:27My wife died a year ago,
12:30and I continue to live in this house,
12:33but I live very alone.
12:36Very alone, because the illusion of my life was her,
12:39and not the house.
13:10It is the instantly recognizable building
13:13by which you just know youíre here.
13:16Itís not always been that way.
13:18Not everybody has always agreed upon the merits of the building,
13:21and they still donít.
13:23George Orwell, for instance, when he was here in the Civil War,
13:26when this part of it had already been built,
13:29felt quite sincerely that the best thing to do with it
13:32was to blow it up.
13:34On the other hand, there are other people who think
13:37that it is a tremendous masterpiece,
13:40designed, if not by God himself,
13:43at least by his nearest vicar on earth, the great Gaudí.
13:53It continues to divide the city.
13:56It has rabid fans, like the Japanese,
13:59for whom Gaudíís sound is almost a god,
14:02or conservative Catholics, who want to see him made a saint.
14:05But there are also many Catalans who would rather do
14:08without this gloomy palace of penitence.
14:13Todayís Sagrada Familia is a better deal
14:16than the original design of 1882,
14:19a boring neo-Romanesque affair whose architect Gaudí replaced.
14:24Gaudíís disadvantage was that nobody really knew his work.
14:28His big advantage was that being young, he was cheap.
14:33Gaudí got the job and leapt to local fame.
14:36What he produced was less a building
14:39than a sort of mission impossible to reform the morals of the city.
15:03At the turn of the century,
15:06Barcelona was filled with bars, brothels and crooks,
15:09with an enormous free-floating population of hookers,
15:12just like today.
15:20For Gaudí, it was the city for whose wickedness and corruption
15:23the Sagrada Familia was meant to atone.
15:33The Sagrada Familia was commissioned as a penitentiary shrine
15:37to be funded entirely by individual donations,
15:40each an act of penance.
15:44It would be an ecstatically repressive building
15:47that would redeem Barcelona from the sins of modernism
15:50and the excesses of democracy.
15:54For Gaudí, it would be the stone book
15:57on which the theology of the Catholic faith would be written.
16:03It was Gaudí's life's work,
16:06but as the temple progressed,
16:09he was tempted by commissions
16:12from the city's wealthiest and most powerful patrons.
16:15More enticingly, they gave free rein to his ideas.
16:25One of Barcelona's richest men was Eusebi Juang.
16:28In manners and English language,
16:31in taste a Renaissance prince,
16:34and one who believed quite rightly
16:37that he'd found his Michelangelo in Gaudí.
16:44For the young architect, Juang was the dream client,
16:47patient, indulgent and rich.
16:50Gaudí was just 34 when the work began
16:53on a palace for his patron,
16:56which showed him at full strength.
17:01The palace is very important
17:04because it reveals itself for the first time as a great architect.
17:07Gaudí was lucky enough to meet Eusebi Juang
17:10when his career was coming to an end.
17:13That opened up horizons that probably wouldn't have been opened
17:16if it weren't for him.
17:19And the influence that the other had on him was incredible.
17:22And that, to be able to start
17:25from the hand of an important person
17:28who trusts you and gives himself to you in some way.
17:34As a curiosity, I can say that the founder of this house
17:37was called Eusebio Güell.
17:40My grandfather was called Eusebio Güell,
17:43my father Eusebio Güell,
17:46I, Eusebio Güell, and I have a son called Eusebio Güell
17:49and a grandson who is also called Eusebio Güell.
17:52I also remember getting here in a horse car
17:55with my aunt, I remember.
17:58Then I also remember the fear that was going on.
18:01I was six or seven years old,
18:04five, six, seven years old, of course.
18:07This house is a bit gloomy at night with few lights.
18:10It's not that it's so big, but now it doesn't seem so big to me.
18:13Then I saw it and said, well, it's fine,
18:16but it's not that it's so big, but then it seemed like a world to me.
18:20Güell and Gaudí shared an intense patriotism
18:23which was reflected in the massive shield of Catalunya
18:26at the entrance to the palace.
18:29The building glorified Güell and his city.
18:50The final cost is not known, but it was huge.
18:53Gaudí employed the city's finest craftsmen
18:56and used the most precious of materials.
18:59Here, he began the indulgent working practice
19:02of directing construction from the street,
19:05tearing down three versions of the Palau's façade
19:08before settling on a final one.
19:11It was Gaudí's showplace.
19:14Even the ceramic inlaid chimneys and ventilators
19:17were designed to please not only Güell,
19:20but God and his angels in heaven.
19:23And yet his extravagance was containable.
19:26During the Palau's construction,
19:29he accepted the more humble commission
19:32from a school run by nuns.
19:36The Theresians' order was strapped for cash.
19:39And for not much money,
19:42Gaudí gave them a genuinely spiritual space
19:45with those lovely paraboloid archers.
19:51The palace was built in the late 19th century
19:54and was the home of the Palau's archers.
19:57The palace was built in the late 19th century
20:00and was the home of the Palau's archers.
20:03It's corridors are a far cry
20:06from the enormous ostentation of Palau away.
20:17But the security that Güell's patronage gave Gaudí
20:20enabled him to explore other sources of style,
20:23one of which was almost completely overlooked
20:26by the Palau's archers.
20:33It was overlooked by fine building methods
20:36in the Barcelona of the time.
20:39He began to turn the same intensive curiosity
20:43to the work that was done
20:46in his own homeland, Catalunya.
20:49He was the first person, almost, not quite,
20:52but certainly the most creative person
20:55to look at the details and the construction methods
20:58that had been absolutely standard folk architecture
21:02in Catalunya since Romanesque days.
21:05But he synthesised them
21:08and he made of them something marvellously inventive.
21:15In 1898, Gaudí designed a revolutionary church,
21:19the Colonia Güell,
21:22for Güell's textile workers just outside Barcelona.
21:25Both Gaudí and Güell believed that workers ought to be a family,
21:29with Güell as Big Daddy, of course.
21:32And the family that prays together stays together.
21:35Only the crypt got built, but it is a masterpiece.
21:40You know, Oscar, every time I come to Barcelona
21:43and I see those enormous crowds of tourists at the Sagrada Familia,
21:47which they think of, it's the biggest, it's the best,
21:50it's the greatest work of Gaudí and so forth,
21:53and I never really believe that.
21:56The best part of Gaudí is in a smaller structure like this,
22:00you know, the Colonia Güell, which is much more Gaudí.
22:03Don't you feel that in some way?
22:05Absolutely.
22:07I think the Sagrada Familia is bigger and more popular,
22:10but this is more Gaudí.
22:13I think it's an ideal model of what Gaudí would like to do
22:16in the Sagrada Familia.
22:18Yeah, this is where he tried out his first ideas
22:21in their first primal experimental period.
22:25And here he's completely free.
22:27And you get this terrific feeling of freshness off it,
22:30as though he was trying out things that he hadn't tried before.
22:33It's his first church.
22:39There are certain functions that we expect from a given art.
22:43From music, we learn how to move.
22:46From architecture, we satisfy that desire for shelter,
22:50which we were deprived of when Mama let us go from the womb.
22:54And architecture gives us something
22:56that we can come into from the world.
23:01It relates very strongly,
23:03much more strongly than we consciously imagine, to the cave.
23:07And this is one of the things that Gaudí exploits
23:10so magnificently and so ruthlessly,
23:13the idea that his buildings are caves,
23:16but they're caves with God in them.
23:21The crypt feels ancient.
23:23Space winds around it, expanding and contracting
23:27so that you feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale.
23:35Oscar, what is it that you most love about this place?
23:39Well, the space.
23:42But I think, first of all, architecture is space, light.
23:48No, not decoration.
23:50And with Gaudí, it's quite clear.
23:53We can love all the details, and we can love Gaudí in books,
23:57but if you visit directly, what you feel is the space.
24:01And how it breathes and expands and deflates.
24:04It's asymmetrical.
24:06And how it does all that stuff.
24:08A little symmetrical.
24:10But not entirely.
24:12No, absolutely not. You see the plan.
24:14The plan is very interesting. The space is fantastic.
24:16He is a sexy architect.
24:18I think so. Very, very radical.
24:20Very radical architect.
24:26I think that quite a few people, at the time that Gaudí was alive,
24:30thought of him as a kind of primitive force
24:33who didn't belong to the normal definitions of architecture.
24:36His character was very violent, very strong.
24:41Güell was so crazy also.
24:43Both were a couple of crazy men.
24:46Absolutely.
24:48Eusebio Güell was really a religious monomaniac, wasn't he?
24:51That's one of the reasons why he and Gaudí got on so well.
24:54Did Gaudí become more of a religious nut
24:57because he wanted to please Güell, you suppose?
25:00I don't know.
25:02They had a very peculiar relation.
25:04Because in one moment of depression,
25:08Gaudí said to Eusebio Güell,
25:11listen, sometimes, when he saw all the people against his architecture,
25:16sometimes I think that only you and me, we like this architecture.
25:23And Eusebio Güell said, don't be wrong.
25:27I don't like your architecture.
25:31I respect you.
25:39Gaudí's working methods were, to say the least, unorthodox.
25:43Unlike most architects, he made a model before he did a plan.
25:48He couldn't see why architects imagined their buildings in three dimensions
25:52and then drew them in two dimensions.
26:00This is Gaudí's original model for the church at the Colonia Güell.
26:04It looks old-fashioned, like a mad aunt's dream of chandeliers,
26:08but it's actually three quarters of a century ahead of design ideas
26:12which only computers would make possible.
26:18Gaudí hung string from each point where a column would stand
26:22to see how it would transfer the thrust of the building into the foundations.
26:28He joined these hanging strings with cross strings
26:31to simulate arches and vaults.
26:33Attached to each string was a bag full of birdshot,
26:36scaled to the actual load on each column at arch and vault.
26:40And finally, he used mirrors and photos to turn this virtual building
26:45right way up and show what shapes the loads created.
26:53Nobody in the history of architecture had ever used this way of design.
26:58Gaudí only ever finished the crypt.
27:01By 1914, Güell was in financial troubles and work on the building had stopped.
27:10The crypt of the Colonia Güell was a laboratory for ideas
27:14that would be perfected in the project dearest to him,
27:17his expiatory temple, the Sagrada Familia.
27:20The crypt of the Colonia Güell was a laboratory for ideas
27:23that would be perfected in the project dearest to him,
27:26his expiatory temple, the Sagrada Familia.
27:51The decoration of his work was intensely original too.
27:54The decoration of his work was intensely original too.
27:57He and his partner, a brilliant designer called Joujou,
28:00revived the art of trencadisse, an originally Moorish way
28:04of deliberately breaking and rearranging tiles into new patterns.
28:08They used it over and over,
28:10fascinated by the mosaics of shifting colour under changing light.
28:15This serpentine bench is one of the most famous examples.
28:23The first time I ever saw the Güell Park was a long time ago,
28:26it was back in the mid-60s, and I loved it then,
28:29and I still do love it now.
28:31It's just one of those places that never gets stale.
28:35Up here on its hill above the city,
28:37the Güell Park is one of the most beloved features of Barcelona,
28:41with its curved serpentine benches
28:44with its curved serpentine benches
28:47covered with a mosaic of broken tiles and broken plates.
28:50It is one of the extraordinary predictions of Cubism
28:55even before the Cubists really got going.
28:59I mean, this dates from 1913-14,
29:02and it's the first public work of art in which Cubist principles appear.
29:12The park was meant as a gated housing estate for the rich.
29:16It failed because the rich disliked Gaudí's designs.
29:20Güell left it to the city at his death
29:23and was immortalised as a great benefactor,
29:26and this would have pleased the old patriot a lot.
29:41My father was blessed to live here.
29:43You can come with your family to live here.
29:46He lived in the entrance pavilion on the right,
29:50and that's how it was.
29:52On 1 August 1908, my father came here as a gardener of the park.
29:57And two years after my father came here, I was born.
30:03My name is Ramon Saumell.
30:06I am the son of the gardener of Güell Park.
30:10I was born right here in the park in 1910,
30:15so I am now 92 years old.
30:20The memories I have of the park are really wonderful.
30:27I didn't have to leave home anymore
30:30because I saw so many people,
30:33especially when I was young.
30:35So many girls came here, too.
30:37You know, when you're young, you like to see girls.
30:41I didn't have to leave home anymore.
30:49I don't really think of it in terms of art style.
30:53I think of it as that beautiful, flowing, serpentine, joyous thing that it is.
31:03A kind of harmony parallel to nature,
31:05just the epitome of the sort of relation to nature,
31:08to the trees, the palms, the sudden flight of parrots,
31:12and all the rest of the things that Gaudí so enjoyed.
31:17It's one of the magical places of this earth.
31:23When I come back to visit this park,
31:27tears well up in my eyes
31:30just thinking about how much, how much I was in the park.
31:40Coming here is like going to paradise for me.
31:50The park was not just a paradise on earth.
31:53It required you to be a pilgrim.
31:55All paths lead to the Hill of the Crucifixion
31:58with its three stone crosses,
32:00a symbol, too, of the sacred mountain of Montserrat,
32:03not far from Barcelona,
32:05haven of the Catholic faith and of Catalan cultural identity.
32:10The mountain monastery of Montserrat
32:12was the site of pilgrimage for every pious Catalan.
32:16Folklore said its strangely shaped rocks
32:19were formed in a geological explosion at the time of the crucifixion.
32:24And the Holy Grail was supposed to be buried here.
32:28Getting here is a drag,
32:31particularly if you suffer from vertigo.
32:36This is about as close to a religious pilgrimage that I'll ever get.
32:40I was brought up as a good Catholic boy
32:43and sent to a school run by Jesuits,
32:45but I still lapsed, despite my parents' best efforts.
32:50Oh, look, there's a crashed one down there.
32:53Oh, Jesus Mary of a little brown donkey, get me out of here.
32:59Here comes another one who's got a good line with us.
33:05Ah.
33:10Ooh!
33:15Devil's head.
33:23Gaudí went on his own religious pilgrimages to Montserrat.
33:27He even dragged his poor builders here as a treat on their days off.
33:38What goes on here is very simple.
33:40People come here in order to leave votive offerings
33:45to the Black Virgin of Montserrat,
33:47credited with miraculous healing.
33:50This thing about her being the Black Virgin is a bit of a have-on, actually.
33:54She's black because she's covered with many centuries of candle grease.
33:58That's what it comes down to.
34:00You know, presumably this little fellow here
34:02will in due course be the little black angel boy of Montserrat too
34:07if it's exposed to enough candle soot.
34:21No, I think not.
34:23I haven't been praying to the Virgin.
34:27I don't know what those are. Are they pills?
34:29Yes, they're pills.
34:31Being where they are, they certainly won't be contraceptive pills.
34:34I don't know what the hell they are, though.
34:39Oh, my God, it's the Barcelona football club.
34:42There it is. You put that in there
34:44and the Virgin will make sure that your soccer team
34:48will take it away next year.
34:54It's rather a touching sort of collage, actually.
34:57Makes me proud to be an ex-Catholic.
35:02Now that I'm a cynical old art critic,
35:04what I like about it really, I guess, is the kitsch side.
35:07The idea that the Virgin or baby Jesus
35:10would be just as pleased by this stuff
35:12as he would be by Michelangelo.
35:14Gaudi's connection with Monserrat is very direct.
35:17He was a tremendously pious man, as we know.
35:20The story goes that when he had these two big commissions going
35:25for private patrons and not the priesthood,
35:28he thought he'd better cover himself by coming up here
35:32and getting down on his knees and asking the Virgin Mary
35:36if it was OK for him to do it,
35:38if it was going to be kosher to do these secular projects.
35:41And apparently the Virgin Mary said,
35:43yeah, go for it.
35:50The Virgin may be horrified to know
35:52that the first of these buildings, the Casa Batlló,
35:55was offered on the world real estate market for $100 million.
36:02This is soft architecture.
36:04To the classical eye, it's complete madness
36:07with its lack of straight lines.
36:12Gaudi gave architecture a narrative,
36:15the idea that a building can tell a story.
36:21Salvador Dalí saw it as a house of seafalls,
36:25representing the waves on a stormy day,
36:28a veritable sculpture of the reflection of clouds in the water.
36:42Gaudi meant the Casa Batlló to be read as a symbolic ode
36:47to the legend of St George, the patron saint of Catalonia,
36:51in his victory over the dragon.
36:55The staircase is the dragon's spine.
37:01The skull balconies and bony columns are its victims.
37:06A thrusting roof tower, crowned with a cross, is St George's lance.
37:11Its tiles are the scales of the dragon.
37:22On a grey day, it looks like something underwater,
37:26a jewel box fantasy.
37:29It is a work of ostentatious piety.
37:33In 1906, it became the new wonder of the Passage de Gracia,
37:37which is why Batlló's friend, Pau Milà,
37:40immediately commissioned Gaudi to build a newer prodigy
37:44to eclipse it on the other side of the street.
37:47The Casa Milà was the last full-scale commission that he would undertake.
37:52He'd become Barcelona's most famous architect,
37:55but a backlash was growing.
37:57His select client list, his extreme Catholicism
38:01and the waning popularity of the Art Nouveau style
38:04began to attract critics.
38:07The local press satirised the Casa Milà.
38:10It became known as La Pedrera, meaning the stone quarry.
38:16The Casa Milà was built in the 17th century,
38:19La Pedrera, meaning the stone quarry.
38:26Despite its early detractors,
38:28the Casa Milà is by now one of Gaudi's indispensable signature works.
38:34It feels raw and primitive, and yet it's immensely sophisticated.
38:41All my life belongs to this flat.
38:46Luis, my husband, liked to show it to all his friends.
38:51It was always full of people, and we really enjoyed what we had,
38:57because all invite us for living here.
39:02How lucky you are, living in this house.
39:15I've lived in this house since 1950.
39:23Every ceiling has a different shape.
39:26In this living room, there are the signs of faith,
39:32represented by the cross,
39:34land, represented by the Catalan flag,
39:38and love.
39:41For Luis, for my husband, it was to live in the ceiling,
39:47in heaven, in heaven, in heaven.
39:51And this sensation, this feeling of living in heaven,
39:56don't leave him until he dies.
40:04And he was the happiest man in the world,
40:07the happiest man in the world, just for living in La Pedrera.
40:12He didn't need to go outside for holidays,
40:16because he said that the sun was always in their house.
40:25When he was ill, almost dying,
40:29he always told me that we didn't take him to the hospital,
40:34because he wanted to die in La Pedrera,
40:38where, so happy, he had lived.
40:50The balconies and grills were inspired sculpture,
40:53and they renew the ancient Catalan language of wrought iron decoration.
40:58Designed by his associate, Jujol,
41:01they hark back to Gaudi's craft roots.
41:04He'd learned, he said, to produce the miracle of volume
41:08out of the banality of flatness
41:10by watching his father beat out sheets of copper in the workshop.
41:19Light floods in through two inner courtyards, open to the sky.
41:28Nature's elements, form, colour, wind and light,
41:31were all to act on the observer.
41:39For all the wonders below,
41:41the most extraordinary part of the Casa Milà actually is the roof.
41:45Gaudi had the idea of using his building as a giant cliff for a statue.
41:50The statue was going to be of the Virgin Mary,
41:53many, many, many times life-size,
41:55to stare out to sea from up here on Paso de Gracia.
41:59Now, due to some blessed miracle,
42:03this ghastly idea was never actually carried out,
42:06probably because the owner of the Casa Milà
42:10had decided that given the religious turbulence around 1904,
42:16it would probably lead to the destruction of his building
42:19by infuriated anti-clerical mobs.
42:22Whatever happened, we were spared this enormous virgin,
42:25but instead we got these air-breathing totems on the roof,
42:30which are ventilators,
42:32and he took the simple idea of a ventilator and made it into sculpture.
42:38I think Xavier Corberó is about Spain's best living sculptor,
42:42and he's certainly my oldest friend.
42:44We met in the 1960s when he first persuaded me to come to Barcelona.
42:52It's kind of amazing that Gaudi is not only the national architect of Catalunya,
42:58but in a real sense, he's the architect of Catalonia.
43:02It's kind of amazing that Gaudi is not only the national architect of Catalonia,
43:08but in a real sense, he's also the national artist, isn't he?
43:11Yes, almost more of an artist than of an architect.
43:17What do you think of the chimneys and the air vents
43:21that Gaudi put on the roof of the Casa Milà?
43:24Well, it's fantastic, and that is where I really enjoy Gaudi as an artist,
43:31and also I enjoy his religious kind of preoccupation.
43:39Why do you enjoy the religious preoccupation?
43:41You're about as religious as a shark.
43:44Yeah, well, and sharks are probably very religious.
43:49So I think sculpture is always a little bit religious,
43:52so it's either something that you are quite nothing,
43:56and it's something that you feel like in front of a sunset,
44:02or in front of something very good.
44:04You think of it like God taking some mud and making a man out of it.
44:08God or whomever.
44:11When he does things to the sky, like those chimneys,
44:17and when he finishes a building, like a song to something that is a big mystery,
44:23I think he's amazing.
44:25And I think it's there where he's really a fantastic artist.
44:36Gaudi was a religious symbolist to the very core.
44:40He would never have thought of being an abstract artist,
44:43and yet he does belong among the pioneers of abstract sculpture.
44:48One of the things about great geniuses
44:50is that they can sometimes be monomaniacal balls.
44:54And this, I'm afraid, was rather the case with Gaudi.
44:57He was hard to get on with, because he was only thinking of one thing,
45:01how to get his temple built.
45:03The other thing that he thought of, when he wasn't thinking about that,
45:07was how to please God by self-sacrifice.
45:10He was not the sort of guy that you wanted to have lunch with.
45:14His idea of a round meal would be a lettuce,
45:18on which he would sprinkle a bit of milk,
45:22or on particularly luxurious feast days, some oil,
45:26and then go on and finish it off with some dried apricots and nuts.
45:31This was all intended to glorify Jesus Christ by mortifying the flesh.
45:38To work with, he was a nightmare.
45:40He was short-tempered, he was arrogant,
45:42he treated workers with considerable contempt.
45:45He did all the things that demanding, brilliant maestros
45:50are in the bad habit of doing.
45:52See, I have a theory, which is people who live on medium-rare steak
45:57and lashings of claret are probably rather nicely to be with
46:01than people who live on nut cutlets and a sense of their own virtue.
46:05Now, there's no doubt into which of these two camps Gaudi fell.
46:10Please, continue. Come here.
46:13When Gaudi was doing his lettuce munching,
46:20his clients would be tucking into enormous, multi-course meals of this description.
46:28They would be eating the lettuce,
46:30they would be eating the meat,
46:32they would be eating the vegetables,
46:34they would be eating the meat,
46:37They would die of heart attacks outside the opera club down on the Ramblas
46:43just at the time that Gaudi was going out to get run over by a number 30 tram.
46:48And the moral of this sad story is that the truth is that no matter what you eat,
46:54you know not the day nor the hour when the Lord cometh.
46:58Ah, look at that lobster.
47:00Ah, makes me feel sinful just looking at it.
47:07Gaudi's growing piety was out of sync with the city's sentiments.
47:12In 1909, strikes by disaffected workers turned into anti-clerical vandalism.
47:18Many churches were sacked and burnt,
47:21and the terrible sight of the rotting corpses of priests and nuns
47:25propped up in grisly tableaux
47:27made Gaudi even more determined that his temple should be built.
47:33Tragic week, as this episode became known, affected him deeply.
47:37His family was dead, so were most of his friends.
47:41He grew increasingly isolated,
47:44and in the last 15 years of his life,
47:46he gave himself entirely over to his work on the Sagrada Familia.
47:51He begged door to door for donations
47:54and moved in to live on the site to be closer to his work.
48:03CHOIR SINGS
48:12Gaudi went to extremes on his nativity façade,
48:16making plaster models before having them carved in stone
48:20and then putting them in situ
48:22so that he could see their effect on the overall design.
48:26CHOIR SINGS
48:31For greater realism, he cast living human beings,
48:35a Catalan girl as an angel
48:37and a mustachioed local as Jesus on the cross.
48:41He used body casts of stillborn babies
48:45to represent the children slaughtered by Herod,
48:48and he chloroformed animals,
48:50quickly casting them before they woke up again.
48:55CHOIR SINGS
49:03The weird thing about Gaudi
49:06is that he was a tremendous designer of architectural form,
49:11but he also rather fancied himself as a sculptor.
49:14And here lay the problem,
49:16because his architectural shapes are superbly sculptural,
49:20but when he sets out to design a sculpture itself,
49:23it's almost invariably banal,
49:25and the proof of it is on this façade here,
49:28with all its figures from the biblical narrative
49:31looking, I'm afraid, almost exactly like some ghastly,
49:34melting-wax Chianti bottle in a cheap Italian restaurant,
49:38on a huge scale.
49:40I mean, this was intended to be the 20th century's answer
49:43to the medieval stone narratives on the cathedrals,
49:47but the shapes, the figures,
49:50they're so damn banal and boring
49:52that you couldn't take one off the façade
49:54and put it in a museum without it seeming faintly laughable.
49:59I don't know what you could put in its place.
50:01In any case, nothing will be put in its place because it's there now,
50:05and it is going to enthrall and delight
50:08further generations of tourists
50:10who don't really have much idea of what the art of sculpture is about.
50:15Gaudí said the Sagrada Familia was the work of generations
50:20and after him would come other architects following his plans.
50:25He did not foresee the Spanish Civil War.
50:28In 1936, the anarchists broke into the workshops
50:33and burned Gaudí's designs and models.
50:36No-one was sure what his plans for it were,
50:39and yet the work continued,
50:41and it continued without them.
50:44Gaudí never finished his nativity façade.
50:48The sculptures on the passion façade
50:51are the work of an agnostic, Josep Subirax.
51:00They don't make me feel anything.
51:02I think they're well-intentioned, banal sculpture.
51:07Essentially, this marks the end of Christian religious art.
51:10It just shows how that great cycle of images and narratives
51:14that produced so much great art in the past
51:17no longer seems capable of inspiring it.
51:20You have to reckon in the fact that some of this is personal.
51:24I mean, I was brought up by rather authoritarian Catholics,
51:28and this is a gloomy authoritarian building.
51:31I mean, this is where you were supposed to go to do penance
51:36for your own sins and the sins of others.
51:39I don't feel like doing penance for my sins,
51:42and if I did feel like doing it,
51:44I wouldn't be doing it in a place like this.
51:47I just can't look at those centurions
51:50without thinking of Darth Vader going...
51:53HE GASPS
51:55..through his helmet, you know?
51:58The Sagrada Familia will always be a divisive building.
52:02It can't be torn down,
52:04but it can't be left as it is,
52:06the biggest unfinished relic of the 20th century.
52:10Some of the city's most influential architects feel, as I do,
52:14that continuing the work is a huge waste of money.
52:18So what should be done with it?
52:20The architect Beth Gali has her own ideas
52:24We have this building. It's already done.
52:27Nobody can destroy it.
52:29It's time to think about what we have to do
52:33with this big artefact.
52:36What do we have to do? We have to do something.
52:39But aren't you supposed to pray?
52:41Nobody.
52:43Nobody is going to pray?
52:45Nobody. It's impossible.
52:47We have to do something.
52:49Nobody is going to pray?
52:51Nobody. It's impossible.
52:53What is your proposal?
52:55There's a few proposals.
52:57The first proposal was to invite Christo
53:01to involve the new part of the building with Christo's way.
53:06You mean to wrap it in plastic,
53:08the way that Christo wraps bits of coastline
53:12or wraps up bits of Central Park?
53:15Yes. Or the Reichstag.
53:18So the idea is to wrap all the new bits in plastic
53:24and leave the old parts unwrapped?
53:26Yes.
53:28This one is the old part.
53:30So what happened to that? Nobody was going to talk about it.
53:33They said, OK, maybe.
53:35Maybe someday.
53:37In the year 2032.
53:39Now what's this?
53:41Another proposal.
53:44If we take a lot of pieces of the same sculpture of...
53:48Zubirak.
53:50Zubirak. These horrible sculptures.
53:52If we break all these sculptures into little pieces,
53:55a lot of pieces...
53:57Like Trencadís.
53:59Like Trencadís, yes.
54:01Like Trencadís towers.
54:03And we put a lot in the whole part.
54:05It becomes better.
54:07I can just see him agreeing.
54:10And this is the last proposal.
54:12What are these? Are these trains coming in and out of the...
54:15The trains coming to the bridge.
54:17You want to take the church and turn it into a railroad station.
54:20Yes. It's very easy because...
54:23No.
54:30This is the picture.
54:32The supersonic Japanese train.
54:34With all the people waiting for the train.
54:36They are all Japanese.
54:38Very appropriate.
54:40And then they just get in and they're back in Kyoto.
54:42Yes. Back in Kyoto directly.
54:44Sagrada Familia, Kyoto.
54:46Going back.
54:48But you know, I think this is very appropriate because...
54:51When you think of the railway stations of the 19th century...
54:57It was the railway stations.
54:59More than the churches.
55:01The real cathedrals of the 19th century.
55:05In 1870 the stations celebrated the god of development.
55:09The god of technology.
55:11So in a way this would...
55:13I don't think it's blasphemous at all.
55:16Not at all.
55:18It's a noble idea.
55:21A dead architect has no control over the fate of his unfinished buildings.
55:26People will always hijack Gaudi and define him on their own terms...
55:30Because this complex character so full of contradictions...
55:34Is so hard to pin down.
55:38Salvador Dali was one of many who reinvented Gaudi.
55:43Here is Dali painting his version of the Sagrada Familia.
55:49He thought of Gaudi as the great solution to what he saw as the tyranny of the glass box.
55:55He wanted to see an architecture that was organic and runny and erotic...
56:00And full of all sorts of suggestions of the human body...
56:03And what bodies did to one another.
56:08And he found them in that pure old Catholic Gaudi.
56:17Dali was the instigator of this view of Gaudi...
56:21Being an intensely erotic Catholic virgin...
56:24Who could promote any amount of fantasy.
56:32The surrealists loved this idea and they adopted Gaudi as one of their own.
56:38The muddled interpretations continued in the 1960s...
56:41Via the counterculture for whom the buildings were the product of hallucinogenic drugs.
56:48Gaudi the subversive became Gaudi the hedonist.
56:52And yet he is the antithesis to all this.
56:56The surrealist fantasies would have disgusted him.
57:00His work was connected not to dreams but to structural laws, craft traditions...
57:05And a deep experience of nature and piety.
57:18Architecture is not just an art that happens on a piece of paper.
57:23It has to stand up, be solid, contain people and give them pleasure.
57:28As an architect, Gaudi does all this and much more.
57:36He had one of those extraordinary minds which is capable of connecting...
57:41Across a very wide span of experience and making coherent symbols of it.
57:47His work alludes all attempts at imitation.
57:51It is completely of its own sort.
57:55And it looks like nobody else's.
57:58That's why you don't get bored with him.
58:00You can get irritated with him.
58:02I've got to say that I do.
58:04I've never liked that kind of obsessive authoritarian Catholicism.
58:08But he's a great example of the fact that some of the most advanced art...
58:13That has ever been made in the world...
58:15Has also been made by some of the most conservative people.
58:19And that's one of the reasons why I find him endlessly interesting...
58:23And at times, quite frankly, endlessly annoying as well.
58:29But for little guys like me to be annoyed by big guys like Gaudi...
58:36Is a very small price to pay for the joy and the interest of looking at his work.
58:46And the BBC Four Zone returns tomorrow night with the DVD collection.
58:51Stuart McHoney will be reviewing the latest releases...
58:54And introducing BBC Four's inaugural World Cinema Awards.
58:58That's here on BBC Two after Newsnight.
59:15.