An Exceptional Man - Antoni Gaudí
"Antoni Gaudí is one of the outstanding figures of Catalan culture and international architecture. (...) He was first and foremost an architect, but he also designed furniture and objects and worked in town planning and landscaping, amongst other disciplines. In all those fields he developed a highly expressive language of his own and created a body of work that speaks directly to the senses." (Quote and pictures from https://sagradafamilia.org/antoni-gaudi)
L. Sz. (8/b) looked up some information about him.
Antoni Gaudí i Cornet ( 25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926) was a Spanish architect from Reus, who was an outstanding figure of Catalan Modernism.
Much of Gaudí's work was marked by his big passions in life: architecture, nature, religion. Gaudí studied every detail of his creations, integrating into his architecture a series of crafts in which he was skilled:ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironworkforging and carpentry. He introduced new techniques in the treatment of materials, such as trencadís, made of waste ceramic pieces.
Gaudí's work is normally classed as modernista, and it belongs to this movement because of its eagerness to renovate without breaking with tradition, its quest for modernity, the ornamental sense applied to works, and the multidisciplinary character of its undertakings, where craftsmanship plays a central role. To this, Gaudí adds a dose of the baroque, adopts technical advances and continues to use traditional architectural language.
Antoni Gaudí started his professional career while still at university. To pay for his studies, he worked as a draughtsman for some of the most outstanding Barcelona architects of the time.