The Gaudí Year will reveal his unexplored works and his scientific genius

Madrid. Antoni Gaudí is a symbol and emblem of modernist architecture, which has also made him a figure closely linked to his city, Barcelona, ​​where most of his work is located, including his magnum opus, the still unfinished cathedral of the Sagrada Familia.

This year marks the centenary of his death: on June 10, 1926, he was run over by a tram while on his way to his daily prayer, dressed in torn clothes that made him look like a beggar.

To commemorate his figure, Catalan institutions celebrate the Gaudí Year, in which they aim to discover the most unknown facets of his figure, including his least visited or known buildings, but also the enormous importance that his scientific erudition had in his career.

The curator of the tribute, Galdric Santana, is, in addition to being a professor at the University of Architecture of Barcelona, ​​from which Gaudí graduated, one of the great experts on his work.

In interview with The Day, Santana explained that, “although we are commemorating the celebration of an artist and a character related to culture, due to the peculiarity of his art, so linked to science, there is also a scientific context that is an interesting and fundamental contribution; this is because, although Gaudí is apparently well known, in reality he is not well known in depth and as appropriate.

“There is great content of his work still unexplored; there are well-known milestones, but there are others, quite a few, unknown, and it is about promoting knowledge of those works. There are also missing pieces. We seek to talk about Gaudí in a transversal way and do a global analysis so that this allows us to open new routes of buildings, new avenues of exploration for his work.”

Throughout the year there will be seminars and conferences around his figure, but a core part of the posthumous tribute will be the exhibitions, especially four: an immersive one, created with cutting-edge technology in which you can enter a unique university project signed by Gaudí, when he was still a student, and in which he proposed an intervention in the mythical Plaza de Cataluña in Barcelona, ​​where he designed an immense fountain with sculptures that communicated through a kind of plaza with a height of more than 40 meters.

Another exhibition will delve into Gaudí’s connection with music, since he was a music lover, an opera fan, and sought in his work to create spaces in which acoustics were vital.

This exhibition, once its cycle closes in Barcelona, ​​will be traveling to the main music museums in Europe. Afterwards there will be two more exhibitions, of a classical nature, that delve into Gaudí’s unpublished content, of which one will go to Korea and then to Japan.

In the interview, Santana delved into an aspect that marked the study of Gaudí’s work: after the outbreak of the civil war (1936-1939), when the fascist forces entered Barcelona and took control of the city, they also violently entered the Sagrada Familia, where most of the architect’s personal archive was kept after his death, which was partially destroyed, resulting in the loss of documents, projects and plans for works on which he worked. “When he died, Gaudí had in his office all the project documentation of his entire life, of all his works, and he had them deposited in the Sagrada Familia. Then, in the 1936 revolt, when the Francoists entered, they burned them, along with the studio, the plans, with everything, all the information. They also cut up the models, although some were preserved in the ground, buried. There are things that were saved because by chance they were taken out at the time of their death, but many others do not, which makes it much more difficult to objectively know the architect.”

During the presentation of the anniversary, Elena Fernández, vice-rector of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, explained that “the figure of Gaudí has ​​often been the object of uncritical exaltation, oriented only to the character as a tourist attraction.

“That is why the Gaudí chair remains more necessary than ever: to study him, vindicate him and defend his scientific character, dismantling some of the legends that have been built around him.”

The Gaudí Year wants, for the first time, to interrelate all his works, overcoming the fragmented vision that has explained them until now.

“There are no major or minor works by Gaudí; they all have a universal value,” explained the curator, adding that this tribute “wants to leave a structural legacy: consolidate collaboration between Gaudí’s entities, reinforce rigorous research and bring the figure of Gaudí closer to citizens, especially the youngest.

“Ignore the character to rediscover the person. Understand that behind organic forms and spirituality there is calculation, experimentation, science and a deep knowledge of multiple disciplines.”