Antoni Gaudí

Journalist Eaude (A People’s History of Catalonia) delivers an energetic survey of the life and work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Entering the field in the 1870s as Europe shifted away from classical architecture, Gaudí melded late 19th– and early 20th–century Catalan modernisme, an architectural movement that involved curved lines, abundant ornamentation, and medieval influences, with neo-Gothic and Moorish overtones, making for a “passionate architecture full of colour and joy.” His buildings, most notably the Sagrada Família, a Catholic church in Barcelona that Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death, were striking for their “plasticity of ironwork, wood and stone.” Writing that Gaudí was “consistent in his extremism” across nearly all aspects of his life, Eaude dissects the architect’s design influences (he sought “inspiration [in] medieval times, when Catalonia had been a powerful nation”); his obsessive, exacting methods (a “total architect,” he often designed his buildings’ furnishings and gardens); and the “religious devotion” that intensified throughout his life and nearly caused him to starve to death when fasting for Lent in 1894. Because Gaudí was notoriously private and “wrote only one newspaper article in his life,” Eaude hews closely to the work, making for a study that sometimes lacks insight into its subject’s motivations. Still, this is a worthy tribute to one of history’s great iconoclasts. (Mar.)