Gaudí’s Workshop at the Sagrada Familia

Juan José Lahuerta 
30/06/2002


All the photographs published in the monograph issue of Gaseta de les Arts of July 1926, dedicated to Gaudí in commemoration of his death, show us views of the architect’s workshop at the Sagrada Familia or images of the sculptural processes used by him. On the one hand, small figures of wire and wire netting, models posing among mirrors, skeletons on the cross, chicken wire dolls that become angels; on the other, interiors brimming with plaster casts: geometric solids, fragments of architecture, models, anatomical parts, complete human bodies, rocks, plants, animals... or tables and shelves full of drawings, of rolls, of papers.

Clearly, the intention of Joaquim Folch i Torres, the magazine’s director and editor of that issue, was to show, at the very moment of Gaudí’s disappearance, his still living work, the workshop under development, in feverish growth, the protean work expanding beyond death. Gaudí’s workshop, these images come to tell us, is not the office of any common architect, but a place where forms and material, in a state of extraordinary abundance, overflow: the very center of the whirlwind of creation, of the perpetuum mobile, where matter changes and is transformed infinitely without ever ceasing to be the same, rich and generous without limits. This is not the office that produces cold plans, numbers, calculations and budgets, but the work room of the artist creator, who creates by modelling with his hands and blowing into the forms...[+]


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