Word: gaud
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Vicens would collapse when their supports were removed, their projecting brick corbels being unable to bear their weight. The worker even stayed on for several hours that evening, waiting to see disaster happen. The galleries remain today, just as Gaudí designed them...
...ornate decoration of many Gaudí buildings can be seen as at best superfluous, at worst kitsch. In his excellent biography Gaudí, published by HarperCollins last year, U.K.-based Dutch architect Gijs van Hensbergen says of the Catalan's first private commission, a house in Barcelona for the wealthy tilemaker Manuel Vicens, "ornamentation is everywhere in riotous and tasteless profusion...
...While Gaudí was unlucky in love and had poor health, he was enormously fortunate in those with whom he surrounded himself. He found patrons, particularly businessman Eusebi Güell, who rarely interfered with his vision. Given that Gaudí was given to changing his designs over and over during the building process, they needed to have bottomless pockets. Gaudí was also backed by superb Catalan craftsmen, particularly in stone and iron, and his studio included men both loyal and brilliant in their own right. One, the largely unrecognized Josep Jujol, is described by Van Hensbergen...
...Many of Gaudí's buildings were never finished, he often fell out with owners or planning authorities, and toward the end of his life he became ever more despotic and rude - his irritability perhaps exacerbated by his contraction of the livestock disease brucellosis. The Catholic Church, however, has few doubts about the man. A movement within it wants the Pope to canonize him, and the Archbishop of Barcelona has called for him to be named patron saint of architecture. Many Catalans draw the line at sainthood, arguing that Gaudí's legacy of buildings is, as Daniel Giralt-Miracle...
Luckily for the throngs of tourists and architecture buffs who will visit the various celebrations during 2002 (see the International Gaudí Year site at www.gaudi2002.bcn.es) much of that legacy is intact. This is despite the view sometimes held at the time of their construction that his buildings, with their weirdly angled columns and arches, would fall down. A Catalan construction worker once dared to tell Gaudí that the galleries he designed for the house of Manuel...