Word: gaudi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground. It has the same kind of weird beauty as the basement of Antoni Gaudi's Palau Guell. Here and there the lights pick up sparkles of quartz and waste opal crumbs embedded in the stone. You could imagine it as a set for a Wagner opera; you half expect to see Alberich and his dwarfs...
...just possible, however, that this last situation may change. In Barcelona a movement is stirring among the city's Catholic hierarchy to push for the beatification and eventual canonization of Antoni Gaudi I Cornet (1852-1926), designer of the unfinished church of the Sagrada Famolia and the greatest architect that Barcelona, or Spain itself, has ever produced. Back in 1992, the auxiliary bishop of Barcelona, Joan Carrera, called the beatification move "a legitimate and reasonable proposal." In a pastoral letter last Aug. 23, Ricard Maria Cardinal Carles declared his intent to begin the long and labyrinthine process toward beatifying...
...Gaudi was obsessively pious, especially in his old age. He used to shuffle around the streets of his city nibbling on crusts of bread and seeking alms for the building of the Sagrada Famolia. He hated liberalism and was devoted to everything most penitential and reactionary in Spanish Catholicism. He was gloomy, short-fused, arrogant--the Christian virtue of humility was never his forte--and so misogynistic that he never married and probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly...
Some people feel one needs to be a saint to put up with architects, but the Archbishop of Barcelona begs to differ. He thinks we should beatify one. Ricard Maria Cardinal Carles' candidate is Antonio Gaudi, who could perhaps become the patron saint of highly decorative unfinished projects because although he died in 1926, his most famous work, Barcelona's CHURCH OF THE SAGRADA FAMILIA, is not complete. The archbishop believes that Gaudi had a deep spiritual life. Since architects have long had an image problem, His Eminence may be on to something. How does St. Frank Gehry sound...
...insists that the essence of building is structure and placemaking. It confronts the rethinking of structure and the formation of space with an impetuous, eccentric confidence. No "school of Gehry" will come out of it, any more than there could have been a "school" of Barcelona's Antonio Gaudi. His work is imitation-proof, but liberating...