“Antonie Gaudi’s Architecture and Design Exhibition” Opening at Capital Museum

“Antonie Gaudi’s Architecture and Design Exhibition” will Open at Capital Museum from May 31 to August 2, 2007.

The prevailing view of Gaudí associates him with the surface aspect of his work. The spectacular forms, the variety of materials, the wealth of colours and the symbolic allusions mask the innermost dimension of his architecture, in which special attention is paid to the concepts of space, geometry, structure and construction. All the elements that support his buildings are based, firstly, on the constructional logic and experimentation that generally proceed from Gaudí’s determination to make the most of the static and aesthetic potential of the materials, and, secondly, on the use of a geometry centred around ruled surfaces that does away with the compass and set square and which offers countless possibilities in construction and forms. This is not a speculative geometry unrelated to reality, but one addressed at construction and at finding practical solutions whilst taking into account the economy of form and stability of the buildings.

Gaudí was drawn towards the geometry of ruled surfaces by his analysis from his boyhood of natural forms (tree trunks, bones, shells, etc.) and by his extraordinary mastery of the geometry of space, both of which led him to experiment in three dimensions. It may be because of that he soon began to work with small and large models, which he manipulated either directly or through photographs until he achieved alternative forms that could easily be visualised, as can be seen in his polyfunicular experiments for the church at the industrial village of Colònia Guell. Gaudí’s was a world of testing, of trial and error and of corrections, which helped him to arrived at the solutions to the problems he was dealing with, meaning that he proceeded in the opposite direction to that taken by professionals in the sphere of construction until that time: Gaudí did not go from calculation and theory to the realisation of the project, but from the model to calculation, and from thence to the plan and the construction. His vast knowledge of the skilled crafts and trades, which he had learnt in the family workshop and alongside the finest craftsmen of the time, gave him the measure of the full range of theses crafts. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to ignore the high standards of scientific and technical training that he attained.