Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi was a very unique, Barcelonian architect. His designs are recognized around the world as symbols of the city. Some say that no architect has shaped a city as much as Gaudi has shaped Barcelona. The strange and beautiful, undulating structures such as the Casa Mila are distinct to the city. His designs are colorful, vivid, alive, almost. He was also incredibly religious and his work shows a very spiritual beauty that not many have been able to achieve. More than that Antoni Gaudi was ahead of his time in the way he took his inspiration from nature. Everything in his work somehow calls back to the natural world. The turrets of the Sagrada Familia, spiraling upwards like shells, the facade of Casa Batllo, shaped like bones, the park Guell, featuring treelike columns. He had an appreciation and reverence of nature that we are just beginning to feel today. Of course there have always been the organic and nature inspired artists, but everywhere you look you can see the effects of the industrial revolution and the unconscious attempts to eradicate nature.

In the past century, with the help of the industrial revolution, architecture has reached new levels of ingenuity and innovation. New materials and machines have been created to make buildings bigger and better but something we are beginning to realize is that with this sudden acceleration of technology we have lost any regard to the ground we are building on. Because we have discovered our own ways of creating things, our environment is being left behind in a haze of smog. Perhaps we have built our skyscrapers so high that we believe we are closer to space than the earth. We disconnect ourselves from the planet and pretend that the problems the w...

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...tecture, creating buildings that are unlike any other. exotic, outrageous, some say a tad too embellished, but all the same very individual to who he was and his vision of the natural world around him. He is just one example of many artists who used the designs in nature in their work but we need to take that an inspiration a step further. We have gotten so wrapped up in our own technological age that we believe we are no longer connected to the earth. What we need is to find a route through architecture, where we can become one with nature once more.

Works Cited

Robinson, William H., Jordi Falgàs, Carmen Belen Lord, and Trueba Josefina. Alix.Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in Association with Yale UP, 2006. Print.

Van, Hensbergen Gijs. Gaudí: A Biography. New York: Perennial, 2003. Print.