Episode notes
In June 1926 an elderly man in threadbare clothes was struck by a tram in Barcelona, and because he looked like a vagrant with empty pockets he was taken to a hospital for the poor. Days later a chaplain recognized him as Antoni Gaudí, the architect behind the city's skyline. Born in 1852 in Reus or Riudoms (he later claimed Riudoms, likely out of spite after Reus rejected one of his proposals), Gaudí came from generations of coppersmiths who hammered flat sheets into boilers and stills, which he credited for his three-dimensional thinking. Rheumatism kept him from playing as a child, so he studied how leaves, trees, and bones carry weight. He earned average grades at the Barcelona Higher School of Architecture, and director Elies Rogent said at his 1878 graduation that the school had given the title either to a fool or a genius.
A glove display cabinet at the 1878 Paris World's Fair caught the eye of industrialist Eusebi Güell, who became his lifelong patron. Gaudí rejected Gothic flying buttresses as crutches and built with hyperboloids and catenary arches found through hanging string models. Once a dandy with a carriage, he became an ascetic Catholic, nearly died from fasting in 1894, and was beaten and arrested in 1924 for refusing to speak Spanish to the Civil Guard. After losing his niece Rosa, collaborator Francesc Berenguer, and Güell by 1918, he moved into the Sagrada Família workshop and begged for money to keep building it.
- How a hyperboloid can be built from perfectly straight bricks or rods, like a twisted bundle of spaghetti
- The Colonia Güell model of strings and bags of birdshot, photographed and flipped upside down to reveal the structure
- His insistence on speaking only Catalan to King Alfonso XIII, and his theory of Mediterranean light at 45 degrees
- Anarchists smashing and burning his models in 1936, and Dalí and Le Corbusier reviving his reputation in the 1950s
- Seven UNESCO World Heritage works and Pope Francis declaring him venerable in April 2025