Antoni Gaudí

Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia

The Casa Milà, in the Eixample, Barcelona

View of the Parc Güell, El Carmel, Barcelona

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852 - 1926) was a Catalan architect who is famous for his ground-breaking, modernistic designs.

He was born and educated, and worked all his life in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

His first works were influenced by gothic and Catalan architectural modes but he developed his own distinct sculptural style.
In the first years of his career, Gaudí was strongly influenced by a French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc who promoted the return to an evolved form of gothic architecture.

But Gaudí surpassed Viollet-le-Duc, and created buildings and designs that were highly original - irregular, fantastically shaped with intricate art nouveau-like patterns. Some of his masterworks, most notably, La Sagrada Família have an almost hallucinatory power.

Though acknowledged as a genius there is a theory that Gaudí was color blind and that it was only in collaboration with Josep M. Jujol, an architect 27 years his junior whom he acknowledged as both a genius in his own right, that he produced his greatest works.

Gaudi's major works in chronological order :

Casa Vicens (1878-1880)
Palau Güell (1885-1889)
Colegio de Santa Maria de Jesús (1889-1894)
Santa Coloma de Cervelló (1898-1915)
Casa Calvet (1899-1904)
Casa Batlló (1905-1907)
Casa Milà (La Pedrera) (1905-1907)
Parc Güell (1900-1914)
Sagrada Família (1884-1926)

Many of these works are found in the Eixample district of Barcelona, and three of them, the Parc Güell, Palau Güell, and Casa Milà, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.