Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
In 1884, however, Gaudí was made director of works for a large new
Gothic church in Barcelona, and from this time forward a considerable
part of his activity, extending down through his restoration of the
cathedral of Palma on the island of Mallorca in 1900-14, was that of a
Gothic Revivalist, if an increasingly unconventional one. Towards such a
career his own intense religiosity inclined him quite as much as was the
case with Pugin and reputedly also with Cuijpers—Viollet-le-Duc, by
exception, was strongly anti-clerical. Unlike Pugin’s or Cuijpers’s,
however, Gaudí’s career as an ecclesiastical architect was rather
unproductive. Yet from the first he designed and executed church
furnishings and, while still a student in 1875-7, he assisted the
architect Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona (1845-1922) on a
project for adding a porch to the monastery church of Montsarrat.
In 1881 Villar was made architect of the proposed Expiatory Temple of
the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia),[258] for which a large square site
had been obtained between the Carrers de Mallorca, de Marina, de
Provença, and de Sardenya in an outlying part of Barcelona, and the
construction of the crypt of a great cruciform Gothic church was started
in 1882. Two years later Gaudí took over charge of the work, as has been
said, completing the crypt by 1891 almost entirely according to Villar’s
original and quite conventionally thirteenth-fourteenth-century Gothic
design. There followed the construction of the outer walls only of the
chevet; these were finished by 1893. The further history of the church
will be considered later; for Gaudí’s style underwent extraordinary
changes in the nineties as he designed and built one transept façade of
the church and its towers—which is about all that exists above ground
even today (see Chapter 17).
Contemporaneously with Gaudí’s construction of the crypt and the chevet
walls of the Sagrada Familia came four secular works, two of them also
quite Neo-Gothic in character and two others of very great originality.
The Bishop’s Palace at Astorga of 1887-93 and the Fernández-Arbós house,
known as the Casa de los Botines, in the Plaza de San Marcelo at León of
1892-4 might well be mistaken for provincial High Victorian Gothic done
in England or America twenty or thirty years earlier. But the city
mansion of Don Eusebio Güell at 3-5 Carrer Nou de la Rambla (now Conde
del Asalto) in Barcelona, built in 1885-9, is an edifice of the greatest
distinction, rivalled for quality in its period only by the very finest
late work of Richardson in America (see Chapter 13). The Teresian
College at 41 Carrer de Ganduxer in Barcelona is also quite remarkable
in its simpler way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account