{"id":9678,"date":"2026-06-17T10:15:59","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T10:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angesfinanciers.org\/?p=9678"},"modified":"2026-06-19T15:17:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T15:17:38","slug":"why-did-gaudi-not-have-more-of-an-impact-on-global-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/angesfinanciers.org\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/why-did-gaudi-not-have-more-of-an-impact-on-global-architecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did Gaud\u00ed not have more of an impact on global architecture?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gaudi<\/div>\n

Few architects have achieved more public recognition than Antoni Gaud\u00ed<\/a>. But why was he not more influential? Nat Barker<\/a> reports as part of our Gaud\u00ed Centenary<\/a>\u00a0series.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to fantastical buildings and a fascinating character, Gaud\u00ed and his work have long been a source of considerable interest to many.<\/p>\n

Around the centenary of his death, Barcelona<\/a> has been gripped by Gaud\u00ed fever. So many events have been organised that several of the Catalan city’s institutions are referring to 2026 as “Gaud\u00ed Year”.<\/p>\n

\"Sagrada
Dozens of events have been organised in Barcelona to mark the centenary of Gaud\u00ed’s death. Photo courtesy of Sagrada Familia Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among those who attended an anniversary mass at the architect’s finally completed Sagrada Familia<\/a> was Pope Leo XIV \u2013 with Gaud\u00ed himself well on the path to sainthood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to imagine this level of pomp and circumstance in honour of any other architect, living or dead.<\/p>\n

However, walk around most other major cities today and the buildings on display give little indication that he ever existed \u2013 much less so, arguably, than other prominent architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n

Why the lack of obvious Gaud\u00ed influence on global architecture, despite his global fame?<\/p>\n

“He’s famous in the general public,” architecture historian and critic Mario Carpo<\/a> told Dezeen. “But he’s not necessarily popular with professional architects.”<\/p>\n

“A\u00a0person against the spirit of his time”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The years surrounding Gaud\u00ed’s sudden death in 1926 represented a Cambrian explosion of architectural ideas in Europe.<\/p>\n

Walter Gropius had founded the Bauhaus<\/a> seven years prior in 1919. In 1923, Le Corbusier<\/a> published his seminal Vers une Architecture. In 1925, art deco<\/a> was launched by a major expo in Paris.<\/p>\n

And in 1929 in Barcelona itself, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe<\/a> blew away a World Fair with his famous pavilion<\/a>, whose gridded rationality and extensive glazing looks much more familiar to us today than Gaud\u00ed’s trippy creations.<\/p>\n

Each of these ideas were firmly embedded in the societal upheaval of the first world war and the rapid advance of modernity. Gaud\u00ed was not.<\/p>\n

“He was really a person against the spirit of his time,” said Carpo. “Look at the buildings and you understand that people of the time must have thought, ‘that guy is nuts’.”<\/p>\n

“He stands for a very specific strand of art nouveau, which is really very idiosyncratic,” said MoMA<\/a> chief curator of architecture and design Martino Stierli. “It’s really him. Nobody else worked exactly like him.”<\/p>\n

\"Barcelona
Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion was dramatically different to Gaud\u00ed’s heavily ornamented style. Photo via Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Or, as Gaud\u00ed’s biographer Gijs van Hensenberg<\/a> puts it, he was “peculiar and particular”.<\/p>\n

“People just didn’t understand what the hell he was about,” van Hensenberg told Dezeen.<\/p>\n

In technical terms Gaud\u00ed was highly innovative, and he used emerging materials such as reinforced concrete.<\/p>\n

But on a more philosophical level, while others were embracing the machine age Gaud\u00ed was looking centuries into the past, particularly with his most famous work \u2013 the Sagrada Familia.<\/p>\n

“Gaud\u00ed was in a sense re-enacting and embodying and trying to revive the medieval way of building,” Carpo said.<\/p>\n

Motivated by his fervent Catholicism, Gaud\u00ed wanted to repeal the aberrations that had been the Renaissance and Reformation to restore what he viewed as the purer Christianity of the middle ages, including its churches.<\/p>\n

Intrinsic to that ambition was the idea that a cathedral was not, as in the view of the modernists and most Western architects today, the product of a design thought up by an intellectual and passed to workers to materialise.<\/p>\n

\"Sagrada
With the Sagrada Familia, Gaud\u00ed was seeking to revive a medieval approach to architecture. Photo courtesy of Sagrada Familia Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Instead, as in the medieval period, it was produced by artisanal master builders, designing and constructing as they went.<\/p>\n

According to Carpo, Gaud\u00ed’s belief in this approach is evidenced by the fact he used models rather than drawings, and by the fact that he slept at the site for the last 14 years of his life, climbing up onto the scaffolding each morning.<\/p>\n

“Conceptually, it is as if he wanted to build the entire Sagrada Familia with his hands, everything improvising and extemporising on-site,” said Carpo. “He was a madman.”<\/p>\n

“It’s too expensive, it’s not practical”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Clearly, this understanding of how architecture should work was totally at odds with the zeitgeist and the rapidly expanding construction industry, which the Bauhaus modernists and Le Corbusier were embracing wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n

“They didn’t think it was viable in an industrialised society to have this kind of crafts-based ornamentation \u2013 it’s too expensive, it’s not practical,” said Stierli.<\/p>\n

“But also it was against their notion of finding an architectural language that is in line with the industrial revolution.”<\/p>\n