This day was a completely unexpected mind-blowing trip! K had been mentioning this architect named Gaudi for a long time. This was his home for many years. He also was the chief architect on Sagrada Familia (which we saw over a week after this). Sagrada Familia church is absolutely something the likes of which I’ve never seen before. I’ll get to that post in a week or so.
I think that Gaudi perfected his craft at Park Guell. It was meant to be an incredibly unique land development project with 50 homes. Instead it has 2 homes: Gaudi’s home, and a home up top for a lawyer. It also has a school. Guell was the wealthy financier.
My guess is that Guell really embraced Gaudi’s genius and vision to the extent that he abandoned the settlement as a community, and instead went with the concept of keeping it as a park.
The story of Gaudi’s passing was sad and unfortunate. He worked as chief architect at Sagrada Familia for over 40 years. He was a very modest genius whom many considered to be flat out crazy. But, the calculations for his absolutely audacious designs panned out. He could organize things, and work with people. His quotations have great insight into humanity, evidence to his mental abilities. But outwardly he was assumed to be a homeless old man on the night that he was hit by a tram on his way to church. People just put him to the side of the road as he succumbed to his fatal injuries. Prior to his passing he was eventually taken to a local shelter/clinic for some sort of treatment.
The church, realizing that their genius architect (that was redefining the architectural face of Spain in the early 1900s) was missing sent out their people to scour the city in an attempt to find him. They found him at the local clinic and immediately got him to proper hospital. Alas, it was too late.
Gaudi did live to see one of the entrances of Sagrada Familia (the most intricate of the entrances), but from that point on his plans were handed off to future Spanish architects to implement his vision. Gaudi’s tomb is prominently displayed in the chapel below Sagrada Familia.
