Chapter 1
The Clay of Reus
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They ask me where I come from, and I always give them the same answer: I come from copper. From the smell of metal warming in the forge, from the rhythmic percussion of my father’s hammer against the curved belly of a boiler, from the curling of red-hot shavings as they fell away from the lathe and scattered across the stone floor of our workshop like the shed skins of serpents. I am Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, born in the province of Tarragona, on the twenty-fifth of June in the year 1852 — the feast of Saint Eloi, patron of smiths and craftsmen — and if there is a single truth about my character that supersedes all others, it is this: I was shaped by the hands of makers before I myself learned to make anything at all.
My father was Francesc Gaudí i Serra, a calderero — a coppersmith — who worked in both Riudoms and the nearby city of Reus. His father before him had been a coppersmith too, and his father before that. The trade went back through our family line like a vein of ore through rock, generations of men who understood that you could not impose your will upon metal without first understanding the nature of the metal itself. You had to listen to it. You had to learn how it wanted to move, how it expanded under heat and contracted in the cold, how it held a curve grudgingly if you fought it and graciously if you guided it. My father never articulated this philosophy in words — he was not a philosophical man in the spoken sense — but I watched it in everything he did. And without knowing it, I received from him the most important lesson of my entire life: that the maker must subordinate the self to the nature of the material, not the material to the tyranny of the maker’s imagination.
Reus was, in those years of my early childhood, the second most important city in Catalonia after Barcelona itself. It sat inland from the coast, south of the Prades mountains, surrounded by hazelnut orchards and the long, fragrant rows of vines that produced the wine and spirits for which the region was celebrated. The city had wealth — merchant wealth, trading wealth — and it wore this prosperity with a particular Catalan pride. There were textile mills and commercial houses, elegant bourgeois mansions along the Carrer de Sant Joan, and a covered market whose vaulted arcades I explored as a very small boy, running my fingers along the columns while the adults around me haggled over fish and bread. I did not know then that I was already learning architecture. I thought I was simply running my hands along the world.
My mother, Antònia Cornet i Bertran, came from a family of coppersmiths as well — one of those tight webs of professional endogamy that characterised the artisan class in Catalonia at that time. She was a woman of formidable patience and quiet faith. Our household was governed by the rhythms of Catholic devotion: the morning prayer, the evening rosary, the processions through the streets of Reus during Holy Week when the air smelled of incense and orange blossom and the sound of the cornets drifted down from the direction of the Church of Sant Pere. I cannot say precisely when God entered my consciousness as a living presence rather than a liturgical habit, but I suspect it happened very early, in the same wordless way that architecture did — through the senses, through stone and song and candle-flame, through the strange electricity that moves through a child who stands for the first time beneath the vault of a great church and feels, without comprehension, that the space above him is not empty.
I had two brothers and a sister. Francesc, the eldest, followed our father into the trade and showed no unusual inclinations in any other direction. My sister Rosa was delicate and did not survive long — she died in childhood, one of the ordinary tragedies that visited every family with unremarkable frequency in those years. And then there was my brother Joan, who was closer to me in age and who became my companion in the explorations that shaped my earliest education: the fields and ravines around Riudoms, where we had a farmhouse and where we spent long stretches of summer and holiday. It is Riudoms, more than Reus, that lives in the deepest chambers of my memory.
The farmhouse at Riudoms — a mas, the old Catalan word for a rural estate — was not grand. It was stone and function, as Catalan rural architecture always is: thick walls that kept out the summer heat, small windows that opened onto terraces where the vines climbed and the cicadas maintained their ceaseless liturgy. But it was surrounded by a landscape that I have spent my entire life trying to understand and to translate into stone. The camp de Tarragona is an ancient land, an eroded plateau that the millennia have worked over with a sculptor’s patience. You see, along the ravines and the exposed hillsides, the effects of ten thousand years of water and wind: strata of limestone tilted at unlikely angles, formations of clay and sandstone worn into shapes that anticipate nothing so much as the forms I would spend my working life constructing. The twisted columns of the Prades mountains. The organic, undulating faces of the cliffs above the Siurana river. The bone-white masses of rock that emerged from the red Tarragona earth like the spines of buried creatures. I studied them before I knew the word for what I was doing. I mapped them in my memory. And when, decades later, I was accused of inventing an architecture that had no precedent in the history of human building, I wanted to take my critics by the hand and bring them to the fields around Riudoms, and show them where I had already seen everything.
There was also, in those early years, the church. Not merely the institution of the Church, to which my family belonged with the unquestioning fidelity of all devout Catalan Catholics, but the physical churches themselves: the spaces, the vaults, the altarpieces gleaming with gold in the dimness, the quality of light coming through the high windows and falling in columns of illuminated dust. The Church of Sant Pere in Reus, where I was baptised, had a Gothic tower that I could see from the workshop. The priory church at Scala Dei, up in the Priorat hills, was already a ruin when I was a boy — the friars had been expelled during the suppression of the monasteries in the 1830s — but the ruins were magnificent, and I saw them on excursions with my father. Ruins, I understood even then, were not failures. They were arguments. They were stone saying: I was here, and I am here still, even though what I was has changed.
But I am getting ahead of myself, and of the boy I was before illness first introduced itself into my life. For a time — a precious, ordinary time — I was simply a child in Catalonia, the son of a coppersmith, with dirty hands and a quick mind and no particular destiny that anyone could have predicted. I ran in the orchards. I climbed the stone walls between the fields. I watched the lizards on the hot rocks and the swallows cutting their impossible arcs through the afternoon sky. I helped in the workshop when I was old enough to be useful and not merely underfoot. I learned to read at the school in Reus, where my handwriting was never good and my mathematics was acceptable and my imagination was already, according to the teachers who tolerated it, a problem.
What I had — what I possessed from the very beginning, before rheumatism and poverty and ambition shaped me into something harder and stranger — was an eye. Not the trained eye of the draftsman, not yet. But the natural eye of a child who finds everything interesting and who cannot walk past a crumbling wall without wanting to understand how it was built, and who cannot look at a tree without cataloguing the branching angles, and who cannot observe the inside of a seashell without feeling that someone — some intelligence, some force — had been at work in it. I did not call this tendency by any name. It was simply how I was. It was, I now believe, the first gift I was given, and I did not earn it and did not choose it, and it came to me packaged, as all such gifts are, with its corresponding burdens.
My parents were good people. I want to say that clearly, because the life I lived as an adult — solitary, ascetic, consumed by work, increasingly indifferent to comfort and society and all the ordinary satisfactions that people pursue — might suggest a childhood of some deprivation or coldness, and this would be false. We were not wealthy, but we were not poor in the ways that damage a child’s spirit. My father worked with his hands and was respected by those who knew his craft. My mother maintained the household with competence and warmth. We ate well enough. We went to mass. We observed the feasts and fasts of the calendar with the regularity that was itself a kind of architecture — a structure of time that organised existence into meaning. I was loved. I knew it, even if none of us used that word very much, because Catalan families of our class did not speak of love in the direct way that I sometimes read about in the French novels that circulated among the students in Barcelona. Love was demonstrated in the quality of attention: in the way my father would stop what he was doing and look at what I had drawn, really look at it, before setting it aside. In the way my mother would call me back from the fields before the light failed, with a persistence that was indistinguishable from prayer.
It was in this world — copper and clay, incense and stone, the vast open sky over the Tarragona plain, the smell of the forge and the sound of the bells — that I was formed. Not educated, not trained, not shaped by any deliberate pedagogy. Simply formed, the way a piece of metal is formed by the fire that makes it malleable and the hands that work it while it still glows: before it has cooled into the fixed thing it is going to be. I carry Reus with me always. I carry the workshop and the fields and the church and the ruins and the quality of the Tarragona light that falls so differently from the light anywhere else I have ever been — harsher and more honest, a Mediterranean light that does not flatter but reveals. All my life I have been trying to build something worthy of that light. I am not sure, even now, that I have succeeded.
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