Peter Stanford remembers a genius with one heavenly client
Antoni Gaudí preferred to let his buildings do the talking. ‘I am the doorman,’ he would remark in his later years, when showing visitors round the shell of the cash-starved La Sagrada Família, his most celebrated creation in Barcelona. In our age of starchitects, such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, who both acknowledged a debt to him, such self-effacement is peculiar but revealing. He rarely wrote anything, keeping a brief diary for only one year (when his mother and brother died), was by nature a loner, distrusted plans and politics, and seems never to have enjoyed an intimate relationship. It all plays into the sense of mystery that is a key part of Gaudí’s legend, something as intriguing to the five million people who visit the basilica each year as the building’s long gestation. This year marks the 100th anniversary of his death, at the age of 73, and...
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