Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{22. Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (begun 1882); architect: Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). This is not Barcelona’s cathedral, which is a fine medieval building in the heart of the old city, but a project initiated by a Barcelona bookseller, Josep Bocabella, who directed the efforts of the Association of the Followers of St Joseph (founded 1866) which grew to have half a million members, including the Pope and the King of Spain. The project’s first architect soon parted from the project, and Gaudí took over from 1883, when work had barely reached ground level. The church is being built slowly, from private subscriptions, and is still incomplete, but work continues, following Gaudí’s general intentions. Gaudí’s idiosyncratic and striking sense of form was grounded in a profound understanding and rethinking of structural principles, and of practical building techniques.}

One way in which to make a reputation as an architect is by producing work that is in some sense original, so that it is immediately apparent whose work it is. Gaudí’s architecture would be a case a point. No one else has ever put up buildings quite like his. However it is not the case that the more original a building is, the better it is, or the more worthy of attention. The Parthenon is a building of the highest quality, but it looks very like all the other Greek temples of its age and it would not have been a better building if it had departed more radically from that type (Figure 7). Having said that, it is not without originality: the building was not simply a repetition of earlier temples. For a start it is larger than most, and made of better stone, and its decorative sculpture was freshly considered and very well executed. The building is unusual in having eight columns across the façade instead of the usual six, and in being made with optical corrections, the effect of which is perhaps barely noticeable, but the shaping of the stone demanded more care and skill than was usual, and signals a preoccupation with precise refinement of the type. In addition to the decorative frieze running round the building above the columns, which was usual with this type of temple, there was another frieze running round the outside wall of the inner chamber, visible between the columns, and that had never been done before. So there was no doubt that the Parthenon belonged securely within the tradition of Greek temple building, but it was more magnificent and splendid than the temples that had gone before. It is inconceivable that it would have happened, but just suppose that instead of building the Parthenon, Phidias, Ictinus, and Callicrates had collaborated on a work that had turned out like the Sagrada Familia. How would it have looked to the citizens of Athens in the 5th century BC? It would have looked totally bizarre and barbaric. It would not have showed them that its designers knew or cared about their culture. When they looked at it they would not have seen any of the familiar signs that would have prompted in them feelings of recognition and being in familiar territory. Indeed our word ‘barbaric’ has its origins in the Greeks’ word for foreigners, which tells us what they thought of them.

Familiar and exotic cultures