Antoni Gaudí: The Architect Who Died Before His Dream Was Complete

Told without invented dialogue or events, this is the life of Antoni Gaudí as it bent toward a church he would never see finished. Growing up in Catalonia, he saw a structural system in the tree, strength without excess weight in bone, geometry protecting life in the shell and a material as important as stone in light; as a young architect he took charge of the Sagrada Família and turned it toward columns branching like trees, ceilings like forest canopies and towers rising over Barcelona as though growing from the earth. The book shows his method of physical models hung with strings, chains and weights that became arches when inverted, and his final years given to the basilica alone, with his workshop on the building site. Leaving the site alone in the evening, he walked toward the chapel of Sant Felip Neri, was struck by a tram and lay unrecognized in his simple clothes; he died in the Hospital de la Santa Creu, and Barcelona filled the streets to follow him back to the crypt of the church he had left alone. The closing pages follow his models into the hands of later generations and their computers, and draw the lesson that an architect may begin a line that a student not yet born will complete.