Antoni Gaudí and the Casa Milà

The True Silhouette Antoni Gaudí and the Casa Milà Edward Ford UNPUBLISHED ARTICLE Fall 2000

The True Silhouette Antoni Gaudí and the Casa Milà "The true silhouette springs from the actual structure of a building, everything else is vain."

Antoni Gaudí In 1937, on his last night in Barcelona following a short, unhappy enlistment on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell spent the night in a vacant lot near the Sagrada Famìlia. He later wrote: "For the first time since I had been to Barcelona I went to have a look at the Cathedral- a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world . . . I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance . . ." 1 The 1930s saw the low point of Gaudí's reputation, the end of work on the Sagrada Famìlia, and the destruction of most of his models and drawings. The same period also saw the beginning of Gaudí's critical resurrection, but it was a resurrection whose advocates held two different, perhaps mutually exclusive, critical positions. The first, a diverse group of non-architects that ranged from Albert Schweitzer to Alberto Moravia, shared the common trait that their emotional reaction to Gaudí's work which was invariably sculptural- they admired its ability to evoke the qualities of materials completely unlike those from which it was constructed. In 1930 Evelyn Waugh wrote of the Sagrada Famìlia: "[At the south door] Gaudí has again introduced his "sugar-icing" motive, translating it from tile and mosaic into carved stone, giving an effect as though the whole work had been arrested in an early stage of liquefaction." And of the Casa Milà: "Outside many of the windows have wrought-iron balustrades that are fearless tangles of twisted metal, like the wreckage of an aeroplane that has fallen burning from a great height and has suddenly been cooled by hosings of cold water."

Many of them saw Gaudí as a proto-Cubist or proto-Surrealist. In 1933 Salvador Dalí wrote of the Casa Milà: "Gaudí built a house following the shapes of the sea, 'representing' the waves on a stormy day. Another one is made in the shape of the calm water of a lake . . . . We are dealing with real buildings, authentic sculpture of the reflections in water of crepuscular clouds, made possible by reverting to a huge and extravagant multi-colored mosaic."2 The second group of Gaudí admirers, composed entirely of architects, saw Gaudí as the heir of Viollet-le-Duc, one who used materials to demonstrate their structural and not their evocative qualities. This interpretation, that of Gaudí as a structural rationalist, is older than the first. As early as 1913 Juan Bellar published a structural analysis of Gaudí's work, and if Gaudí was undervalued in the 1930s it was not because he was unappreciated by the Modernists. In 1928 Le Corbusier, on a visit to Barcelona said of Gaudí's work: "What formidable domination of structures!" and in 1932 Walter Gropius said: "Gaudí, among the architects of the old school, interests me from the point of view

of construction, some of the walls of the Sagrada Famìlia being of a marvelous technical perfection." 3 Juan Bergos' 1954 and George Collins' 1960 monographs codified this view, and Sweeney and Sert's 1970 book took pains to detach Gaudí from his Surrealist associations and to connect him to a heritage of constructional rigor: [Gaudí's] architectural work offers us today less of the curiosity interest and less of the "terrifying and comestible beauty" which Dalí saw in it, and more of an object-lesson from the architect who perhaps more than any other in the nineteenth century recognized the neglected structural principles of the Gothic and who recovered and restressed them for the architecture of today.4 The problematic nature of the first view of Gaudí, the Surrealist one, is well known and has been examined elsewhere. The premise I wish to question, or at least to qualify, is the second- that of Gaudí as a structural rationalist.

Of these two views there is in Gaudí's few surviving documents and anecdotes far more evidence of the structuralist view than the Surrealist one. The often published drawing showing the force vectors of the retaining wall at Parc Güell was drawn by Gaudí's assistant Juan Rubio and exhibited by Gaudí in Paris in 1910. Gaudí made no secret of his admiration for and debt to Viollet-le-Duc, and it was said that he read and re-read Viollet-le-Duc's Entretiens throughout his life. Many have argued that his debt to John Ruskin was equally strong, although there is less direct evidence, and Ruskin was not translated into Spanish until the early 1900s.

The examination of the this evidence, or rather the examination of the written record in relation to Gaudí's built work, is more enigmatic than enlightening, for one directly contradicts the other. Gaudí spent most of his career in a successful attempt to eliminate the flying buttress- an element that to Viollet-le-Duc was the high point of Western Architecture. Many of the durability problems that Gaudí works such as the Casa Milà and the Parc Güell have experienced are the direct result of Gaudí's use of iron as concealed internal reinforcing, a practice Viollet-le-Duc found so repulsive that he devoted the greater part of two chapters of the Entretiens to it. More direct correspondences can be found in Ruskin, particularly the principle of encrustation as described in The Stones of Venice, a principle essential to understanding much of Gaudí work as having a basis in structural rationalism.

If one assumes that a structurally rational work consists of architectural forms determined by structural laws, in which the structure is inseparable from the architecture, the result is a building which is unclad, monolithic, and in Pugin's terms, in which the structure is ornamented and the ornament is not constructed. Relatively few of Gaudí's works match this description. One that does is the Torre Bellesguard. It is built of monolithic walls of stone and brick, tile floors supported by parabolic arches and brackets that are exposed throughout, wall openings framed with exposed brick parabolic arches (Parabolic arches produce no lateral thrust.) and only minimal applied tile. There are no suspended ceilings,

no constructed ornamental structures, only a thin coating of plaster on some of the structural members. It also contains an element missing from every other Gaudí buildingexposed iron reinforcing- used here in the tie rods of the ground floor vaults. This was the first and last time Gaudí used iron in the manner prescribed by Viollet-le-Duc. It is a straightforward, simple building, one that Louis Kahn might admire. At the same time it has no encrustation of tiles, no curved lines in plan, and in section none of the evocative undulations of Gaudí's better-known work. The Torre Bellesguard is in many ways Gaudí's most structurally rigorous building, and it is also the last building he completed before he began two buildings different in every way, the Casa Batlló and the Casa Milà.

The type of building represented by the Torre Bellesguard constitutes only about a third of Gaudí's work, and those fall into two categories- the mundane and the sacred. The two Gaudí structures that Le Corbusier most admired- the attic of the Casa Milà and the school of the Sagrada Famìlia- clearly were to Gaudí insignificant spaces. In Gaudí's time the windowless attics of Casa Milà were used for drying laundry and elevator machinery.

The tile vaults of the school of the Sagrada Famìlia will have to be demolished if the church is to be completed according to Gaudí's plan. Obviously he considered it a temporary building. In the second category are Gaudí's churches- the Sagrada Famìlia and the crypt of the unfinished chapel at the Colonia Güell in particular. Since there is no definitive evidence as to how Gaudí wished to finish these spaces this characteristic is by no means clear, but this odd typology of using unclad masonry for the most sacred and the most profane spaces has a remarkable consistency in Gaudí's work.

At the other end of the scale in Gaudí's work is the Casa Batlló, which is- put bluntly- a facade job. Gaudí altered the exterior of an existing apartment block maintaining the basic structure, even the windows, in the their original locations. It is a design determined by narrative, metaphor, symbol, and pure decoration, but in which structural, even constructional considerations play a minor role. There are exceptions; the parts of the building that are new- a two-story attic of parabolic arches above the existing building and the framing of the courtyard skylight- have a true structural rationale. The tibia-like columns of the bay windows have an organic character but hardly a structural rigor; what is structurally logical in the human leg is not necessarily so in a window mullion. In any case four feet behind these mullions are rather mundane cast iron columns that really support the facade.

The third category of Gaudí buildings consists of structures that are expressed but not exposed, in which the columns, beams, and vaults are clad in such a way as to describe that which is being hidden. Gaudí's favorite methodology for this was an encrustation of tiles, a traditional Spanish and Catalan technique, but also the system praised by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice. Despite their appearance most of the structures in the Parc Güell (1910-1914) are of this type- clad rather than monolithic. The earth-bound retaining walls and platforms appear to be of solid ruble but in many locations have a stone cladding, albeit a thick one, applied to a structural base of brick and tile. In the centerpiece, the Greek Theater, the cladding is most evident in the undulating bench, but it is also true of the Doric structure below. The roof terrace is built of domes of tile and cement, which are then clad with glazed ceramic tiles graded in size toward the apex. The columns, despite

their monolithic appearance, are tile cylinders, some hollow, some filled with ruble, and then covered with glazed tiles at the base and plaster shaped into flutes above.

Gaudí added iron reinforcing to this structure, particularly at the bench- scrap wire that had been used to bind cotton bales, (Eusebi Güell was a textile manufacturer.) and the corrosion of this iron had necessitated the complete reconstruction of the roof and bench and the insertion of a new internal structure. Admittedly the use of internal iron looks forward to reinforced concrete, and there is reinforced concrete in the Parc structures, but this construction again demonstrates how little practical advice he took from Viollet-leDuc. Of the remaining Gaudí buildings the majority cannot neatly fit into any of these categories. There are a number of hybrids- all three systems co-existing in a single work.

The Palau Güell (1886-1888), an early work also built for Eusebi Güell, consists of a monolithic stone facade and an internal structure of brick vaults, tile vaults, and iron beams supporting smaller vaulted floors. Some of the structures are exposed; some are partially exposed; some are concealed and some are clad with false wood and iron framed structures that are purely decorative. In keeping with the polar opposites described above, the exposed masonry structures occur in the basement stable and in the conical dome of the chapel/living room. (Güell's devotion to Catholicism was as strong or stronger than Gaudí's.)

The Casa Milà (1906-1910) is to many the signature Gaudí building. The two Catalan versions of the fifty peseta piece- a coin that serves like the US quarter as a device for regional expression- contain the Sagrada Famìlia and the Casa Milà respectively. The Casa Milà is his most literal adaptation of natural forms to architecture and perhaps his most superficial. It is in many ways revolutionary but in other ways conventional. Its plan typology- a five-story building of flats with internal courtyards- is common in Barcelona.

The gentle curve of the facade is as much the result of the chamfered corners of the blocks of this area- the Eixample- as they are of Gaudí's formal invention, and again occur in similar form on the adjacent street corners. In comparison with other housing of the twentieth century it is a stylized version of a conventional type. It is true, as many have commented, that extensive use of internal columns makes possible something like Le Corbusier's free plan, and in this way it is exceptional, but Gaudí was clearly using this to facilitate the curved and segmented wall plan, not to create a proto-Miesian space.

The Casa Milà has a far greater claim to structural originality. Again it is a bit of a hybrid. The exterior is a bearing wall of stone and iron. The typical floor system is an iron beam and tile vault combination supported by interior stone columns, brick columns, and occasional iron ones. The attic is a series of winding corridors of brick parabolic arches and vaults- one of Gaudí's most powerful spaces, but there merely to support the roof terrace above. The most elaborate and inventive structure is an iron, cable-reinforced bicycle wheel-like structure that supports the long span between the inner courtyard and the basement. At the same time the building is hardly a revolutionary design, as there were a number of buildings in Barcelona at the time that made extensive use of iron.5

This hardly matters, as the iron is completely concealed in the finished building; the entire iron and tile assembly is covered with the swirling plaster ceilings beloved by the Surrealists. The exposed structure is limited to the internal stone columns (about one half the total), the vaults of the attic, the iron wheel of the basement, the stone columns of the courtyard facades and, in theory at least, the facade.6 Is this structurally dishonest? Perhaps the stone columns disappearing into the plaster ceiling of the interior do not imply that there is iron and tile above, but if nothing about the structure is truly deceptive, nothing about it is particularly structurally descriptive.

There is nothing in the decoration or finishes to give even a small clue as to the nature of what lies below. There are admittedly pragmatic advantages to covering the internal iron structure. Each floor is divided into more than fifty rooms, and covering the beams no doubt facilitates this. But Gaudí does not benefit from a comparison with his contemporaries in this regard. This iron and tile system, in the days before modern fire codes, was frequently exposed- sometimes bare, sometimes with a thin cladding of ornamental tiles or plaster. Victor Horta had used it in the Solway house (1895-1900) and Maison du Peuple (1896-1899). More troubling comparison is with Lluis Domènech's Palace of Music (1905-1908) twelve blocks away from the Casa Milà and constructed at the same time, in which this system, albeit highly ornamented, is exposed in the ceiling of the principle auditorium.

While the facade of the Casa Milà has provoked untold quantities of poetic reaction and a long list of metaphors- ocean waves, caves, human lips, fortifications, a hornets nest, the Catalan sanctuary at Montserrat, an allegory of an Opera by Richard Wagner, crumpled paper (Gaudí's own) and the local favorite- La Pedrera- the quarry, it has inspired far less structural or even compositional analysis. Its undulations are produced by a series of projecting bays that taper toward the top, each framed by two columns. The facade thus has two layers of columns- one to support the floors and one to support the balconies.

The floor-support columns have capitals and bases, the balcony columns none. All of the columns gradually disappear into a flatter, more massive wall as the building rises so that it is effectively a frame building at grade and a wall building at the roof. As the columns transform into the wall as the building rises so do the capitals so that they are only faintly recognizable at the second and third floors. The two lines of columns converge towards the top so that the section suggests the tilted columns Gaudí used elsewhere for lateral bracing but, since the outer columns either do not reach the ground or do so indirectly, they are of dubious value in this regard. 7 One suspects that this facade would all be impossible without considerable iron reinforcing and this is the case. While the exterior columns are solid, each lateral lintel is supported by curved iron beams with iron brackets projecting into the stone. It is the kind of masonry and iron hybrid common in Chicago twenty years earlier that is structurally neither a true wall nor a true frame. As at the Parc Güell, corrosion of this iron necessitated an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s.

It certainly is neither necessary nor desirable to expose iron on the exterior. We see the effects of the steel frame in Louis Sullivan's work even if we do not see the frame

(Sullivan was a great Gaudí admirer), and arguably the Casa Milà does the same since it reverses our expectations of a masonry building, being lighter rather than heavier at the base. Yet it suggests the reconciliation of an aesthetic with a technology, not the expression of that technology. Metaphorically it resembles nothing so much as the plaster of the model from which it was constructed, particularly because of the knife-like edges between each floor. It is a bit of a shock on close inspection to see the orthogonal lines of the stone joints. It can be argued that there is a great deal of exposed iron in the building in the balcony ornaments. True, but they have no structural role other than supporting themselves and even that role is hidden by the iron foliage. It would be difficult to make a case for Gaudí as a structural rationalist using this building or even for an architect that had a concept of material other than pure sculptural.

A far better case for Gaudí as a structural rationalist can be made using a less well known building- the unfinished chapel for the Colonia Güell, Eusebi Güell's factory town, of which only the crypt was built. We know Gaudí's intentions for the unfinished portion only from photographs of the funicular models used in designing the vaults and the impressionistic photo-sketches he made from them, and it is far from certain that what we see today is totally in accord with Gaudí's wishes, but the evidence of the crypt is intriguing. The roof vaults are of three types. The central crypt is not really a vault but brick arches supporting a flat tile slab, configured in a pattern similar to a fan vault. The vaults of the portico are triangular hyperbolic paraboloids, built of tile but encrusted with triangular finish tiles, each marked in the center with an X, the cross of the Catalan Saint Eulalia. The triangular shape of the vault and tiles is a reference to the Trinity, but also part of a more complex mathematical theory of building. Gaudí stated: The tetrahedron is the synthesis of space. The hyperboloid represents the light that can diffuse in all directions. The heliocoid the movement of life, spiritual energy. The hyperbolic paraboloid is the perfect representation of the Holy Trinity since it springs from the two infinite laws: the Father and The Son united by a third, as the Father and the Son are unified by the Holy Spirit. 8 The third vault system, that of the sacristy, is the same iron and tile construction used at Casa Milà. It is exposed today but it is easy to imagine that Gaudí wished it covered.

Given the relative importance of these three spaces it is easy to explain the differencesexposed structure in the sanctuary, a clad structure in the porch, and a concealed structure (perhaps) in the sacristy.

The materials and construction of the columns follow a similar but less clear pattern. The four most central are solid basalt; their hexagonal shapes are not imitations of natural forms; they are natural forms. The stone is undressed and the hex pattern is the natural fracture pattern of the basalt. Gaudí did join larger and smaller hexagons with lead to produce capitals and bases. The other sanctuary columns are solid brick or a checkered mixture of stone and brick, some of which are partially clad in plaster. These generally fall toward the perimeter and are sized according to the loads they would have had to carry from the unbuilt church above, but the system is not clear. The porch columns and ribs are brick polygons. Construction photographs indicate that their geometry might be

related to a system of formwork that uses straight rather than curved boards. There is one exception- a single basalt hexagonal column at the center.

The differences between the Casa Milà and the Güell Chapel are a reflection of two polar aspects of Gaudí's work. His "organic" forms had two very different manifestations. The first is literal; it imitates natural forms- the bone-like mullions of the Casa Batlló or the grotto-like openings of the Casa Milà- and as a result rarely has a meaningful relationship to the materials, structural loads, or constructional methods that create it. The second, what might be called the crystalline manifestation, is based on straight lines but is rarely orthogonal. It is far more characteristic of the Güell Chapel and of certain parts of the Sagrada Famìlia, the spires for example, which are generated out of triangles or tetrahedrons in a kind of transformational geometry. While the crystalline method may be less evocative in the way that the Surrealists admired, it yields a much more inclusive architecture, and, as Gaudí used it, one that responds far more readily to structural and constructional concerns. The intersecting planes of the porch columns of the Güell chapel responded to the methods of formwork employed, as the hyperbolic parabaloid vaults they support respond to their structural loads and to their method of construction. (Since a hyperbolic paraboloid is defined by straight lines, its formwork is greatly simplified.)

Two intriguing explanations for these different modes present themselves, one typological and the other chronological. The literally organic mode characterized the speculative apartment buildings, the crystalline the ecclesiastical work. Likewise the literally organic mode rapidly recedes after the completion of the Casa Milà in 1910 while the crystalline becomes more common. The first interpretation implies that the kind of styling seen at the Casa Milà was to Gaudí fine for speculative work but unsuitable for ecclesiastical. The second implies that Gaudí's working methodology evolved as he looked for a more inclusive attitude toward learning from nature. The crystalline mode is far more likely to use monolithic or clad construction; the literal is more closely associated with his more ornamental and clad designs.

Gaudí was willing to mix systems of structural expression that were literal, clad but representative, clad and non-descriptive, or even clad and deceptive- within the body of his work or even within in a single building. This is not surprising; in the late nineteenth century this was the rule rather than the exception, and it is a characteristic he shares with Frank Lloyd Wright, the Greene Brothers, Otto Wagner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and McKim, Mead & White. What we have today come to expect from a structural rationalist is something like the work of Tadao Ando where exposed, unclad, bare concrete walls are used in every building type, in every room, for every purpose. This consistency of attitude was rare at this time. The work of H. P. Berlage comes the closest.

We are separated from Gaudí's time not just by our reluctance to accept (or admit that we use) representational or inconsistent methods of structural expression but by our automatic assumption that a single methodology is appropriate to each task. Gaudí and his contemporaries were more likely to make the opposite assumption- that a church would be handled differently than a speculative apartment building, that a garage would be different from a living room, or than a drawing room would be different than a

bedroom, or than a room designed primarily for men would be different than one designed for women, and that these differences might take the form of different types of structural expression. Accepting this attitude however, does not excuse structural deceptions.

What might be seen in isolation as Gaudí shortcomings appear less so in relation to his international contemporaries, but neither do these instances demonstrate superiority. Was Gaudí truly the exceptional structural rationalist he has been portrayed as? A comparison with his Catalan contemporaries does not work in his favor. His career of course was not an isolated phenomenon and his work shares much with his contemporaries Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Lluís Domènech i Montaner. If Gaudí is perceived today as the superior of Puig and Domènech, it is due to his greater formal inventiveness, not because he was their superior in constructive terms. Granted there is nothing in their work to rival the unbuilt vaults of the Güell chapel or the Sagrada Famìlia, and granted they also made frequent use of clad, ornamental, even deceptive structural systems, but other aspects of their work show a far more direct relationship between structural form and architectural form. Gaudí made extensive use of tile vaults, but there are none so impressive as Puig's 1904 Exposition pavilion or Domènech's Hospital of St. Paul or Palace of Music, and there is nothing in Gaudí's work like the large, proto-curtain wall expanses of glass in the latter building. All of these tile vaults, although they are sometimes thinly clad or heavily ornamented, are exposed, and not just in an attic or basement. Few of Gaudí's built vaults are as ambitious or straightforward as these and some that are, such as those at the Güell gatehouse, are plastered over.

Gaudí's status as a structural rationalist is truly an academic subject in every sense of the word. His reputation with the public is secure, and if the Archbishop of Barcelona has his way Gaudí will receive an honor unique among Modernists- canonization by the Catholic Church, e.g., sainthood. In 1930 Evelyn Waugh lamented that the Sagrada Famìlia would remain unfinished "unless some eccentric millionaire is moved to invest in the near future." 9 The eccentric millionaires have come forward, work on the main vaults is well underway, although it is far from completion. Yet so much of the original documentation has been destroyed the completed building will be in many ways conjectural, and in any case is being built with precast concrete, some of which is factory clad with stone.

Ironically, the Casa Milà that was to be Gaudí's last completed building. If the Güell chapel and the Sagrada Famìlia had been completed according to Gaudí's designs, Gaudí's standing as the true heir of Viollet-le-Duc might be unquestioned, but it is no less certain that a great deal of Gaudí's work does not support this view, and of his well known buildings, the Casa Milà, from a structural point of view, is one of the most heretical. It has been argued that Gaudí is the intellectual ancestor of Candella and Calatrava, but they are clearly descendents of Gaudí's crystalline and not his organic ideology, and certainly owe little to the Casa Milà. If it deserves a place in the Modernist history it is due to what it represents for the Surrealists not because it is a precursor of the structural rationalism of high Modernism. Likewise, if we say with Sert and Collins that Gaudí's value is in his contribution to structural rationalism there are other Gaudí works,

and perhaps some Catalan ones not by Gaudí, that might claim the Casa Milà's place in the Modernist canon.

I doubt that anyone would wish to see the Casa Milà displaced on the UNESCO World Heritage list by the Torre Bellesguard. Sert argues that it is Bellesguard that is the heretical work, not the Casa Milà, and Martinell takes Gaudí to task for cladding the vaults of the attic with stone on the exterior, saying that such cladding is a lapse from Gaudí's typical structural honesty! Even Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who was a great advocate of Gaudí as a structuralist, argued that the Casa Batlló was a better representation of Gaudí's work than the Sagrada Famìlia. But if the Casa Milà represents the best of Gaudí's work, what is it about the building that we then value? The Torre Bellesguard is devoid of evocative metaphors as the Casa Milà is full of them, what it gains through structural integrity is at the expense of sculptural suggestiveness.

The best that architecture has to offer operates on the sculptural and structural levels simultaneously. It is able to evoke a visceral reaction while, in Louis Kahn's terminology, "answering to structure" and in the very best- the vaults of Amiens cathedral for examplewe cannot really separate our emotional from our intellectual reactions. Gaudí was a great structural rationalist and a great sculptor, and was sometimes both, but at the Casa Milà he was more the latter than the former.

1. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1952), p.

225.

2. Evelyn Waugh, "Gaudí," Architectural Review LXVII (June 1930), pp.310-311.; Haim Finkelstein, Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), p. 198.

3. quoted in George R. Collins, Antoni Gaudí (New York: George Braziller, 1960), p.

130.

4. James Johnson Sweeney and Josep Lluís Sert, Antoni Gaudí (New York: Praeger 1960), p. 7.

5. The often quoted story that Gaudí had originally planned automobile ramp that would serve each floor is discounted by most contemporary scholars.

6. The Gaudí anecdote that he lost all interest in the work when Milà eliminated a four meter high statue of the virgin from the facade is also apocryphal.

7. I have referred to the frame material of the Casa Milà throughout as iron in keeping with precedent, but a chemical analysis during the last restoration showed it to be very close to steel. Gaudí worked closely with the engineer/contractor Josep Bayo who designed much of the iron structure.

8. Claude Prevost, Gaudí, Visionnaire: Exposition de Clovis Prevost (Valence: Valence Centre de Recherche et d'Action Culturelle, 1985) unpaginated.

9. Waugh, op cit., p. 311.

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