Snippets from Spain
Worlds Coincide and Then Collide: Antoni Gaudí and Victor Falkenau
During our three-day visit to Barcelona, I wandered with my mouth agape through two houses and a park designed and built by the renowned Catalan designer and architect Antoni Gaudí. As mentioned in last week’s post, over the last ten years my distaste for his peculiar style has crept to fascination with his genius, especially the use of organic shapes to celebrate nature. During this recent immersion, the similarities between him and the life and time of my great-grandfather, Victor Falkenau, about whom I’m writing a nonfiction book, surprised me. Gaudí was born in Cataluña in 1852 and my great-grandfather in New Jersey in 1859, during the Victorian Era, a time of radical breakthroughs in the arts and sciences. Though the world was a lot bigger then―neither news nor people traveled quickly or easily, Victor and the architects for whom he worked an ocean and a half a continent away were influenced by the same global forces that were transforming society, art, industry, and building.
At Casa Vicens, Casa Batllo, and Park Güell, similarities between this Spanish designer and Victor and his architect colleagues dawned on me. Gaudí and Louis Sullivan, one of the most prominent of the Chicago School of architects in the late 1800s, drew inspiration from shapes found in nature but expressed them in distinct ways. Gaudí incorporated geometric structures found in rushes, reeds, tree trunks, and seashells into curves, arches, windows, wood door and window frames, and tile and glass mosaics.
Sullivan integrated nature through geometric shapes using iron. His interior ornamentation in the Chicago Stock Exchange, which Victor built for Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler in 1893, represented the designer’s interpretation of nature. Sullivan professed a building should respond to its own environment, just as a plant would grow “naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.”
Gaudí and Victor attended World’s Fairs that helped shape and elevate their careers. World’s Fairs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed tourists to see people, cultures, and inventions from all over the world. For the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, Gaudi designed a showcase for the glove manufacturer Comilla using a functional and modernisme design. It caught the eye of the Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell. Güell latched onto Guadí and commissioned some of the designer’s most famous work, including the Park Güell, which we visited.
At the 1888 World’s Fair in Barcelona, Gaudí constructed a pavilion for the Compañía Trasatlántica, a company that owned passenger ocean liners. This fair was one of the city’s most important events and it came at a key time in the Modernisme movement, the style for which the architect is renowned. It was an Art Nouveau architectural genre developed in Barcelona that coincided with new trends in art, music, and literature. Many found the architectural style eccentric. (I wasn’t the only one.) This fair elevated Gaudí’s and his colleagues’ reputation by enabling people beyond the border of Cataluña to become familiar with their work.
Victor with two of his older brothers, Louis and Arthur, convened in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition, the first World’s Fair in the United States, to see America’s new technologies and innovations―machines and tools that were shaping the Industrial Revolution and making the country a global leader in innovation. They lingered at booths displaying a telephone, sewing machine, and Type-Writer. Venders sold novelties such as bananas, popcorn, and root beer. Each of the Falkenau boys, studying engineering and building, developed careers in these fields. I wrote about their experience at the Centennial Exhibition and how it influenced Victor’s work at the next World’s Fair in the United States, the World’s Columbian Exhibition here in my Substack “Building Modern Chicago.”
I stumbled across another similarity between Gaudí and Victor on one of the wettest days of our hiking adventure in the Pyrenees. For five hours we had sloshed along the GR11 trail in the rain to reach our destination, the town of Puigcerdà. Gaudí spent a year in this town in 1911 while convalescing from tuberculosis. Here he created the design for the façade of the Sagrada Família.
I thought I’d contract a bronchial infection. We were soaked and shivering.
Victor’s father and oldest brother also suffered from consumption. They and other family members traveled on a steamer from Manhattan to the sunny Portuguese island of Madeira three times over twelve years for two-year stints to seek tuberculosis therapies from the world’s specialists. Given the prevalence of the illness at the time, it’s not a coincidence that both men experienced it as a patient or family member. By the late 19th century, 70 to 90 percent of the urban populations in Europe and North America were infected with the tuberculosis bacillus. Eighty percent of those with an active case died.
One of the most surprising, and disturbing coincidences between my great-grandfather and Gaudí was that they met their demise in the same way on their daily constitutional when they were 73-years old. The forces of nature and technology collided in a tragic ending for each. Each, at distant points on the globe but connected by similar scientific and artistic innovations, left a legacy on architecture of the era.
Fabulous piece. I especially love how you showcase connections from the past and present generations and align the work of Gaudi and Victor through the similarities in their individual styles influenced by social, economic and artistic happenings of their times.
Interesting story. It would have been fascinating if all three had met each other face to face. Imagine the conversations they may have shared over coffee!