Barcelona is marking 100 years since the death of Antoni Gaudí, with a new initiative aimed at moving beyond tourist clichés and re-evaluating his architectural legacy. Galdric Santana, commissioner of the Gaudí Year and director of the UPC’s Gaudí Chair, is leading the effort, according to El País Barcelona.
Santana says Gaudí’s principle that “originality consists of returning to the origin” still speaks to modern challenges, including climate change and globalisation. He points to Casa Vicenç as an example, noting its orientation to the sun and its way of linking indoor and outdoor spaces, features he says remain relevant today.
At Casa Vicenç, Santana also highlighted details that are easy to miss, including floral tile motifs that reflect the species of flower that grew on the site before construction, and inscriptions on the inner façade that include traditional Catalan verses. He argues these elements show Gaudí’s close study of place, where every line and ornament had a function. “It is a way of understanding architecture that uses science and the latest technological innovations of the era to turn them into art or apply them to art. Gaudí did not make gestures,” Santana told El País Barcelona.
Despite that depth, Gaudí is often reduced to a visual symbol for Barcelona and Catalonia, shaped more by tourism than by context. Santana chose Casa Vicenç, one of Gaudí’s less famous works compared with Casa Batlló or the Sagrada Família, to encourage a more intimate reading of the architect’s ideas. For background on the wider city context, see our news coverage.
Art historian Mireia Freixa, emeritus professor at the University of Barcelona, has also worked to demystify Gaudí by presenting him as a product of his time. She said he felt deeply Catalan, valued the land, and was strongly opposed to the Spanish programme of political, linguistic and cultural standardisation that followed the Nueva Planta. Freixa added that he aligned with the Catalanist cultural ideology of his era, including a Catholic and Catalan homeland in which religion and national identity reinforced each other.
Gaudí’s image has also been shaped by politics. The Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime pushed Catalan expressions, including his work, into folkloric stereotypes, and later periods each produced their own version of Gaudí. In the early Francoist years he was recast as an apolitical Catholic genius, while from the 1960s he was presented as a modern, eccentric figure. During the Pujol era, his Catalanism was used to support the autonomist project, and under Olympic Barcelona he became a non-controversial tourist attraction. The independence movement later promoted a more anti-Spanish reading of his life, including anecdotes about his clash with Miguel de Unamuno and his arrest for refusing to stop speaking Catalan to a police officer.
Tourism remains another challenge. Gaudí’s buildings draw large numbers of visitors at a time when over-tourism is a major issue in Catalonia, and the scale of the promotional machinery can make it harder to engage with the work itself. David Bestué, a contemporary artist working in sculpture and architecture, said the saturation has created an instinctive disinterest in Gaudí among his generation, seeing him as part of the status quo that artists often resist.