What made him become the man that he ended up being?
Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was born on June 25, 1852 in Reus, the capital of the Baix Camp region, a region of southern Catalonia. The mother of Gaudí, Antònia Cornet i Bertran, was the daughter of a specialist in the manufacture of boilers, like the father of the architect, Francesc Gaudí i Serra, a boilermaker from Riudoms, a small town located a few kilometers from Reus.
Gaudí lived with his parents and two older brothers, Rosa and Francesc, in a modest house in the center of Reus, although he often moved to Riudoms, where the family owned a farm called Mas de la Calderera. After beginning his primary studies in a school run by Francesc Berenguer, father of one of his future collaborators, in 1863 Antoni Gaudí enrolled in the Pious Schools of Reus, where he met two of his best childhood friends, Josep Ribera Sans and Eduard Toda i Güell, with whom he collaborated in the publication of the satirical magazine El Arlequín and in the writing of a utopian project to restore the monastery of Poblet.
But he was a sick child, suffering from rheumatic fever, which forced him to spend a lot of time in Riudoms, in the countryside, unable to follow classes. On the other hand, Antonio Gaudí helped his father in the boilermaking workshop. He learned from him the virtues of work and the transformation of surfaces into volume, which greatly facilitated his spatial imagination.
This fact allowed the young Antoni Gaudí to acquire a special ability to deal with space and volume while helping his father and grandfather in the family workshop.
His ease at the time of conceiving the spaces and the transformation of materials prospered until becoming the genius of the creation in three dimensions that later would prove to be.
In 1868, Gaudí moved to Barcelona to finish his baccalaureate studies. The future architect settled in the bustling neighborhood of La Ribera with his brother Francesc, who was then studying a career in medicine.
In 1874, Gaudí was accepted at the School of Architecture. The young man alternated his studies with his first forays into the professional world, collaborating with established architects such as Josep Fontserè, Francisco de Paula del Villar and, above all, Joan Martorell, his main mentor. Gaudí’s progress was overshadowed in 1876 by the death of his brother and his mother. Three years later, her sister also died, whose daughter – who suffered serious health problems – was taken into custody by the architect and her father.
