Gaudí’s dreams

Occasionally, Antoni Gaudí’s eternal Sagrada Família captures the attention of the media. These days, with the illumination of the towers of the four Evangelists and yet another announcement of the postponement of its completion, 140 years after construction began, the photograph accompanying these lines takes on a special significance.

Some people pass through the world leaving an indelible mark with their discoveries and creations—people who have always fascinated us. Not only because of the legacy they leave behind, which endures for generations, but also because their very existence, the way they passionately lived their profession, powerfully draws our attention. It’s as if we could decipher their eccentric genius by observing what they ate, read, or the places they frequented.

The photograph shows a corner of the workshop where Gaudí worked, his atelier at the foot of the Sagrada Família. It features a bed—or more accurately, a rolled-up, partially propped-up mattress—surrounded by clutter and plaster models.

It is known that Gaudí had a residence in Park Güell after having lived in Barcelona’s Eixample district. Initially, he decided to set up a bed in his studio to spend the night there during storms, after experiencing falls when returning to the park at night in the rain. It must have been quite an odyssey to travel from Mallorca Street to the barren hill of Can Coll over a century ago—a remoteness that likely discouraged the wealthy classes who were intended to reside in that garden city.

As time went by, the work on the temple consumed him to such an extent that what began as an occasional arrangement became his routine during the last decade of his life. Gaudí practically never left his studio, dedicating himself body and soul to creating the basilica.

Surrounded by blueprints, sculptures, and plaster models, the architect would lie down each night immersed in the challenges of conceiving his great life project.

Gaudí did not want collaborators in his studio beyond half a working day. He needed the rest of the time to resolve geometric intersections, make strategic decisions, or adjust the course of his plans. He also often visited artisans working on forging or stone, or invited all sorts of people—mostly destitute individuals—to pose as models for the sculptures that would adorn the temple’s interiors and façades.

The bed is typically a place where we rest our worries and troubles and where we often resolve them.

But at night, he would retreat to his bed, taking with him models and other project materials, using a long wooden table as a desk to eke out the last minutes of work each day.

We can imagine his apprentices waking the master each morning, absorbed in his revelatory dreams, where he conceived spaces and glimpsed impossible places. Viewed this way, the bed was just another element of his studio—a vital instrument for capturing those things that reveal themselves only on the brink of sleep.

The bed was also where the French writer Georges Perec constructed his decalogue of species of spaces, drawing a fitting parallel between the sheet of paper he wrote on and his own cot, of very similar proportions.

Or consider the bed at Paris’s Hôtel d’Alsace, where Gaudí’s contemporary, Oscar Wilde, wrote his last words, and where he eventually died, stricken by a severe meningitis that weakened his health after two years of infamous imprisonment in London.

The bed is typically a place where we rest our worries and troubles and where we often resolve them. Dawn is the precise moment to capture these thoughts on paper, lest we forget them forever. Gaudí undoubtedly understood this, going to sleep with a pencil in hand.