Antonio Gaudi
...f important Barcelona builders such as Martorell and de Villar. He attained almost immediate success as an architect and from then on based almost all his creations within Barcelona. Antonio is regarded as one of the most innovative and visionary architect in the world who rewrote the language of architecture. He was not only an architect, but a landscaper, designer, sculptor, ceramist and ‘collagist’. His greatness lies in his prolific invention of forms. It is difficult to divide Gaudi’s highly individualized buildings into styles because he wanted to grow away from historical styles in search of personal expressionism. However, he can be considered as a gothic, a baroque, a romantic, a rationalist and even a surrealist. Gaudi was influenced by his interest in Moslem art, Gothic architecture and pursuit of nature and its forms. He was also exposed to Spanish Art Nouveau, the elegant and unified style that flourished from the early 1880s to the beginning of WWI. Thus he was interested in creating ornamental, sinuous lines based on the natural forms of fauna and flora in some of his works. His diverse and expressive forms were a result of unusual structural devices, an imaginative deployment of materials and a unique sense of decoration- three traditional attr...