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What made Antoni Gaudí's genius possible? Of course, this was an extraordinary man with vision and one of the most talented architects in recent history but would he have thrived today as he did a hundred years ago?
What definitely helped Gaudí to realize his dreams were three things: the lifting of the building sanctions imposed by Madrid, the Catalan drive to assert itself on the world's stage and the wealth to finance all the construction projects.
The building style of Gaudí and his Catalan contemporaries such as Lluís Domènech i Montaner is called Modernista but also goes by the name of Art Nouveau or Jugendstil: "the aim being to give aesthetic value to practical objects". Keep an eye on this newsletter to learn more about the Gaudí legacy in issues to come.
Whilst Barcelona underwent its Modernista facelift, its underbelly was getting more dirty and rebelious. Fueled by the industrialisation of the city, the population grew from 100.000 in 1800 to more than a million in 1930. Anarchists, nationalists and socialists all fought to control the new city. Gaudí was too busy working on his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, and died an untimely death run over by a tram in 1926.
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