Avinguda de Gaudí: The Avenue Between Two Geniuses
Why is it significant?
Walk a few steps onto the avenue and look straight ahead. Between two rows of trees and café terraces, the street runs dead straight, and at its far end, almost a kilometre away, a cluster of domes and spires glows red and gold. Behind you, the Sagrada Família. In front, the Hospital de Sant Pau.
Key Facts
| Place | Avinguda de Gaudí: The Avenue Between Two Geniuses |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda de Gaudí 10, 08025 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40520, 2.17470 |
| Part of Walk | Gaudí's Endless Temple to Domènech's Garden Hospital: Sagrada Família & Sant Pau, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk a few steps onto the avenue and look straight ahead. Between two rows of trees and café terraces, the street runs dead straight, and at its far end, almost a kilometre away, a cluster of domes and spires glows red and gold. Behind you, the Sagrada Família. In front, the Hospital de Sant Pau.
Notice that this avenue cuts the Eixample grid at an angle. It is a diagonal, laid out to link the two great monuments of the neighbourhood, and much of it was later handed over to pedestrians. It carries Gaudí's name, but the building at the other end belongs to his great contemporary, Lluís Domènech i Montaner.
Look at the tall, branching lampposts near the start of the avenue, wrought in iron with clusters of lamps and touches of coloured tile. They were designed by Pere Falqués, the city architect who also gave Passeig de Gràcia its famous tiled benches with lamps. These were made for another corner of the city in the early twentieth century and found a new home on this avenue much later. Barcelona moves its furniture around like a family rearranging the living room.
Now for the human story. Domènech was two years older than Gaudí, and while Gaudí was a student at Barcelona's School of Architecture, Domènech was already teaching there. He later became its director. Legend says that when Gaudí graduated in 1878, the head of the school remarked that they had just given the title either to a madman or to a genius, and that time would tell. It is probably too good to be entirely true... but time did tell.
The two men had very different temperaments. Domènech was a politician, a scholar and a teamworker who ran a workshop of craftsmen. Gaudí was a solitary, deeply religious perfectionist. This avenue is the line between their two worlds. Walk on along it for a few hundred metres, then stop and turn back to look at the towers.