Escoles de la Sagrada Família: Gaudí's Wavy School
Why is it significant?
Find the low brick building at the corner of the site, so small beside the towers that many visitors walk straight past it. Then look at its roof. It ripples. The walls ripple too, in and out, like a curtain moving in a breeze.
Key Facts
| Place | Escoles de la Sagrada Família: Gaudí's Wavy School |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Mallorca 401 (corner of Carrer de Sardenya), 08013 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40300, 2.17420 |
| Part of Walk | Gaudí's Endless Temple to Domènech's Garden Hospital: Sagrada Família & Sant Pau, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the low brick building at the corner of the site, so small beside the towers that many visitors walk straight past it. Then look at its roof. It ripples. The walls ripple too, in and out, like a curtain moving in a breeze.
These are the Escoles de la Sagrada Família, the schools, built by Gaudí in 1909 for the children of the men working on the temple and of the families in the neighbourhood. It was meant to be temporary and it had to be cheap, so he used the humblest material there is: thin, flat Catalan bricks, laid in a few layers. And then he made them do something extraordinary.
The trick is geometry. Each wave of the roof and the walls is a surface made entirely of straight lines, arranged so that together they curve. A curved surface is stiffer than a flat one, so a wall barely the thickness of a few bricks can stand on its own, and the roof sheds rainwater down its own valleys. When the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier visited Barcelona in 1928, he stopped here and sketched it in his notebook. The prophet of concrete boxes, drawing a brick wave.
The building has had a hard life. It was burned during the violence of 1936, at the beginning of the Civil War, and later restored. It has been taken apart and moved more than once, to make room for the growing basilica, and it arrived at this corner in 2002. Today it holds an exhibition about the school and about how Gaudí taught himself, and others, to think in curves.
There is something touching about this little building. Next to the greatest construction project in Spain, the first thing Gaudí made for the neighbourhood was a classroom. Now cross Carrer de Sardenya into the garden square opposite, and turn around to face the angular, almost skeletal façade above you.