Gaudí Year: everything you still don't know about the genius (and don't know it)

BarcelonaThe Year of Gaudí has begun. The dozens of institutions and organizations that manage Antoni Gaudí's works throughout Spain have joined forces to commemorate the centenary of the architect's death (1852-1926). The Catalan government has promoted the official commemoration and allocated an extraordinary budget of 6.5 million euros. The Ministry of Culture has also declared it a Special Event of Public Interest. The objective of the Year of Gaudí, curated by architect Galdric Santana, director of the Gaudí Chair at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is not so much to project a widely recognized and visited legacy to the world—the Sagrada Familia and Park Güell alone receive 10 million visitors a year—but rather to offer a perspective that hints at everything.

"There are some ideas about Gaudí that we all mistakenly assume," says the curator. "For example, it's said that he was inspired by nature, but that's a misconception. What he does is observe the scientific laws of nature, not nature itself, and apply them to a leaf or a snail, but his objective wasn't mimicry of nature but rather how nature generates itself." This in-depth and rigorous perspective is what the Gaudí Year 2026 aims to offer anew, after the Gaudí Year 2002 marked the explosion of popularity and global acclaim for the modernist architect.

The two central events of the Gaudí Year, for which all Gaudí-related organizations have agreed, aim to "generate lasting knowledge," says Santana: "We want everything produced to have significance and avoid ephemeral events." On the one hand, they have announced an exhibition at the Museum of the History of Catalonia, Gaudí, the invisible order –in the second half of 2026–, which will focus on "contributions that are absolutely unprecedented today," explains the curator of the Gaudí Year, who will also be the curator of the exhibition. This will set it apart from the major exhibition on the architect that was held four years ago in the National Art Museum of CataloniaOn the other hand, an international scientific congress will be held at La Pedrera – from June 28 to July 2 – in which all the new local and international research on Gaudí's work will be validated.

One of the goals of the Gaudí Year, in addition to promoting scientific study and leveraging new audiovisual tools to make the complexity of his architecture accessible to all audiences, is also to explain Gaudí's unbuilt and lost works. "There is a large body of planned but unbuilt works, from the Franciscan Missions in Tangier to the Güell hunting lodge in Garraf, including the buildings he designed as a student and the lampposts in Vic's Plaça Major, which have disappeared," explains Santana. One of the major obstacles to studying Gaudí is that his studio, located in the Sagrada Família, crammed with plans and drawings, burned down in 1936, and therefore a large part of the genius's documentary heritage was lost. Architects and researchers now have to reconstruct and define it with great difficulty. "It's said that he didn't make plans. Of course he did, like everyone else, or even more so, but we have the misfortune of not having preserved them all," explains the director of the Gaudí Chair.

A schedule that will be expanded

The Gaudí Year will kick off on November 8th in the towns where the architect was born and spent his childhood: Riudoms and Reus. In the town where Gaudí's father worked as a coppersmith, a festive parade will take place featuring elements representative of Gaudí's architecture. The official opening ceremony will be held in Reus, the capital of the Baix Camp region, where a performance by Pulga Espectáculos will also be presented, explaining the architect's origins through music, performing arts, and technology. Although the Gaudí Year begins this autumn, there are still dozens of events to be added to the commemoration for 2026. The Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, has announced concerts, guided tours, activities, educational projects, and up to thirty registered participants. on the official website"We want it to be a participatory, open commemoration with an international reach, spread throughout the territory. A national commemoration to showcase Gaudí as a universal genius and Catalonia as a land of culture and creativity, connecting heritage and future, innovation and tradition."

Antoni Gaudí is the architect with the most works on UNESCO's World Heritage List, with seven buildings in Barcelona and its surrounding areas, added in two phases, in 1984 and 2005. But there are a number of works that are far less visited, studied, and known, both within and outside Catalonia—in Lleó. It's time to shine a light on them. "We want to explain Gaudí's universal value. There's no distinction between major and minor works: they are all major works," says Santana. Behind the Gaudí Year is the Antoni Gaudí Council, an advisory body of the Department of Culture created in 2014 to celebrate the centenary. It brings together the fourteen Gaudí works located in Catalonia and other Gaudí-related institutions. The Gaudí Chair at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) will coordinate the technical office for the Gaudí Year and lead the four annual joint events (opening, closing, congress, and exhibition). Beyond that, each work and institution will organize the year as it sees fit, the curator explained, should they wish to offer open houses or other events. For example, the Torre de Bellesguard, one of Gaudí's lesser-known works, which has had a research group directed by Galdric Santana himself for the past fifteen years, will present its first monograph. And the Sagrada Família will... an exhibition about the tower of San Bernabé, the only one that Gaudí saw completed.