Gaudi
Gaudi, the Spanish architect from Barcelona, can be seen as a visionary of architecture but also of structures. His greatness as an architect is to be found in a prolific invention of forms and ways to study structures, especially vaulted ones.
When he received his architect diploma, the director of his School of architecture said from him: “I don´t know if I gave a diploma to a genius or a mad man”.
Mad man, surely not. Gaudi was a genius of a special kind. He found and developed a way to evaluate the stability of vaulted structures. The optimisation method developed by the Earth Institute has been inspired by his findings.
He was born in 1852 and his life time has been very prolific. His quest for perfection made him redo many times a design, until he was entirely satisfied. It is amazing to see how fast he could work and how many works he could handle at the same time.
He passed away in 1926, run over by a tramway, leaving to followers the completion of his greatest project, the Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Familia.
