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José Manuel Almuzara devoted a lecture at El Círcol de Reus to Antoni Gaudí's relationship with nature, as part of the Gaudí Year marking the centenary. Agència Flama, a Catalan Christian news agency, published its report on 20 January 2026 under a headline that sums up the argument: Gaudí did not copy nature, he drew out its laws.
The lecture «Gaudí i la natura» («Gaudí and Nature») was part of the Gaudí Year (Any Gaudí), which commemorates the centenary of the architect's death in 1926. José Manuel Almuzara, an architect and president of the Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí, gave it at El Círcol de Reus, a short distance from Riudoms, where Gaudí spent his childhood. The journalist Xavier Pete wrote the report for Agència Flama, which published it on 20 January 2026 under the headline «Gaudí no copiava la natura: n'extreia les lleis» («Gaudí did not copy nature: he drew out its laws»). The piece concentrates on the substance of the talk: how Gaudí learned to look at the natural world and what he did with what he saw.
Almuzara presented nature as Gaudí's great teacher. According to the report, the architect's gift for observation was born in his childhood at the Mas de la Calderera, the family's farmhouse in Riudoms. As a boy he learned early to look closely at what lay around him, and that habit stayed with him in his work as an architect. For the speaker, this is the root of a body of work now studied as an example of architecture inspired by nature. What Gaudí learned in the countryside around Riudoms he later applied, on a grand scale, in Barcelona.
The central idea of the lecture is the one Flama chose for its headline. In Almuzara's account, Gaudí did not imitate nature: he discovered the laws that order it and carried them into his architecture. The distinction matters, because whoever copies reproduces an appearance, while whoever discovers a law can apply it to new problems. The speaker summed it up with an idea that runs through Gaudí's work: «true originality consists in returning to the origin». Returning to the origin, in that sense, means turning to nature to learn from it before designing. Almuzara offered that idea as a key to reading Gaudí's buildings.
The lecture also took up the cause of beatification, which Almuzara has promoted since 1992. As Flama reports, he explained that the process began in Riudoms and passed to the Archdiocese of Barcelona about three years ago. Gaudí has been Venerable since April 2025, and the step to beatification requires the recognition of a miracle attributed to his intercession. Almuzara expressed his hope that the cause will culminate in beatification and announced a book of his devoted to Gaudí's thought. He also left a personal remark, which the report quotes in Catalan: «Sense Gaudí no soc res ni ningú» («Without Gaudí I am nothing and no one»). These are the words of a man who has spent more than thirty years making Gaudí known.