Radio Interview
"Gaudí is not an almost spiritual figure, but wholly human and spiritual at the same time. He lived the human and the divine in unity"
ESSENCEmag interviewed José Manuel Almuzara on 6 June 2026, four days before the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death and the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Barcelona. The architect presents his essay «Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma» (Gaudí, the Architect of the Soul) and argues that in the Catalan genius the man, the architect and the Christian cannot be separated.
The interview appeared on 6 June 2026 in ESSENCEmag, as the world was preparing for the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death, on 10 June, and for the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Barcelona. The occasion was the arrival in bookshops of «Gaudí, el arquitecto del alma», José Manuel Almuzara's new book, an intimate and reflective essay on the architect's human, ethical and spiritual dimension. A graduate of the Barcelona School of Architecture and president for more than three decades of the Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí, Almuzara offers a reading focused less on the myth and more on the man.
Asked at what point Gaudí ceased to be an architect for him and became an almost spiritual figure, Almuzara corrects the premise: «Gaudí is not an almost spiritual figure, but wholly human and spiritual at the same time. He lived the human and the divine in unity». That discovery came, he explains, when he grasped the union of architecture and symbolism throughout Gaudí's work, civil and religious, a depth that springs from an exemplary life: love of work, of his workmen, of his family, of his country, of nature —which he considered his teacher— and of his religious practice. To sum it up he turns to words of Benedict XVI, according to whom Gaudí «overcame the split between human consciousness and Christian consciousness, between temporal existence and openness to eternal life, between the beauty of things and God as Beauty».
"Work is the fruit of collaboration, and that collaboration can only be based on love"
The book distinguishes three inseparable dimensions: Gaudí the man, with his joys and sacrifices; Gaudí the architect, a pioneer in applying the laws of nature and a forerunner of sustainability; and Gaudí the Christian, who placed his gifts at the service of God and of others with humility and charity. Almuzara recalls that the architect saw himself as an instrument with gifts received from God and that he used to say that «useful things are not done with an eye to reward». Hence his demands on himself and his deep care, professional and personal, for his workmen, whom he knew one by one. That is the lesson he says he did not learn at university: «Work is the fruit of collaboration, and that collaboration can only be based on love».
When pointing to the moment that most reveals Gaudí's vision of the world, Almuzara has no doubt: the Sagrada Família, a work that, in Gaudí's words, «is made by the people and is reflected in them». His faith and his bond with nature led him, at the end of his life, to take refuge in the basilica and to abandon almost all civil work, proof that architecture and faith were inseparable for him. If he had to sum it up in a single image, he chooses the keystone that closes the vault of the Sagrada Família crypt: a symbol of Mary's «yes» at the Annunciation and of the union between faith, architecture and salvation.
"His architecture is not only looked at: it is also lived"
As for the fascination Gaudí still arouses more than a century later, Almuzara attributes it to a man ahead of his time —a pioneer of sustainability and architectural biomimicry long before those concepts existed— and to something that cannot be explained by reason alone: a spiritual dimension that moves even those far from the faith. Many of them, he says, have had a spiritual experience while contemplating his works: «His architecture is not only looked at: it is also lived». What is essential, he insists, remains to be discovered: the «whys» and the «what fors» of a body of work that sought to reveal something transcendent. That same conviction sustains the cause of beatification Almuzara has driven for more than thirty years.