BSS-IC London Annual Lecture: Gaudi: The Liberated Imagination with John Carlin

Gaudí: The Liberated Imagination with John Carlin
British Spanish Society and Instituto Cervantes London: the annual lecture marking the centenary of the death of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926)

A century after his death, Antoni Gaudí is nearing a double completion. The Sagrada Família, unfinished when a tram struck him down in 1926, is at last approaching its final form; and in 2025 the Vatican declared him Venerable, setting “God’s architect” on the path to sainthood.

This lecture looks beyond the celebrated silhouettes of La Pedrera and Park Güell to the mind and convictions that shaped them. It considers Gaudí as more than a designer of buildings: a Catalan patriot, a man of profound faith, and a thinker who dispensed with the rulebook — reading structure in the branches of a tree and letting gravity draw his arches through models of hanging chains and weights.

About the speaker: John Carlin is a British journalist and author who has reported from Central America, South Africa and the United States for The Independent, and written for The New York Times, the Financial Times and The Observer, among others. He is best known for Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, the book behind Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning film Invictus. A winner of Spain’s Ortega y Gasset journalism prize, he has lived in Barcelona since the late 1990s and writes a regular column for La Vanguardia. He has just completed a book on Barcelona in which Gaudí features prominently.

Antoni Gaudí liberated architecture by first liberating the imagination. Join us to rediscover the intelligence, belief and craft behind the stone.