The Year dedicated to the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí was officially opened in Spain on 20 March. The ceremony in the town hall of Barcelona, which inaugurated the events celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great architect (1852-1926), was attended by Queen Sofia of Spain, the President of Catalogna Jordi Pujol and the architects Oriol Bohigas, Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki. “Constructor of the Catalan identity” according to Pujol, Gaudí was also a man of profound faith; indeed many hope that the process for his beatification will be opened in this anniversary year. The journalist J.J. Navarro Arisa, author of the most recent biography, “Gaudí the Architect of God”, calls him “a solid candidate for sainthood”, who “by his work as an architect set himself the task of continuing the divine creation”. According to the journalist, the religious dimension of Gaudí was profoundly marked by the idea of “original nature and land” and of a Catalogna recovered from the past”.
