Antoni Gaudi has a reputation as monastic, mad and hermetic. But the architect of many of the buildings that define Barcelona's cityscape was no mad eccentric. He was a genius inspired by his faith in nature and the divine.

Picking up the same strands of eclecticism and art nouveau current in fin de siecle European architecture, he transformed them into an idiom unique to himself and Barcelona to create a series of buildings as revolutionary in their engineering as they were astonishing for their spaces. For Gaudi his work was his life, and this book reveals the exuberant world and groundbreaking work of this unique figure in the history of modern architecture.