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Peter, you wear many hats — writer, journalist, broadcaster, campaigner. Can you give us a snapshot of your working week? And since this book is all about architecture, where is your personal favourite building and why?
I split my time between writing – as well as books, I am a features writer for the Daily Telegraph and a columnist in the Tablet, the Catholic weekly (long ago I was editor of the Catholic Herald) – and working for the Longford Trust, a charity established in 2002 in memory of prison reformer and politician Lord Longford which supports around 120 young serving and ex-prisoners each year to go to university as part of their rehabilitation.
My favourite building: Gaudí’s buildings are right up there – including the Sagrada Familia, the basilica that has taken 144 years to build and looks like no other church you have ever seen, and the wonderful crypt at Colonia Güell (the church he was building above it was never started because the money ran out but the crypt is extraordinary in itself, half Neanderthal cave with crooked stone pillars holding up the ground above, but also in its modern decoration, its circular arrangement and its futurist vibe somewhat akin to a space ship.
But my heart belongs to Liverpool’s fabulous round Metropolitan (Catholic) Cathedral in my home town, opened in 1969, still looking strikingly modern, like a rocket on a launch pad. The circular crown of stained glass at the centre of the roof fills the building at all times with glorious, in both senses of the word, colours and light.
La Sagrada Família is one of those buildings that stops people in their tracks — including, I've no doubt, many of our customers. You first visited it as a sixth-former on a school trip, and it clearly made an impact. What was it about that first encounter that planted the seed for this book, decades later?
I was 17 and we were taken by the Christian Brothers on a trip to what was there back in 1980 – just one of the three planned facades, the Nativity Façade, and the crypt, a few half built walls, and these four mighty honeycomb towers rising up behind the façade. I’d never seen anything like it. It was as if it was from another planet. And there seemed to be no prospect of it ever being finished.
Who was the man behind this melancholy ruin, I wanted to know? But Gaudí in his lifetime shunned all questions about himself or his inspiration, and since his death that mystery around him has only increased. I was hooked, so much so that almost 50 years later, here I am publishing a book all about him
Five years in the researching and writing — and you've said yourself that Gaudí left behind very few papers and preferred making models to drawing plans. How do you even begin to research a biography of someone who was so deliberately hard to pin down?
I searched out every book and document by anyone who knew him in his lifetime, accessed what few scraps of documents that had survived by him (he only kept a diary for 1 year, 1876 when both his brother and mother died, and even then only managed about 1000 words). He preferred making models to drawing plans of his buildings.
But had he been a novelist, I would have read every page of every one of his novels 10 times over to get to know him. So I applied the same logic and spent several months in Barcelona, where almost all his buildings are, and would visit each one time and time again, picking out new details each time that gave a clue to what he was thinking and doing and imagining at that point in time.
As part of the project you spent time living in Barcelona, can you tell us a little about what that was like and how it helped shape the book?
See above… it also gave my O Level Spanish a severe test, and that was before I realised everyone in the city spoke Catalan.
Gaudi's faith, like so many, was often one of challenges. Did spending 5 years walking alongside him impact your own faith?
After more than 40 years writing (among other things) about religion, religious institutions and people of faith, often Catholics, I hadn’t anticipated quite how uplifting, quietly at first, but more forcefully as I ploughed on, it was to spend time in the company of Antoni Gaudí, and to understand how he lived his faith through the buildings he has bequeathed to us.
There was nothing in him of the fudges, half-measures, side-steps, ‘I’ll-come-back-to-that-later-while-I-have some-fun’ approach that loom large in my own faith. He lived it, with ever greater intensity, and despite his frequent and very human failures to reach the ideals he set himself, he did so in every part of his life.
It was undoubtedly extreme, penitential and even, in secular times, may sound crazy but, while emulating his depth of commitment may be beyond me, Gaudí’s example certainly caught my imagination, and admiration, in a world where so many role models and modern-day saints end up revealing their feet of clay.
This month sees the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death. What do you think he'd make of the millions of tourists who visit La Sagrada Família every year, many of whom have no faith at all, yet still find it completely overwhelming and moving?
Gaudí’s aim, certainly in the last two decades of his life, was that La Sagrada Família would bring people back to God at a time when the gap between rich and poor, the rise of unionism, anarchism and huge political turmoil in Catalunya and across Spain were all dividing people into opposing camps It didn’t work, despite the wonder of the basilica. But he thought that failure was his fault – if only he could somehow recreate the divine perfection of God in his buildings, people would flock back.
So he may not be that surprised if he came back today to see many who visit the basilica having no formal religious ties, but he would, I think, be shocked that they are in the overwhelming majority. Yet he would, too, I believe, like to watch how many without religion react and are moved, transported, made to think afresh by the powerful spirituality, sense of transcendence, that La Sagrada Família exudes, by virtue of the brilliance of his design.
A century on, people are still searching and seeking and needing something more than the material in their life, they just express it differently.
There are often links made between Creativity and faith, from famous authors to musicians and painters - do you have any reflections on why you think that might be?
Gaudí doesn’t fit neatly into any architectural school, any movement, any style. What he imagined and designed and built is so radically different from what others were doing in his lifetime. You have to ask where that imagination came from – he would have said from God.
What that meant was that what he created came from his own deeply Catholic upbringing in the Catalan countryside, the religious rites and rituals, the processions, the saints’ days, the relics and artefacts, and most of all from nature, the natural shapes of his buildings, no straight lines, all curves, no angles Because nature was for him God’s creation, and he drew, he said “on the Book of Nature” as much as he drew on “the Book of God”, in other words the Bible.
As a Christian bookseller I'm always keen to know - what is your favourite Christian book (other than the Bible!) and why?
Oh so many. I see doubt as very much a part of faith so where I turn when I worry that my doubt compromises my faith are the wonderful poems of the Welsh priest-poet RS Thomas. He captures the relationship between God and faith better than anyone. For example in “Counterpoint” - “I think that maybe/I will be a little surer/of being a little nearer./That’s all. Eternity/Is the understanding/That that little is more than enough”
You're an author of several biographies - which character from the Bible would you most like to write one for and why?
I’ve done quite a few already – biographies of Judas, Angels, the Devil that was made into a TV series. I once did a Life of Christ where each section of his life was illustrated by my favourite painting on that theme. Somewhere in the back of my head now I keep thinking I want to write about Lazarus next.
And lastly now 'Gaudi' has launched what's next for Peter Stanford and where's the best place for people to find your work and follow what you're up to?
There is some interest in making a film of Gaudí, highly unlikely but nice to think about and wouldn’t it be amazing. You can find me on my website or via The Longford Trust.
Want to find out more? Grab your copy of Gaudi: God's Architect HERE.
