Lost works and those that were never built

There's a reason why this page is more uncertain than the others, and it's best to put it at the beginning. On July 20, 1936, in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Gaudí's workshop at the Sagrada Família was raided and set on fire: plans and photographs were burned, and the plaster models were destroyed. With them, a significant part of the visual record of everything that had not yet been built was lost.

The consequence is uncomfortable, but it must be said: of the unrealized projects, almost nothing is original. Much of what circulates as "a drawing by Gaudí" is actually the work of collaborators, or reconstructions made decades later from memory. A catalog that does not distinguish between these three things is stating falsehoods without being wrong about a single date.

Gaudí created things that can no longer be seen today, and in some cases, their disappearance tells the story of the city better than the buildings that remain. A shop that closed upon the death of its owner, a bar that was replaced in the 1930s, streetlights that were removed due to disrepair.

There are also partial losses, which are the most difficult to quantify because the building is still standing. The Casa Vicens lost its monumental waterfall in 1946, and its plot of land went from more than 1,700 square meters to just over 700. The entire estate of the Portal Miralles was demolished around 1965, and the iron cross that is seen today is a replica. In the Park Güell, the three crosses at the highest point were destroyed in 1936, and the current ones date from 1939.

It is Gaudí's most famous unbuilt project, reproduced in books and exhibitions, and its documentation is more fragile than most people realize. It deserves to be explained carefully, as it is the best example of how an attribution is constructed.

The story goes that around 1908, two American entrepreneurs, whose names are unknown, commissioned a hotel from Gaudí for New York. The news was not made public until 1956, thirty years after his death, and it was revealed by the sculptor Joan Matamala i Flotats, who had grown up in the workshop.

When consulting the archive of the chair that houses the collection, you find fifteen items related to the Hotel Attraction. All fifteen have the same name in the author field: Joan Matamala. Four of them are dated 1952. In the Gaudí archive, there is not a single drawing of the Hotel Attraction attributed to Gaudí.

That doesn't prove that the commission didn't exist: the file burned, and the absence of a document never proves the absence of a fact. But there is a second argument, which is more uncomfortable. Josep Francesc Ràfols, who managed the entire studio's archive to write his monograph, and Isidre Puig i Boada, who saw those drawings before they were destroyed, never wrote a single line about the project. It also doesn't appear in the 1910 exhibition in Paris, nor in the 1927 retrospective, nor in the obituaries.

The honest formulation is not "the disciples said it was false." It is this: the disciples, who had seen the file, never mentioned it. And the height of 360 meters, which is repeated everywhere, comes from Matamala's recollection, not from a Gaudí document.

It was not built for two reasons: the Holy See's reservations about such a lavish project for an order that takes a vow of poverty, and the economic crisis that followed the Margallo War in 1893. Of the entire project, the archive preserves a black and white photograph. The original drawings were destroyed in the fire.

The strangest case on this list is a work that can be visited, but only in a fifth of its intended size. The crypt of the Colònia Güell, in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, is the ground floor of a church that was supposed to have an oval floor plan of 25 by 63 meters, five naves, side towers, and a dome forty meters high. None of that was ever built.

When construction stopped and why is a point where sources disagree: the monument itself states that in 1914, Eusebi Güell's children informed Gaudí that they would no longer finance the project, other sources date the halt in 1915, and the final abandonment is placed in 1918. What is clear is that it was not the death of Count Güell that stopped the project: Güell died in July 1918, years later. This is an error that several encyclopedias perpetuate.

Gaudí said that, once completed, that church would have been a monumental model of the Sagrada Família. You can see the part that exists on the Gaudí Crypt and Colònia Güell page.

The digitized collection of the archive that preserves Gaudí's materials contains 206 items. Of these, 138 are attributed to Joan Matamala, and only 22 to Gaudí. The rest are distributed among Jujol, Bergós, Berenguer, and others.

That distribution doesn't mean that there's little left of Gaudí: the paper archive of the chair contains approximately 100,000 documents, and only a portion of it has been digitized. What it says is something else, which is more useful: the online collection of original graphic materials is limited, and anyone who reproduces a "Gaudí drawing" found on the internet should check who signed it.

It's also the reason why this website distinguishes, piece by piece, between what is documented and what is simply repeated. When it comes to Gaudí, it's not about being pedantic; it's about the difference between describing his work and recounting his legend.