Antoni Gaudi i Cornet became a Catalan folk hero in his own lifetime, and today his work is among Europe's most widely recognised and revered architecture. His father was a coppersmith, which perhaps gave him his instinctive understanding both of the different properties of the materials that he used, and the workmanship of the craftsmen who helped to achieve his astonishing buildings. He became a deeply religious man whose respect for natural forms is implicit in his work, and who believed that the long realisation of his masterpiece, the church of the Sagrada Familia, was in itself a continuing act of worship. This account traces the development of an extraordinary genius, from his time as an architecture student in Barcelona, through the fruitful patronage of his friend Eusebi Guell i Bacigalupi at a time of unprecedented vitality and inventiveness in his native city, to the eventual completion of his grandest design which now appears almost within reach.