Eusebi Guell

Eusebi Guell Bacigalupi, 1st Count of Guell, who lived from 15 December 1846 to 8 July 1918, was a Spanish entrepreneur who profited greatly from the industrial revolution in Catalonia during the late nineteenth century. Following a visit to the 1878 Paris World Fair, where he saw the young architect Antoni Gaudi's work at the Spanish Pavilion, Guell sought Gaudi out, and the two became lifelong friends and collaborators who shared an interest in religion and design. Over the following decades Guell became Gaudi's most important patron, commissioning the Bodega Guell winery at Garraf, the Pabellones Guell estate buildings at Pedralbes, the Colonia Guell industrial settlement at Santa Coloma de Cervello with its distinctive crypt and church, and Park Guell, a hillside park in Barcelona originally conceived as a private garden city for the Guell family before being handed over to the city. Their working relationship is remembered in an exchange Gaudi reportedly made to Guell, that they might be the only people who liked Gaudi's architecture, to which Guell replied that he did not like it so much as respect it. Through this decades-long patronage Guell gave Gaudi the freedom and resources to develop the distinctive style that made him Catalonia's most celebrated architect.