Barcelona made amends. Immediately, the entire city grieved. Gaudi received what was to all intents and purposes a state funeral. Equally immediately, he was spoken of as a saint, and today there are official moves to beatify him. Yet he was a fringe player: in global terms he was an equivalent to Glasgow's Charles Rennie Mackintosh, hitting that turn-of-the-century moment in a peripheral industrial city that briefly decided to express itself through radical architecture. The book does not draw this parallel and perhaps does not need to, since what Gaudi designed, built and dreamed was way beyond anything that Mackintosh or his set were capable of. But a saint?

He had chosen to live in poverty and (after being disappointed in love as a young dandy) celibacy. For most of his life he dined on lettuce leaves dipped in milk. He was a fervently conservative Roman Catholic at a time of profound anti-clerical feeling - so profound that in one week in 1909 dozens of Barcelona convents, churches and religious schools were burnt to the ground. Dead nuns were disinterred and carried through the streets on the shoulders of rioters. Yet the Sagrada Familia and its architect were spared - then. It took Franco's supporters to desecrate it, and his grave there, in 1936.

He was a committed Catalan at a time of enormous and almost perpetual political turmoil. He refused to speak Castilian Spanish, preferring his own native language. Some of his wealthy private clients were over-powerful individuals who effectively controlled the city and the province and thus became the focus of sectarian hatred. He was plain-speaking to the point of rudeness. All these things were dangerous to a greater or lesser extent - even his hermit's diet, which at one point infected him with him brucellosis. But none was so dangerous, as it turned out, as his dogged belief that Barcelona's notoriously ill-braked tramcars should give way to pedestrians.

His architecture was both doom-laden and ecstatic. At times it was structurally audacious to the point of collapse. In his work, the organic motifs of the Art Nouveau movement merged with a potent blend of religious and political symbolism as Gaudi evolved an autonomous, wholly Catalan architecture. He started off as part of a group of architects in the city who applied themselves to the so-called "modernista" style - which has nothing to do with what we now think of as modernism. His rivals are now perhaps unfairly eclipsed, but then again, Gaudi went further than any of them.