Casa Batlló
Gaudí transformed an ordinary apartment building into something resembling a sea creature or a dragon. The façade is covered in glass mosaic, the balconies look like masks and the roof like a dragon’s back. Catalan Modernisme, the Spanish variant of Art Nouveau, in its most imaginative form.
The textile industrialist Josep Batlló bought an apartment building from the 1870s on the Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona’s most prestigious street, and at first wanted to demolish it. Antoni Gaudí persuaded him to remodel it instead, and the work went on in 1904–1906. Gaudí added a storey, reworked the light well, designed an entirely new street façade and renewed the floor where the family itself lived. He worked with traditional Catalan techniques: stone from Montjuïc, wrought iron, tiles and trencadís, a mosaic of broken pieces of tile and glass. His collaborator Josep Maria Jujol helped with the colours of the façade. Gaudí seldom worked from detailed drawings but from models and from work on site, and the craftsmen shaped much directly according to his instructions.
The façade has almost no straight lines. On the lower floors the large windows are supported by columns that resemble bones, and the building has been nicknamed the House of Bones. The cast-iron balconies resemble masks or skulls, and the wall between them shimmers with glass and tiles in blue and green. The roof is covered with glazed tiles like scales, with a curved ridge usually interpreted as the dragon in the legend of Saint George, while the tower with its cross is the knight’s lance. Inside, the light well is lined with tiles that are dark blue at the top and lighter further down, so that daylight is evenly distributed. Doors, handles and window frames are softly shaped to fit the hand, and the attic has a series of parabolic arches in whitewashed brick.
Casa Batlló stands in the block known as the Mansana de la Discòrdia, where three of the leading architects of Modernisme remodelled houses next to one another around 1900. The Batlló family left the house in the mid-20th century, and it then passed through various owners. In the 1990s it was bought by a family who restored it and opened it to visitors. Since 2005 it has been part of the World Heritage Site of the Works of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. The house has become one of the city’s most visited buildings and an example of how a remodelling, not just a new building, can become a masterpiece. Catalan Modernisme was part of the same European movement as Art Nouveau in Sweden, but it went further in its sculptural forms and its use of colour.