Casa Batlló

Antoni Gaudí (Spanish Architect, 1852-1926)

Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Spain

1904-1906 (alteration)

20th century

Architecture and City Planning

apartment houses

dwellings

residential structures

Art Nouveau

Twentieth century

Spanish

sandstone

wrought iron

glazed ceramic tile

construction (assembling)

architecture

decorative arts

Modernisme

Roof design detailing, The Casa Batllo reveals Gaudi's confidence and skill in remodelling an existing building. He added a floor to the original Neo-classical five-storey town house and clothed ground and first floors in stone in fantastic, fluid lines like an eroded outcrop of rock. This curvilinear stonework conceals the original rectangular windows within mask-like openings, which are echoed in the iron balustrades of the balconies above. The higher levels of the redesigned facade are covered in an abstract tile mosaic, and the whole undulates upwards to a parapet that is like a wavecrest and changes colour from end to end. Parapet and roof forms echo the gable that dominates the adjoining house by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, but the roof of the Casa Batllo curves in three dimensions and is covered with green ceramic tiles like the scales of a great sea monster. On the fifth floor there is also a tiny roof-garden from which a circular turret rises to break through the parapet. Inside the house, the curved forms of the stairway and its path up through the building in its skylit, blue and white ceramic-tiled stair-well add to the dynamic analogy.

Javier Gomez

Javier Gomez

© Javier Gomez

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