Casa Batlló
VRA Core
Title
Casa Batlló
Agent
Antoni Gaudí (Spanish Architect, 1852-1926)
Location
Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
43, Passeig de Gracia
Date
1904-1906 (alteration)
20th century
Style Period
Art Nouveau
Twentieth century
Cultural Context
Spanish
Worktype
buildings
dwellings
multiple dwellings
apartment houses
Material
sandstone
wrought iron
glazed ceramic tile
Technique
construction (assembling)
Subject
43.556667
architecture
decorative arts
Modernisme
Description
Fireplace covered in fireproof ceramic tile in one of the anterooms
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.
Rights
© Javier Gomez
ID
GOMEZAT4704
Source
Javier Gomez
State Edition
35 mm slides
Collection
Citation
Gaudí, Antoni, Casa Batlló, 1904-1906 (alteration), Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, TTU Arch Design Images. Image Source: Javier Gomez. https://archimage.lib.ttu.edu/items/show/11889.
Item Relations
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