In the first years of the last century, long before London, Paris and New York were the smart names to put on the outside of a perfume box, Vienna, Brussels and Barcelona held court as the centres of cultural desire. Ever since the Renaissance it has been money as much as art that created such places, and Barcelona was no exception: the newly rich textile industry provided the atmosphere in which the arts could prosper and flourish.
In the fashionable Paseo de Gracia, just up the street from the Ramblas, the architect Antoni Gaudí was at work on the remodelling of a house for the industrialist Josep Batlló – the planners had refused to let them demolish the one already standing there. In those days Barcelona’s most extravagant fiesta – the carnival that signalled the coming of Lent – passed along this very avenue, and under Gaudí’s creative hand its colour and movement seemed to flow upwards into the house that was intended to declare that Señor Batlló was a Catalan and a man of substance.
The front wall is dressed in a mosaic curtain of coloured glass with discs and bubbles that give it an underwater Monet effect – every square foot could be taken and framed. Upper rooms peer out from behind shining harlequin masks of balconies, while on the lower levels stained-glass sequins, like the fringe on a costume, dangle in the windows, filtering the sun. At street and first-floor levels the windows are framed by eroded stone bones with flowering knuckles, no less full of life and vigour. Gaudí saw nature as the source of originality – its purposes are always practical, yet it rarely employs straight lines. Nor did he: the exterior and interior forms of Casa Batlló have a natural unity that gives a balance more to do with sculpture than with housebuilding.
Gaudí was then 50 and at the peak of his career. He had been ‘borrowed’ by Batlló from his fellow industrialist and friend, Count Güell, for whom the architect was working on a project to develop an English garden suburb, called Parc Güell, in Barcelona. Already he had built several houses that declared elements of his intensely individual style, but in general they were eclectic, drawing on the past. Their character was recognisable; they could be understood. All that changed, however, with Casa Batlló. From then on everything that Gaudí created was to contain a confrontation of strangely varied elements, provocative and beyond definition. Attempts to analyse them usually reveal more about the observer than the architect – Gaudí himself never explained his ideas or confided in anyone. His approach was that of the artists of the Renaissance: just as they superimposed their local customs and beliefs on traditional art and made it new, so he overlaid his on the architecture of Barcelona, second city of Spain but, more important to its citizens, central star in its own universe of Catalonia.
At the same time, though, he entered an artistic cul-de-sac, inventing a style so personal that it could never be copied. The remodelling of Casa Batlló went beyond shelter and investment. Gaudí added meaning, colour and life so as to transcend building and create a work of art. He made it an expression of his own emotion, exhibitionism and cynicism, using a cryptic and abstract language developed more at the edge of a chisel than the point of a pencil.
In all his works, the final article bore little resemblance to the original plans submitted to the city authorities. Buildings would grow and flow with his ideas, changing as he did. In the drawings, Casa Batlló had three turrets that echoed human shapes. The finished building has a roof that follows in outline the constellation known as the Dragon, with conch-like ridge tiles varying in colour from turquoise over orange on one side of the roof to orange over turquoise on the other. The overall effect is reinforced by the chameleon-like scaled tiles whose colours mutate over the rest of its surface. Gaudí added an attic level, actually giving the house a double roof ‘just as people use both hats and umbrellas’, he jokingly observed.
Inside, a carved timber stair leads upwards from a foyer adjacent to the main lobby, and ascending it is strangely like picking one’s way through the vertebrae of some recently excavated, and gigantic, prehistoric beast. Without pause the staircase’s curves flow in relay through an anteroom and into the main salon on the first floor, finally spiralling into the centrifugal ceiling lamp. The walls and ceilings, their pale mottled texture suggestive of planetree bark as well as of tides in motion, seem to melt into each other, leaving the floors as the only flat surfaces.
Fantasy and reality are based in one another; on the acceptable borderline stands genius and on the unacceptable madness; and what is to one generation genius can be madness to another. After Casa Batlló and one more residential block (Casa Milà, 1906- 10) Gaudí, under a hammering from his critics against which he chose not to fight back, had moved that one step ahead into the misunderstood. Abandoning the world of secular building and flaunting egos, he devoted himself to his last will and testament, the massive and still unfinished Sagrada Familia, the Church of the Holy Family, in whose crypt he lived for the last six months of his life. He was run down by a tram on 7 June 1926, and taken for an unidentified tramp. His funeral, though, was a massive affair at his beloved final masterpiece. Ten years later his drawings and models were destroyed and his workshop burnt down during the Civil War: George Orwell said that the Anarchists had shown bad taste in not blowing up the Sagrada Familia when they had the chance. His fellow-architect Le Corbusier began Gaudí’s international revaluation in 1957 when he described him as ‘a great artist’, adding: ‘Only they remain and will endure who touch the sensitive hearts of men…’
When they took Gaudí to the hospital, all they found in his pockets were two hazelnuts – a cryptic clue to the man. In June they couldn’t have been edible, but in the hand of an artist whose ideas related so much to nature they were a tangible source of reference. And Gaudí knew that time, as well as nature, was on his side. Despite his 40 years’ work on the Sagrada Familia, he only ever finished the Nativity Façade, which after all is just the side entrance. He was fully aware of the 200 years it might take to build. ‘My client,’ he said, ‘is not in a hurry’.
Casa Batlló, 43 Paseo de Gracia, 08007 Barcelona. Made a Unesco World Heritage site in 2005, the restored house is owned by the Bernat family and has been open to the public since 1995. For details, visit casabatllo.es
