The Casa Lleo Morera was designed in 1902 by architect Domenech i Montener and features a
crescent-shaped, floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window.
The Casa Amatller, next door, was designed in 1898 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch for a
Barcelonense chocolate manufacturer. The facade includes sculptures of artists, here
a painter and sculptor.
A principle motif of the Modernista style: a depiction of the Catalan legend of Saint
George (Catalunya) killing the dragon (Spain).
Even the ticket window at the Palau Musica is a triumph of Modernista design.
Part of Gaudi's style was to take every kind of decorative material and mix it together
into a spastic design.
A ceramic lizard greets visitors to the Parc Guell, a green space at the edge of the city
originally designed by Gaudi for the Barcelonense elite. 
The Facade of Gaudi's unfinished masterwork Temple de la Sagrada Familia is a dripping,
ornate design of stone and stained glass. Gaudi himself admitted that his original plans
would take 250 years to complete.
Gaudi lived in a small studio within the church for the last decade of his life, using all
of his own money to work on his masterpiece.
Gaudi's most famous building, the apartment Casa Mila, built between 1906 ad 1912, is the
perfect culmination of the styles of all his other projects. |
EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNAL August
17, 1999
Barcelona
Modernisme
Barcelonenses have long been the privileged class of Spain. During the Middle
Ages the city served as the commercial hub of the far-flung Mediterranean Empire. When
Seville monopolized the trade riches of the New World and commercial routes shifted to the
Guadalquivir Barcelona suffered a decline. During the Industrial Revolution Barcelona
exploded with a thriving textile business and experienced a fin de siecle return to
greatness. At the end of the 19th century, after a gold rush from 1875-1885,
the city’s planners and wealthy upper class expanded Barcelona’s cramped Gothic
Quarter and commissioned young Catalan architects to build their private residences. L’Eixample
("The Expansion") was a new, spacious, gridded "upper Barcelona", high
in elevation and status, and a blank canvas for what would become the architectural and
design movement called Modernisme, the Catalan’s play on Northern
Europe’s Art Nouveau.
Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Lluis Domenech i Montaner and Antoni Gaudi i Cornet developed a
new style that celebrated their fierce nationalism with the incorporation of Catalan
images. Today in Barcelona there are over fifty highly original, daring and at times
outrageous Modernista buildings and parks dotting the cityscape, overflowing with the
creative use of mosaics, ceramics, stained glass, stone, wrought iron, marble, wood and
brick. Architects like Gaudi incorporated Catalan flags and sculptures depicting Catalan
fables into his organic designs, and worked on almost every feature of his buildings
including furniture, mosaics, lighting and his sculptural serpentine and warrior-like
ceramic and stone chimneys. It’s a paradise to stand in the midst of such unbridled
creativity, imagining a time when patrons valued their surroundings so highly that they
spared no expense on their design and materials, not to mention having the guts to
commission the freshest, most original and unpredictable of artists. It’s inspiring
to walk the streets of this sparkling place, a capitol of aesthetic pleasures in a modern,
functional, living city. |
A dining room Mosaic with porcelain figures in relief depicts the Morera (the
patron's) family having a picnic.
Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo was designed in 1905, a remodeling of an existing house to take
on the signature organic Gaudi style.
The Palau Musica was built for the Catalan Choral Society in 1908.
The stained-glass inverted dome of the Palau Musica makes it the only concert hall in
Europe lit by natural light.
The concert hall stage includes 18 muses playing instruments, with sculpted heads and
mosaic bodies. 
Gaudi's ceramic tile bench in the Parc Guell is said to be the longest in the world.
Gaudi's Casa Calvet was the first apartment building to be built by the architect in the
Modernista district of Eixample. A For Lease sign taunts Modernista
die-hards.
Modernism uses natural themes like a turtle that forms a column base in Sagrada Familia.
Only the outside walls of the Sagrada Familia are complete and construction continues
today.
Gaudi championed the chimney creating elaborate forms and decorating them with broken,
colourful tiles like these on Palau Guell. |
