Casa Batlló

The façade of the Batlló House is known throughout the world for its unique composition full of fantasy and colour. This chromatism, together with the vertical undulations, has caused this building to be compared to Claude Monet’s series of Water Lilies oils. Others have related it to the elements of Carnival because the crown of the façade resembles a harlequin’s cap, the trencadís mosaic cladding is reminiscent of confetti, and the balconies look like carnival masks. The clearest allusion here, however, is to the legend of Saint George, with the roof of the building shaped like a dragon’s back, the cross on the end of the knight’s lance, the princess’s balcony in the shape of a blossoming flower, and the bones of the victims devoured by the dragon on the first floor. 

Aside from such interpretations, this main façade is a compendium of original formal and structural ideas which are repeated in the rest of the building, like the fanciful chimneys on the roof terrace which are reminiscent of wild mushrooms; the rear façade with its ceramic trencadís mosaic of natural and geometrical shapes, or the splendid lightwell where Gaudí graduated the size of the windows and the colours of the ceramic cladding in a progressive combination that enhances the lighting of the whole interior. 

The first storey is the principal floor or piano nobile, which was originally the residence of the Batlló family. Here the great hall stands out as a space full of light and sinuous shapes with views of Passeig de Gràcia. Gaudí gave it special attention, with an interesting arrangement of the ceilings and a very elaborate decoration, playing with lights and shadows in the various spaces and giving an undulating shape to all the partitions. The façade is made of stone here and there is a gallery where the windows once again have sinuous and completely different shapes while the pillars adopt the shape of bones with joints.

Above this principal floor, four floors of the building were for rental and a fifth floor was designed with attics as the area for servants and for storage. It is a very suggestive, evocative and pure space formed by a succession of catenary arches, which transport the visitor into the belly of the dragon. In the complete reform of the old building made by Emili Sala, Gaudí enlarged the central space, where the staircase and the lift are located, forming a lightwell that is covered with blueish tiles that provides greater intensity to the upper part and more brightness to the lower part. In this way the architect achieves an even distribution of light while conveying an unequivocal sensation of  being at sea. For some it evokes Jules Verne’s book Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

The unanimous recognition of the building’s inventiveness and beauty was slow in coming. The City Council’s annual artistic buildings competition denied its prize to it on two occasions, with the award going to the Lleó-Morera House, by Domènech i Montaner, and the school Col·legi Comtal, by Bonaventura Bassegoda i Amigó, respectively, in 1906 and 1907. The Batlló House finally received its well deserved recognition in 1962, when it was listed in the Barcelona City Council’s Heritage Catalogue. Subsequently, it was declared a Historic and Artistic Monument (a designation given by Spain to what is now called Cultural Interest Property) in 1969, and in 2005 it was listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. In 2006 it received the “The Best in Heritage” prize granted by the Europa Nostra Awards, valuing the complete recovery and heritage restoration achieved through a wholly private financial effort.