Even as we celebrate his 165th birth anniversary, Catalonia-based architect Antoni Gaudí's use of curves, cones, hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids, and helicoids to create organic and dynamic structures leaves us in awe.
While he came to be known as the master of Catalan Modernism, there is no one style or label that you can categorise his work within. Picasso criticised his work for being too old fashioned while George Orwell mocked him for building modern monstrosities. He can only be labelled a story-teller who used his organic forms and decorative motifs to transport passersby into a different realm.
A devout Roman Catholic, Gaudí was also known as 'God's Architect', as religious imagery prevalent in his work. His practice in Barcelona, Spain reinvented the Modernist movement with an utopian take on Gothic architecture.
Born to a coppersmith, the architect bore great pride in his Mediterranean heritage, which he said was blessed with creativity, originality and an innate sense for art and design. Influenced by neo-Gothic and Oriental styles, Gaudí used ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork forging, and carpentry to spin a fantasy tale with his architecture, whose distinctive style makes it difficult for us to place it neither in the past nor in the future.
A remodel of a previously built house, Casa Batlló is one of Gaudí's masterpieces and imbibes the architect's signature style to the fullest. Known for the organic quality of its visceral, skeletal facade that is a confection of columns framing wavy windows, the home's interiors showcase bright colours, organically rotund spaces, and sinuous wood carvings.
The roof is arched like the back of a dragon and decorated with a mosaic made of broken ceramic tiles called trencadís that start in shades of golden orange and move into greenish blues.
Casa Vicens, one of the first buildings of the Art Nouveau movement, was also the first home completed by Gaudí. Following a major restoration, the summer house that Gaudi built for real-estate broker Manel Vicens i Montaner is set to open as a museum in late 2017.
Casa Vicens marked Gaudi's first utilization of an orientalist style, mixing together Hispano-Arabic inspiration to break the rigid historical style of architecture of the era. An essential work to understanding Gaudí's coming of age and his unique architectural language, the project will be the last of the architect's heritage structure in Barcelona to open to public.
