Casa Batlló

Landmark · Eixample (Passeig de Gràcia)Barcelona, Spain

Casa Batlló was nearly demolished. Josep Batlló, a textile manufacturer, bought a plain 1877 block on Passeig de Gràcia — built by Emili Sala, one of Gaudí's own teachers — and meant to clear the site. Gaudí persuaded him to keep the old shell and rebuild everything else, and Batlló gave him a free hand. Between 1904 and 1906 he refaced the lower floors in Montjuïc sandstone carved into columns shaped like leg bones, hung cast-iron balconies that look like masks, and clad the wall above in trencadís: broken ceramic and glass discs, warm near the street, blue at the roofline. Barcelona called it the Casa dels Ossos, the house of bones. Inside, straight lines are rare. The oak doors curve, the stair rail winds up the well in one unbroken twist, and the plaster of the main salon ceiling spirals outward from the light fitting at its centre. Gaudí added an attic of whitewashed catenary arches and, above it, a roof of scaled tile with a cross-topped turret. The Batlló family lived on the main floor and let the rest as flats. It is a house-museum now, part of the UNESCO listing of Gaudí's work, and the pavement outside is among the most crowded in the city.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The masks only appear from underneath — stand directly below the upper balconies and the ironwork resolves into faces; from across the road it flattens back into pattern.
Direct sun reaches this front early — By mid-afternoon the whole front is in shadow: the glass discs go quiet and the blues in the mosaic come forward.
The crowd never looks up — It clots at the door, at head height. Step to the kerb, turn your back on it and read the front floor by floor.
The bones come back inside — On the main floor, the big front window's stone mullions are the same shapes you were looking up at from the pavement, now at arm's length.

Things to do

1
Read the facade from the far pavement
Cross to the even-numbered side of Passeig de Gràcia and back up until the whole front fits in one glance. Then walk slowly along the opposite pavement, watching the glass discs switch on and off as your angle changes. Finish directly beneath the gallery, close enough to see tool marks in the sandstone.
2
Handle the noble floor
On the main floor, take hold of an oak door handle: it was shaped to a closed hand, so the metal meets your palm without a gap. Then sit in the mushroom-shaped fireplace nook — a bench for two on one side, a single seat facing it — and count how few right angles the room contains.
3
Cross the attic and come out on the roof
Under the roof, walk the corridor of arches end to end and watch them change height as you go; there is nothing up here but whitewash. Then climb to the terrace, go round behind the ridge to see the tiles from the back, and stand among the chimneys with the Eixample rooftops below.