I love this facade! Always dreamed of seeing it for myself and so happy I was able to! The detail and colors are so cool! Casa Batlló is a building restored by Antoni Gaudí and Josep Maria Jujol, built in 1877 and remodelled in the years 1904–1906. The building is very skeletal looking and that was the intended purpose of the design! The local name for the building is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), as it has a visceral, skeletal organic quality.
It was originally designed for a middle-class family and situated in a prosperous district of Barcelona. This remarkable building like all of Guadi's work is classified as Modernisme or Art Nouveau. The ground floor, in particular, is rather astonishing with tracery, irregular oval windows and flowing sculpted stone work.
The goal to this design seems to be to avoid straight lines completely! The facade has three distinct sections which are harmoniously integrated. The top displays a trim with ceramic pieces that has attracted multiple interpretations. The central part, which reaches the last floor, is a multicolored section with protruding balconies. The lower ground floor with the main floor and two first-floor galleries are contained in a structure of Montjuïc sandstone with undulating lines.
Most of the facade is decorated with broken mosaic ceramic tiles that range from shades of orange to green and blue!
Above the central part of the facade is a smaller balcony, also iron, with a different exterior aesthetic, closer to a local type of lily. Two iron arms were installed here to support a pulley to raise and lower furniture. The roof is arched and was likened to the back of a dragon or dinosaur. A common theory about the building is that the rounded feature to the left of centre, terminating at the top in a turret and cross, represents the lance of Saint George (patron saint of Catalonia, Gaudi's home), which has been plunged into the back of the dragon.
The facade of the main floor, made entirely in sandstone, and is supported by two columns. The design is complemented by joinery windows set with multicolored stained glass. In front of the large windows, as if they were pillars that support the complex stone structure, there are six fine columns that seem to simulate the bones of a limb, with an apparent central articulation; in fact, this is a floral decoration. The rounded shapes of the gaps and the lip-like edges carved into the stone surrounding them create a semblance of a fully open mouth, for which the Casa Batlló has been nicknamed the "house of yawns." The structure repeats on the first floor and in the design of two windows at the ends forming galleries, but on the large central window there are two balconies as described above.
Spanish Words of the Day:
Orgánico meaning Organic
Naranja meaning Orange
Verde meaning Green
Azul meaning Blue
Kevin & Amanda
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