Gaudi’s first masterpiece
While the world waits for the Sagrada Familia to be finished, Michael Kerr finds another Gaudi gem.
The Sagrada Familia of Barcelona, the basilica that must be the most famously unfinished building in the world, is due for completion in 2026, the centenary of the death of its creator, Antoni Gaudi.
Until then, at least, its perforated spires will soar heavenwards amid slowly nodding cranes, its facades hemmed in by scaffolding. The Casa Vicens, the first private house Gaudi designed, has been vacated by the builders a little more quickly. Following a twoand-a-half year restoration project, it opened to the public on November 16.
Gaudi, the master of modernism, had been qualified only five years as an architect when he was hired in 1883 by a tile manufacturer, Don Manuel Vicens Montaner, to design a summer house in Gracia, then a suburb of Barcelona. Gracia has since been swallowed by the city, and to the visitor, the Casa Vicens comes as a delightful surprise: Green, white and creamy yellow tiles cover its facade, forming a composition of horizontal lines in the lower part and vertical lines in the upper.
I saw it in September, just before Catalonia’s controversial independence referendum, and was reminded that, while Gaudi was a passionate Catalan nationalist, he was also, as his biographer Gijs van Hensbergen puts it, ‘‘always reaching out towards the universal in his aspirations and ideals’’.
With me was Mercedes Mora, whose family’s bank, MoraBanc of Andorra, bought the property in 2014 and has spent about €4.5 million ($7.73m) turning it into a museum and cultural centre. The house has been extended and
divided during its 130 years. The part Gaudi designed has been returned, as far as possible, to its original state.
It’s a place of endlessly diverting ornamentation: built-in furniture, murals of herons and cranes, spaces between beams filled with papier-mache carvings of shiny cherries and luscious leaves. In an Arabian smoking room, Gaudi incorporates a polychrome pastiche of the stalactite ceilings of the Alhambra in Granada, made of moulded cardboard. Mora stressed that the project is aiming to be ‘‘sustainable and responsible’’ and will limit visitor numbers.
Gaudi’s 10 or so contributions to the streetscape are popular draws in the city, but there are lesser-known works that you can visit without joining a queue, and while enjoying a little more of Catalonia. The most tucked away was in the forests of the Catllaras mountains, two hours north of Barcelona. Here, in the early 1900s, Gaudi was asked by his main patron, the industrialist Eusebi Guell, to build staff accommodation at a remote mine producing coal for his cement factory. What remains is a shell, a grey-and-white building with the look of an upturned boat - a Gaudi’s Ark, maybe.
The local council plans a phased restoration and has already rebuilt a winding concrete staircase at the rear. The idea is to make the chalet, Xalet del Catllaras, a kind of resource centre-cum-refuge for everyone drawn to this corner of the Pyrenees. Gaudi would probably have approved. While working on the chalet, Gaudi stayed with a second industrialist, Joan Artigas Alart, and advised him on how to make the most of land he owned behind his textile factory on two sides of the Llobregat river. The result was the Artigas Gardens, a rural counterpart to Barcelona’s Park Guell.
The garden, constructed mainly from flagstone, limestone and tufa, includes a wood, a grotto and a couple of bridges. Among its most striking features are handrails and boundaries which look like roughly hewn branches but are man-made.
Close to Barcelona (24 kilometres) is the Colonia Guell, a Catalan equivalent of the model villages built in Britain by the Cadbury and Lever families. It was begun in 1890, when anarchism was at its height and factory owners wanted to keep their workers well away from its influence. In addition to homes built by some of the most talented modernista architects, its wide streets, shaded by plane trees, had schools, a park and a theatre.
In 1898, Guell asked Gaudi to add a church. It was a decade before the first stone was laid, and the church would never be finished, but the crypt, its initial stage, is a masterpiece. Like the Sagrada Familia, it’s a structure that appears to have erupted. Its basalt pillars, inclined at just the angle necessary to avoid buttressing, recall columns of cooled lava at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Inside, fonts are formed from giant conch shells. Stained-glass windows pay homage not to the saints but to butterflies, and the pulleys that open and close those windows seem to flap crystal wings.