Casa Batlló

Interior, typical door to an apartment, detail; The Casa Batlló reveals Gaudí’s confidence and skill in remodelling an existing building. He added a floor to the original Neo-classical five-storey town house and clothed ground and first floors in stone in fantastic, fluid lines like an eroded outcrop of rock. This curvilinear stonework conceals the original rectangular windows within mask-like openings, which are echoed in the iron balustrades of the balconies above. The higher levels of the redesigned façade are covered in an abstract tile mosaic, and the whole undulates upwards to a parapet that is like a wavecrest and changes colour from end to end. Parapet and roof forms echo the gable that dominates the adjoining house by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, but the roof of the Casa Batlló curves in three dimensions and is covered with green ceramic tiles like the scales of a great sea monster. On the fifth floor there is also a tiny roof-garden from which a circular turret rises to break through the parapet. Inside the house, the curved forms of the stairway and its path up through the building in its skylit, blue and white ceramic-tiled stair-well add to the dynamic analogy. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.oxfordartonline.com/ (accessed 7/15/2010