Barcelona and Gaudí
A comparison of structure, ornament, and urban context through major works of Catalan Modernisme.
Construction of the Sagrada Família began in 1882 and continues today. Gaudí devoted much of his later life to it, while completion necessarily belongs to later generations.
Casa Batlló, widely dated to its 1904 to 1906 remodeling, is famous for a facade that evokes bone and skin along Passeig de Gràcia.
Park Güell began as a residential development but became a public landscape of mosaics, curved benches, and shaped terrain. Its principal work is generally dated from about 1900 to 1914.
Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, built in 1929 and reconstructed in the 1980s, sets the decorative city against a modernism of planes and precise materials.
