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In 1883, a young Barcelona architect accepted two commissions. One was to build a summer house for a stockbroker, just outside the city; the other was to take over the construction of a Gothic church. The latter would become Spain’s most visited building, the monstrously brilliant Sagrada Família, which the devout Catholic Antoni Gaudí would obsess over until he was run over by a tram in 1926.
The other project, the Casa Vicens, is pretty impressive too. Considered Gaudí’s first masterpiece, it is the work of a young architect fizzing with invention but still fumbling towards the style that would later become his own: the organic, undulating, alien buildings that utterly undermined ideas about what architecture could be and that haunt machine hallucinations 140 years on.
Casa Vicens is eclectic in the extreme, drawing on an orientalist tradition and the motifs of Moorish Spain as well as elements of British Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, neo-Gothic Barcelona urban vernacular — and even proto-Art Deco half a century before it emerged. It was also a foundational work of the distinctly Barcelona movement known as Modernisme, the exuberant Catalan Art Nouveau. But more than anything, the style was inspired by natural forms.
“Nothing is invented,” Gaudí wrote, “for it is written in nature first.” The carnations he discovered on the site are represented everywhere from the iron gates of the house to its painted tiles. There are palms and tendrils and, in the architecture, the inspiration of salt caves and geology.
Its candy colours, dazzling geometric ornament, chequerboard tiles and finely wrought ironwork make it appear unreal, a kind of hybrid fairytale castle and witch’s house. When it was built for Gaudí’s friend Manuel Vicens i Montaner, surrounded by a large garden, the Gràcia neighbourhood was a green suburb. Now completely subsumed into the city, perhaps the house looks even stranger, a standout oddity of the highest order.
If the outside is eccentric, the interiors are nuts. A cacophony of colours, frescoes, materials and patterns, each room has a distinctive and wholly original feel though the overall effect is slightly queasy, a sensual overload even for someone like me who has a lot of time for Gaudí’s vivid hyperactivity.
The highlights are the mauve-vaulted smoking room, its ceiling a garish, dripping beehive; the screened terrace, whose geometric shutters look weirdly contemporary; the heavily painted dining room and the rooftop, with its toy-land skyline of domes, chimneys and vegetal ironwork.
Gaudí was asked to extend the house in the 1920s but by then had dedicated himself solely to the Sagrada Família and passed the commission to one of his acolytes, Joan Baptista Serra de Martínez. When the building was redesigned to accommodate a museum — which opened in 2017 — it was the more recent parts that were appropriated along with the old basement, now housing a refined shop.
Martínez Lapeña-Torres Architects did a wonderful job, with the new sections being understated and the old house restored to even more garish colours than before.
Avoid the queues for the Sagrada Família and start here.
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