Barcelona - Gaudi houses

We were more tired than we realized.  So, yesterday we just visited a couple of the Gaudi apartment buildings on Paseig de Garcia, a short walk from our current apartment.  Gaudi was so amazing.  We took the tour of the Casa Batllo and we learned so much about him and his work.  I had no idea that Gaudi was an early recycler.  All those mosaics that cover his sculptures and the rounded shapes of some of his walls are actually made from pieces from demolition sites.  Old houses, old ceramics and tiles, old metal - they are pieced together to create something new and beautiful.  He also intentionally looked at nature to create solutions to architectural problems and challenges.  His ventilation system had areas that looked like gills, solving an architectural challenge of the day.  He used the arches that looked like the ribs in a skeleton to replace timbers and other, more space hogging kinds of arches to give his walls the support they needed from the inside.  (This among other things, like the balconies that looked jaw bones, earned the house the nickname House of Bones.) He created calm by mimicking the color, reflections, rippling, and sound of water.  He made windows large in the lower floors, where the rays of the sun can't reach as well, and small at the top of the building, where the sun is most intense.  He took Spanish traditional building norms and made them more efficient - the internal light shaft (like a large elevator shaft) that opens to the sky creating that water effect inside the house, the roof terrace with mosaic trimmed pots attached to the walls,  the use of stained glass and curving staircases.  Yes, these buildings look kind of weird inside and out, but they are also comfortable, appealing, restful, and beautiful.

Casa Mila aka La Pedrera - named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984

The Casa Mila balconies have railings and decoration of twisted forged iron.  

Casa Batllo  (the building in the middle with green coloring on it) - this was a Gaudi remodel  in 1904 of a traditional Spanish house from the mid-nineteenth century.  It broke some of the bylaws of building in Barcelona, but was named one of its best buildings in 1906.

Notice the large windows at the bottom and comparatively small ones at the top.  It has been said that most homes of the wealthy of the time had small windows at the top because that's where the servants lived.  But, I have seen how dark it is at the bottom of these city buildings, especially with narrow streets.  It makes sense to catch as much light as possible at the bottom of a building with large windows and less at the top.

The living room with windows overlooking the main street

Living room ceiling

Living room from the other side

View from the lower stairway - Higher up, the stairs and landings go around the light shaft.

The dining room looking out at the terrace.  Notice the two columns (beautiful multicolored mosaic) within a few feet of the door.

The back wall of the terrace, with ceramic pots attached to the wall.  That arched shape is the shape of the wicker tunnel (which attached in that shape) that the family used in the summer for shade and privacy.  The opening was directly in front of the dining room door.

The tiled floor of the terrace, looking toward those two beautiful columns standing in front of the entrance to the dining room.

The fully tiled air/light shaft that run up through the middle of the house.  Can you sense a little that feeling of being underwater?  It really was soothing.  You had to use the stairs or the landings around this shaft to get anywhere in the building.

A view from the roof with those smooth almost-animal shaped edges

There were many chimneys.  Gaudi seemed to love to decorate chimneys and he would group them together, rather than line them up as was traditional.  All are covered in mosaic tiles pieces.  The pieces had to be broken into odd shapes in order to cover the curves and angles of his designs.

The door is to the stairway back down into the building and this styliszd cross crowns the front of the building.

The view straight down to the street from a front corner of the roof.

The opening of the ventilation system.  Those vents have been compared to fish gills, suggesting that is where Gaudi got his inspiration.

The skeletal arches I spoke of 

The place our official photo was taken.  It was scary because I am rather afraid of heights.

This is what it looks like at night.

Here's the photo that we had taken at the top of Casa Batllo!

We have decided to stay another 3 days and, of course, have to move to another AirBnb apartment (that makes 3 for Barcelona).  The new apartment is actually 2 blocks up from this one in the Eixample  district (pronounced ee-shampla; it means addition, because it was a new more consciously designed area of Barcelona).  I particularly like this district - lots of groceries, restaurants, bakeries, and shopping.  There are a several plazas and parks  nearby and we are within walking distance of many interesting sites, including these Gaudi-designed buildings and the Sagrada Familia (and only a few blocks from the Sants railroad station).

We still want to see the inside of the Sagrada Familia and there are a couple other Gaudi houses, the Magic Fountain, and a couple Plazas to see.  We'll see what we can pack into the next few days before we fly out to Malta to see if it is a warm spot we can settle in for a month or so.