HOUSING WORKS
Was Antoni Gaudí a sculptor or an architect, and does it really matter? After seeing the insides of his two most famous residential works, Casa Batlló and Casa Milla, I say sculptor. This master was trained as an architect and worked as an architect, with all the corresponding woes, battling the city over permits and clients over payments. And he invented form as an architect, through drawings and models. But there is a serious disjunction in his work, and in these two buildings especially, between their outsides and insides – between their expressive, convulsive, Modernisme exteriors, and their deeply conventional interiors.
At both Milla and Batlló, staid nineteenth-century-style apartments are fitted behind radical twentieth-century facades. The facades are undulating, pulsating, encrusted with twisting railings and psychedelic tilework, and topped with menacing, monstrous chimneys. At Milla the stone blocks facing each story have been carved to resemble waves, with black metal balcony grilles floating in front like sheets of sea weed. At Batlló the parlor floor balconies are framed with femur-like columns and braces, and the windows glazed with puddles of plasma-colored glass. The life of both building lies on their facades, which look out from opposite sides onto Paysage de Gracia, the city’s most elegant street, just two blocks apart. They show bold faces to the public.
Inside both buildings, within their apartments, the plaster walls and ceilings are gracefully rounded and carved. But the layouts are constrained by rectangular lots, and by the needs of bourgeois clients. I’m not sure what Gaudí, or anyone else, could have done to transform a turn-of-the-century master bedroom, bathroom or maid’s room. He designed signature tiles and furniture for the owners’ apartments. But in vintage photographs these rooms are overstuffed with upholstered furniture and knickknacks, and have the dry, fussy feeling of Victorian homes. They remain, on the inside, pre-modern. How extraordinary that Gaudí’s patrons were willing to risk appearances like this. They presented a revolutionary facade to Barcelona high society, while carrying on, inside, in the most predictable way.