Although only about two-thirds as tall as the cluster of towers intended by Gaudí to rise over the crossing, the four openwork spires above this façade—with the two in the centre taller than those on the sides—reach a wholly disproportionate height in relation to the roof that should ultimately cover the still unbuilt transept. At the top they break out into fantastically plastic finials whose multi-planar surfaces are covered with a mosaic of broken tiling in brilliant colours. The prototypes for these finials are the chimney-pots of the Palau Güell, but here their note of free fantasy is raised to monumental scale. The inspiration of the towers, so remote in character from anything that the Art Nouveau ever produced, came from certain native buildings which Gaudí had seen in Africa: these strange primitive[[390]] forms he first exploited in a project of 1892-3 for the Spanish Franciscan Mission in Tangier which was never executed.
In posse the Sagrada Familia is perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical monument of the last hundred years; beside it such a suave late example of monumental Neo-Gothic in England as Liverpool Cathedral, begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1903, lacks both vitality and originality of expression, if not nobility of scale. However, Gaudí’s church still remains a fragment, and a very incoherent one at that, even though he prepared in 1925, the year before his death, a brilliant new project for the nave. Gaudí really stands or falls by the few secular buildings that he was able to carry to completion, beginning with the Palau Güell of 1886-9 (Plate [96B]), and not, as many compatriots assume, by the unrealized—perhaps unrealizable—plans for the Sagrada Familia. (Construction has gone slowly forward, however, on the other transept for a decade now.)
Gaudí’s next Barcelona mansion after the Palau Güell, that built at 48 Carrer de Casp for the heirs of Pedro Mártir Calvet in 1898-1904, is much less impressive. Baroque rather than medieval in its antecedents, this is interesting chiefly for the detailing of the ironwork; but even that is no more remarkable here than that at the Palau Güell of a decade earlier. It is of interest, however, as illustrating the support which Gaudí received all along from his fellow citizens, that the Casa Calvet was awarded a prize in 1901 as the best new façade in Barcelona, quite as Guimard’s Castel Béranger was premiated three years earlier in Paris.
A wholly new spirit, quite comparable in its total originality to the Art Nouveau, first appears in the work that Gaudí did for Don Eusebio Güell at the Park Güell (now the Municipal Park of Barcelona), carried out over the years 1900-14, and in the walls and the gate he built in 1901-2 for the suburban estate of Don Hermenegildo Miralles in Las Corts de Sarriá. In the latter all the forms are curved and no stylistic reminiscence whatsoever remains, but it is a production of minor importance compared to the park. The park is mostly landscaping, but partly architecture in that it includes several small buildings and much subsidiary construction. A sort of Neo-Romantic naturalism, exceeding in fantasy that of the most exotic landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, controls the whole conception. Sinuous and megalomaniac near-Doric colonnades of concrete support a sort of flat vault that is of great interest technically;[[391]] yet these colonnades also suggest artificial ruins of the eighteenth-century sort raised to giant scale. The other porticoes and grottoes, however, recall no architecture of the past. Their rubble columns seem rather to emulate slanting tree-trunks, but in fact their profiles were worked out statically with the most careful study of the forces involved.
The ranges of curving benches surrounding the great open terrace over the Doric hypostyle, although covered with a mosaic of the most heterogeneous bits and pieces of broken faience, seem like congelations of the waves of the sea; the roofs of the lodges, also tile-covered, toss in the air like cockscombs. A strange biological plasticity, rather like that of the small-scale carved detail of Horta’s or Guimard’s buildings very much enlarged, turns whole structures into malleable masses as in some Gulliverian dream of vegetable or animal elements grown to monumental size. Everything but the ironwork is moulded in three dimensions, and even the ironwork tends towards a heavy scale more comparable to that of the structural members of metal used in Belgian or French work of the day than to the delicacy of Art Nouveau decorative detail.
Gaudí’s major secular works belong to the same years as the execution of the park. It is hard to believe that the Casa Batlló at 43 Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona, a small block of flats, is not a completely new structure but a remodelling carried out in 1905-7. This fact perhaps explains the relative flatness of the façade. Yet Gaudí made the lower storeys extraordinarily plastic and open, using a bony articulation of curvilinear stone members, and the high roof in front that masks the roof terrace is of even more cockscomb-like character than those on his park lodges (Plate [136]). The upper storeys of the façade glitter with a fantastic plaquage of broken coloured glass considerably more subtle in tonality than his usual mosaic of faience fragments.[[392]] But architecturally the façade is handled more like Horta’s, with most of the windows nearly rectangular even though bulging balconettes of metal project at their bases. The effect, as with Horta, is slightly Neo-Rococo. But the sort of Rococo which this façade recalls is not circumspect French eighteenth-century work but the lusher mode that was exploited in Bavaria and Austria—and still more appositely in Portugal and Spain. The entire wall surface seems to be in motion, and all its edges waver and wind in a way that even interior panelling did rarely in eighteenth-century France. This effect of total motion is even more notable in the interiors, which seem to have been hollowed out by the waves of the sea.
The rear façade of the Casa Batlló is remarkable for its openness. The wide window-walls in the paired flats open on to sinuous balconies extending all the way across. Above, there is a simpler plastic cresting than on the front; over this the curious forms of the chimney-pots provide a range of abstract sculptural features covered with polychrome tiling, always a favourite terminal theme of Gaudí’s.
Figure 35. Antoni Gaudí: Barcelona, Casa Milá, 1905-10, plan of typical floor
Much larger than the Casa Batlló is the edifice built for Roser Segimon de Milá in 1905-7 at 92 Passeig de Gracia, appropriately known in Barcelona as ‘La Pedrera’ (the quarry). Surrounding two more or less circular courts, this large block of flats occupies an obtuse corner site, and the entire plan is worked out in curves as well as all the elements of the exterior (Figure [35]). The façade of the Casa Milá is not a thin plane, curling like paper at the edges and pierced with squarish holes like that of the Casa Batlló; instead ranges of balconies heavier than those on the rear of the Casa Batlló sway in and out like the waves of the sea beneath the foamlike crest of the roof, making the whole edifice a very complex plastic entity (Plate [137A]). From a distance La Pedrera looks as if it were all freely modelled in clay; in fact, it is executed in cut stone with boldly hammered surfaces that appear to result from natural erosion.