Casa Vicens

Interesting facts

Gaudí drew the cast-iron fence from a palmetto growing on site, and surviving sections of it were later reused at the entrance gate of Park Güell.

A brick waterfall as tall as the house once stood in the garden, its arch decorated with terracotta reliefs of swimming children; it was demolished in 1946.

The smoking room has a ceiling of stalactite-like muqarnas in painted plaster, showing palm leaves and clusters of dates, and walls lined with papier-mâché tiles.

The latticed wooden screens of the porch echo Japanese shitomi shutters, which Gaudí could have seen at an exhibition of Japanese architecture held in Barcelona in 1881.

The flower tiles on the facade measure 15 centimetres and were restored in 2015–2017 by a ceramicist using the same stencilling technique as the originals.

The dining room holds thirty-two paintings by Francesc Torrescassana, set into lemon-wood furniture that Gaudí designed around the existing collection.

On the dining-room doorposts Torrescassana painted birds in flight, including hummingbirds, herons and cranes, while flamingos stand at the bottom.

Where Gaudí laid the facade tiles in an alternating rhythm, his follower Serra set them uniformly in the 1925 extension, so the join can still be traced.

Gaudí and Manuel Vicens became friends, and in the 1880s the architect often spent his summers at the Vicens family house in Alella.

The house opened to the public as a museum on 16 November 2017, after its restoration was named a finalist for the FAD Architecture Award.

Why it is worth it

Casa Vicens is the first major building by Antoni Gaudí, and it looks nothing like the undulating stone of his later work. The commission came in 1878, the year he qualified, from Manuel Vicens i Montaner, a stock and currency broker (not, as is often repeated, a tile manufacturer) who wanted a summer house on land he had inherited in Gràcia, then still an independent town outside Barcelona. Gaudí drew the plans by 1880, signed them in January 1883, and the house was built between 1883 and 1885 under his close supervision; one of his assistants later recalled him sitting under a parasol on site and ordering poor work to be knocked down.

The style belongs to Gaudí's short orientalist phase, alongside El Capricho in Comillas and the Güell Pavilions. The structure itself is simple and rectilinear, with loads carried by parallel walls, but the surfaces are covered with invention: bands of rough stone alternate with ceramic tiles decorated with yellow Tagetes flowers, a plant Gaudí said he found growing on the plot, while the cast-iron railings and gate repeat the fan-shaped leaves of the dwarf palm that grew there too. Moorish arches, exposed brick columns, turret-like chimneys and a richly worked smoking room draw on Mudéjar and Persian models Gaudí knew from Owen Jones's books on the Alhambra. The original garden, with a waterfall and fountain, was much larger than today's.

In 1899 the house was sold to the paediatrician Antonio Jover, and in 1925 his extension was designed not by Gaudí, who declined, but by his follower Joan Baptista Serra, in a matching style. The garden was sold off piece by piece for apartment blocks, leaving the house on a small plot on Carrer de les Carolines. It was protected as a monument in 1969 and added to UNESCO's Works of Antoni Gaudí listing in 2005. In 2014 the Andorran bank MoraBanc bought it, and after a restoration by Elías Torres and José Antonio Martínez Lapeña, which removed later additions and inserted a new staircase and lift, it opened to the public as a house museum on 16 November 2017. Gràcia, which grew up around a Carmelite convent founded in the 17th century, was absorbed into Barcelona only in 1897 and has kept a strong identity of its own.

Getting there

Casa Vicens is at Carrer de les Carolines 20–26 in Gràcia, about 0.5 km from the centre of the district and a short metro ride from central Barcelona. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN) is about 13 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Casa Vicens is a modernist building situated in the Gràcia neighbourhood of Barcelona. It is the work of architect Antoni Gaudí and is considered to be his first major project. It was built between 1883 and 1885, although Gaudí drew up the initial plans between 1878 and 1880. The work belongs to the orientalist style, similar to Neo-Mudéjar architecture, although interpreted in Gaudí’s own personal way, with a uniqueness that only he knew how to add to his projects. In this work, and for the first time, Gaudí outlined some of his constructive resources that would become regular features throughout the emergence of Modernisme. The work was widely discussed when it was built and caused a great sensation among the general public at the time. When the building was constructed, Gràcia was still an independent urban nucleus of Barcelona; it had its own council and was classified as a town, though nowadays it is a district of the city.

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Casa Vicens

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia