Casa Batllό

Monday, June 24th

One of the things I've learned on this trip, is that you should check when there are holidays in the places you are visiting. I mean, I had read it but I had kind of ignored it. When there is a holiday, even if its not a very big one, everything shuts down. The difference between Barcelona today and Barcelona on Tuesday when it wasn't a holiday was huge.

I slept in this morning, because once I knew it was a holiday I knew things wouldn't be open. Then I walked up the street to the fancy architecture district (it has a name...). There is one block especially that is known for the crazy buildings. My main reason for visiting Barcelona was to see the Sagrada Familia and more generally to see the other Gaudi buildings. I started my Gaudi experience with Casa Batllo.

 

And here is where I will give you another piece of advice. If you are trying to get a student ticket and the lady at the counter tells you that there is a date on your ID when you know it doesn't have one, look closely at your ID before accepting what she says. Because you will be really annoyed with yourself later when you realize that she was looking at your shuttle sticker not an graduation date.

 

Casa Battlo was amazing. Gaudi was very big into nature and incorporating nature into his architecture. The building didn't have any straight lines, it was all curves and waves to invoke water or the ocean.

 

 

 

He also was really smart about light. The center of the building contains the stairwell which is open at the roof and there are windows into all the rooms to let the light in. The stairwell is tiled in blue and it goes from dark at the top to light at the bottom. This is because the light would be stronger at the top and wouldn't need to be reflected as much by the tiles.

 

The "railings" of the stairwell had wavy glass in them so that when you looked through at the blue tile it felt like you were underwater.

 

The whole building felt like being in a fairy tale.

 

After Casa Batllo, I walked up the street to check out another Gaudi building, La Pedrera. I'll talk more about La Pedrera on another day because I ended up going on a tour of it.

 

I walked up further to see Las Punxes, by another architect...

 

I quickly fell in love with Barcelona.