In Barcelona, mosaic left the churches and came down into the street. It covers benches, roofs, chimneys, entire façades. We owe it above all to one architect, Antoni Gaudí, and to a technique he made famous: trencadís.
ITrencadís
Trencadís means breaking ceramic tiles, crockery or glass, then assembling the shards to cover curved surfaces. Where a whole tile cannot follow a shape, a thousand fragments can.
That principle lies at the heart of our house: an image exists only through its fragments. L'Étang de Gaudí is our most direct tribute to it, with its waves of broken ceramic around a motionless heron.
IIPark Güell
Commissioned by Eusebi Güell and built between 1900 and 1914, the park was meant to be a garden city. It became a public park in 1926. At the entrance, a grand stairway leads to the salamander, or the dragon as Barcelonans call it, covered entirely in multicoloured trencadís.
Higher up, on the great square, the undulating bench designed with Josep Maria Jujol snakes along the edge of the drop. Beneath the square, a hall of columns holds up a ceiling set with ceramic medallions. The park has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.
IIIFrom Casa Batlló to the Sagrada Família
On the Passeig de Gràcia, the façade of Casa Batlló glitters with glass and ceramic, and its roof ripples like a dragon's back. Further on, the Sagrada Família, begun in 1882, keeps rising above the city.
Our Jardin catalan is a nod to the salamander of Park Güell: a blue and green lizard winding between the flowers. And in Arabesques aux lézards, its cousins run across a sunlit wall, as if they had escaped from the park.
Next journalRavenna, capital of mosaics