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.

March 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC ARTS

In 1952, in Phoenix, about half an hour from his perch at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright built a house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys. That house has recently been opened to the public, and what a marvel it is.

It’s a small structure, closer in spirit and in scale to a Usonian House than to the expansive, majestic Prairie Style houses Wright is most famous for. Its enclosure is only about sixteen feet wide, and its doorways are barely 5′-6″ high. Like all Wright creations, the house has a vivid sculptural character. Its kooky, spinning, circular geometries prefigure the Guggenheim, and remain true to the space-age stylings the architect favored at mid-century. Entering is dramatic: one approaches on a gravel path below a broad curving ramp, walks up that ramp, and then passes through a low threshold into a living room that seems to hover above ground. The house’s sloped copper roof juts out savagely at the far end, like the prow of a spaceship.

Yet the feeling isn’t avant-garde; it’s intimate. Wright seems to have designed the house to serve real people rather than the visions in his head. And it’s being shown in an informal way that honors this. When I visited, during the holidays, there were doormats at each entrance, LED lanterns lining the walkways, and a Christmas tree in the living room. A circular coffee table, displaced by the tree, was stored upside down on the bed in the second bedroom. Wright-designed chairs and lamps, not original to the design, had been purchased and set in empty nooks. These additions all give the place a warm, lived-in kind of clutter. (In fact the house really is a home; right now one of the architect’s great-granddaughters is in residence.)

True to Wright’s reputation for being a less-than-pragmatic builder, the house needs improvements. Some wood coffers on the living room ceiling are water-damaged. The concrete lining at the bottom of the entrance ramp is spalling, and the steel reinforcing inside rusting. The ramp’s guard wall has crumbled, leaving holes along the bottom where one’s foot can slide through. The plain, rough masonry blocks at the facade have been regrouted in a shade that doesn’t match the original.

At the end of our tour our guide asked us for overall impressions. Several visitors remarked that the house still feels “modern.” One, a former home builder, admired its uncanny domesticity: “You walk right in and it feels like a house.” This is true, and, for an architect with Wright’s titanic ambitions and abilities, also remarkable.

January 02, 2016 by Nalina Moses