CASA BATILO
BARCELONA, SPAIN
IMAGE NUMBER 775
Casa Batlló is a renowned building in the center of Barcelona and is one of Antoni Gaudí’s masterpieces. A remodel of a previously built house, it was redesigned in 1904 by Gaudí and has been refurbished several times since. The local name for the building is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), as it has a visceral, skeletal organic quality.
It is only identifiable as Modernisme or Art Nouveau in the broadest sense. The ground floor, in particular, has unusual tracery, irregular oval windows and flowing sculpted stone work. There are few straight lines, and much of the façade is decorated with a colorful mosaic made of broken ceramic tiles (trencadís). The roof is arched and was likened to the back of a dragon or dinosaur. A common theory about the building is that the rounded feature to the left of centre, terminating at the top in a turret and cross, represents the lance of Saint George, which has been plunged into the back of the dragon.
This building is very difficult to photograph - not because of its situation, but because of the teeming tourists who peek from every orifice. Barcelona has a population of 1.6 m residents and over 30 m tourists annually. This certainly divides opinion.
TECHNICAL NOTES
The image was taken with a tripod-mounted Phase One 645 Camera at ISO 35. Exposure of 1/20th of a second and at aperture f22. 150 mm Schneider Kreuznach telephoto lens with leaf shutter. The image was captured on a Phase One IQ180 80 megapixel digital back.