In 1890, the Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell made a decision that was radical even by the standards of a city already electrified by modernisme: he abandoned Barcelona's choking factory districts and moved his textile mill — and his entire workforce — to a pine-forested hillside in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, just 20 kilometres southwest of the city. What he built there was not merely a factory complex but a full social experiment: a self-contained workers' village with housing, schools, a theatre, a cooperative shop, and a church that would become one of the most structurally daring buildings of the 20th century. That church was entrusted to Antoni Gaudí — and what Gaudí designed in its crypt between 1908 and 1914 was nothing less than the structural laboratory for the Sagrada Família. Colonia Güell is where the dream was tested. It draws a fraction of the crowds that queue outside Park Güell or the Sagrada Família, yet it is arguably the most intellectually fascinating Gaudí site in all of Catalonia.
On the grandest stretch of Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia — a boulevard so thick with Modernista jewels that locals call it the Block of Discord — one building stops every passerby cold. Casa Batlló shimmers like a living creature: scales of iridescent ceramic, a roofline that breathes, skulls carved into stone balconies. It was commissioned by a wealthy textile magnate, transformed by a visionary architect, and completed in 1906 as a statement that would redefine what a city building could be. This is its story.