Casa Vicens

Recently opened to public after 130 years, Gaudí’s first independent building, the Casa Vicens (1883–5) is a clean break from academicism (or as the pompous Penguin Dictionary of Architecture puts it, ‘a nightmarish farrago of Moorish and Gothic elements’).

One of the first colourful buildings in Barcelona, it was designed as a summer villa covered with brickwork and chequerboard patterns of green and white tiles (Senyor Vicens was a tile merchant, but even so the house nearly bankrupted him).

The delightful iron gate and fence of date-palm fronds, one of Gaudí’s most distinctive early works, has been attributed by some to his disciple, the then very young Francesc Berenguer.