I also visited Barcelona this summer....

All these photos were taken at Antonio Gaudi's El Parc Güell. Despite it being a tourist hotspot, it was still intriguing to stroll around the curving paths and wonder in and out of his naturalistic and surreal creations.

Another Gaudi creation that was hard to miss was the Casa Milà, more popularly known as 

 La Pedrera (the stone quarry) as the façade was intended to resemble an open quarry. The apartment house was commissioned to Gaudi by the industrialist Pere Milà and his wife Roser Segimon and took seven years to build, 1905-1912. It featured many of Gaudi's renowned design elements, including the single undulating façade, organically shaped wrought ironwork and natural forms coated in broken pieces of ceramics. The use of ceramics was termed trencadís in Catalan Modernism, which involved creating mosaics from broken pieces of tile and dinnerware. Gaudi offered a slightly alternative approach to this technique by covering architectural structures in brightly coloured shards of ceramic.

White pieces of ceramic often came from broken cups and plates disregarded by Spanish manufacturers. Gaudi had utilised the neutral colour to cover large, twisting structures that greeted you when walking out on to the top of the La Pedrera...as well as being visible form the streets below. Up close however, it was interesting to see that some of the pieces appeared to have melted and pitted under the intense sun.  












Other chimney forms were ingrained with a mosaic of broken glass bottles. 

The inside of the building presented a selection of rooms that had been kept in the style of the early C20th living. Other rooms and corridors exhibited examples of natural objects that inspired Gaudi's designs, alongside his architectural models. A display that particularly stood out was a suspended chain model that revealed Gaudi's design for the church at the Güell colony, it was titled Estereo Funicular. The display was mesmerising in the way that the reflection offered clarity and structure to the hanging form.

One of the aspects of Guadi's work that I found most intriguing was the way he interpreted natural forms in an intriguingly surreal style. The pieces he designed inhabited a new form of life.