The Calvet house (or Casa Calvet) is a modernist-style building designed by Antoni Gaudi in 1900 for a family of industrial textile manufacturers in Barcelona (Ensanche district). Gaudí collaborated with his assistants Francisco Berenguer, Juan Rubió, and Juli Batllevell to complete his first built project in the Ensanche of Barcelona.
Calvet House Technical Information
- Architects: Antoni Gaudi
- Location: Carrer de Sant Marc, 57, 08253 Sant Salvador de Guardiola, Barcelona, Spain
- Material: Natural Stone
- Typology: Residential / Apartments
- Scale: 5 stories
- Style: Catalan Modernisme
- Project Year: 1898 – 1900
- Drawings: © Antonio Gaudi, © Hiroya Tanaka
There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.
– Antoni Gaudi
Calvet House Photographs
The Casa Calvet is one of the earliest works of Antoni Gaudí. People consider it the genius architect’s most conservative construction. Its symmetry, balance, and orderly rhythm are unusual for Gaudí’s works. However, it contains some elements of marked modernism, like the attic balconies, which look like they came out straight from a fairy tale. The curves, double gable at the top, the projecting oriel at the entrance, and isolated witty details are modernist elements.
The building served as both a commercial property and a residence. The textile manufacturer Pere Màrtir Calvet commissioned the house. He used the upper floors as his private residence and set up his business premises in the basement and ground floor.
The house was built in the baroque Catalan style, using only stone quarry. It showcases incredible wrought ironwork on the balconies. Both the ground floor and hall are particularly interesting in the facade bulging balconies alternate with more petite, shallower balconies. Mushrooms above the oriel at the center allude to the owner’s favorite hobby.
Columns flanking the entrance are stacked bobbins, an allusion to the family business of textile manufacture.
The gallery at ground level is the façade’s most outstanding feature, a daring combination of wrought iron and stone in which decorative historical elements such as a cypress, an olive tree, horns of plenty, and the Catalan coat of arms can be discerned.
– Lluís Permanyer
Three sculpted heads at the top also allude to the owner: One is Sant Pere Màrtir Calvet I Carbonell (the owner’s father), and two are patron saints of Vilassar, Andreu Calvet’s hometown.
Casa Calvet was awarded the prize for the best building by the Barcelona City Council in the year 1900.
Calvet House Floor Plan
Casa Calvet Image Gallery
About Antoni Gaudi
Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was a Catalan architect known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí’s works have a highly individualized, one-of-a-kind style. Most are located in Barcelona, including Casa Mila or his main work, the church of the Sagrada Família.
Gaudí’s work was influenced by his passions in life: architecture, nature, and religion. He considered every detail of his creations and integrated crafts such as ceramics, stained glass, wrought ironwork forging, and carpentry into his architecture. He also introduced new techniques in the treatment of materials, such as trencadís which used waste ceramic pieces.
