Calvet House

The Calvet house is a modernist-style building designed by Antoni Gaudí, located at 48 Caspe street in Barcelona (Eixample district). It was built between 1898 and 1900. Gaudí had the collaboration of his assistants Francisco Berenguer, Juan Rubió and Juli Batllevell.It was the first work that Gaudí designed and built in the Eixample of Barcelona, between party walls under a rental housing regime.

Casa Calvet is a reflection of Gaudí's artistic fullness: it belongs to his naturalist stage, a period in which the architect perfected his personal style, inspired by the organic forms of nature, for which he put into practice a whole series of new structural solutions originated in the profound analyzes carried out by Gaudí of ruled geometry. To this he adds great creative freedom and an imaginative ornamental creation: starting from a certain baroque style, his works acquire great structural richness, shapes and volumes devoid of rationalist rigidity or any classical premise.

In 1900 he received First Prize in the first edition of the annual Contest for artistic buildings in Barcelona. The building was listed as an Asset of Cultural Interest on July 24, 1969 with the reference RI-51-0003819.

Description

Plano of the facade of the house Calvet, signed by Gaudí on March 29, 1898.

The building was built for a textile manufacturer, Hijos de Pedro Mártir Calvet, and served both for business, for which the ground floor and basement were used, and for housing, located on the upper floors —the main one, from the owner, much more luxurious. Some experts in Gaudí's work consider the Calvet house to be the architect's most conservative work. take into account the fact that it would be located in a posh neighborhood. Indeed, the symmetry, balance and order that characterizes the Calvet house are unusual in Gaudí's work. Even so, there are modernist elements such as, for example, the two sections of façades ending in curves on the roof, the glazed balcony that protrudes above the entrance or the shape of the other balconies.

In this project, Gaudí resorted to a somewhat baroque style, visible in the use of Solomonic columns, the decoration with floral themes and the roof project with a waterfall and flower pots with a rococo air. This work marked the end of the use of historicist resources on the part of the architect, who abandoned the use of recurring styles —such as Mudejar, Romanesque or Gothic art— that he had used in some of his previous works, to frame himself in a period of personal maturity and artistic plenitude in which his The greatest inspiration would be nature, and it would culminate in works such as the Casa Batlló or the Casa Milà.

When the building was found in the heart of Barcelona's Eixample, the urban project designed for the expansion of the city in 1860 by Ildefonso Cerdá, Gaudí had to adapt to the planimetry of the buildings built for the Cerdá plan. They used to have a rectangular floor plan, with a double façade and an interior patio, bathrooms, kitchens, and storage rooms in the inner part of the estate, next to a ventilation patio, and distributed by floors, where the most luxurious used to be the first, the main floor., which used to have a grandstand on the façade.

The building is located between party walls, and has five floors and a double façade, one facing the street and the other facing the inner courtyard of the block. The total area is 636 m². As construction material, ashlars were used on the exterior walls, and brick on the interior; the ashlars are worked "a la romana", with a smooth frame and a roughened center. The ceilings of the ground floors are supported by metal beams, while those of the houses have a Catalan vault structure, with bricks supported on iron joists, and a wooden coffered ceiling.

Main Tribune.

The façade is made of sandstone from Montjuïc, with five openings at the base, on the center of which is the gallery of the main floor; Above each opening there is a row of balconies, with two shapes, some more discreet, barely protruding from the wall, and others more prominent, trilobed in shape and supported by corbels, all of them with wrought iron railings in the form of finished spirals. in scrolls. Particularly noteworthy is the gallery on the main floor, decorated with the initial of the owner's last name, an olive branch —symbol of peace—, a cypress —symbol of hospitality— and the coat of arms of Catalonia; it is topped with a dome sculpted with two cornucopias of Amalthea, from which the fruits are scattered, and on which two turtle doves perch. The iron railing of the tribune presents decoration in the shape of mushrooms (clathrus cancellatus, morchella hibrida and craterellus cornucopioides), a tribute to Mr. Calvet's love of mycology., in the shape of a Greek cross that strikes against a thumbtack, a symbol of faith crushing sin. It was forged by Joan Oñós, a blacksmith who regularly collaborated with Gaudí. The columns that flank the entrance are reminiscent of coils of thread, and are an allusion to Calvet's textile business.

Furniture of the main living room designed by Gaudí, currently at the Gaudí House-Museum, in the Güell park.

The upper part of the façade is topped by trefoil structures, three inverted and two protruding, crowned with wrought-iron crosses. The three inverted ones present busts of Saint Peter the Martyr and of the patron saints of the town where Calvet was born (San Ginés de Vilassar): Saint Ginés of Arles and Saint Ginés of Rome; on these are the railings of the roof, in the shape of a palm, a symbol of martyrdom. For its part, the rear façade presents a composition of undulating rhythms formed by small emerging galleries and small balconies made of stone, whose design insinuates the shapes that Shortly after, it would give way to the Milà house. This façade includes paintings with the PMC monogram on the sills, a reference to Pedro Mártir Calvet, recovered in the 1995 restoration.

Inside, the reception hall stands out, fully modernist in decorativism, with attached benches, mirrors with Baroque-style frames, a wainscoting of blue tiles with swirl-shaped decorations, granite Solomonic columns at the corners of the patio and arches with plaster reliefs in the shape of a vine, as well as the inscription "Faith, homeland, love", the motto of the Floral Games. in wood and glass and with a wrought iron door, similar in design to the stair railings, a kind of mesh of concentric circles.

Calvet House Door Mile designed by Gaudí.

The architect took special interest in all the details of the building, as can be seen in the design of elements such as knobs, handles, peepholes, doorknobs and other finishes in the house, which would be one of his hallmarks in later works. Gaudí molded many of these elements in clay, which he endowed with careful ergonomics; the peepholes are honeycomb-shaped, the holes in which the architect made with his own fingers.

Gaudí also designed the furniture for the house, made with organic shapes very much to the taste of the architect. He used a tongue and groove system, without nails or screws. The cabinetry was carried out by the company Casas i Bardés. The furniture in the main room is currently in the Gaudí House-Museum, in Park Güell.

As an anecdote, it is worth mentioning that the main façade exceeded the height allowed by municipal ordinances. When Gaudí was informed of this circumstance, with his usual bad temper, he refused to modify the project, adding that he would cut the top of the house horizontally along the line marked by the Town Hall; which did not happen.

In 1900, Casa Calvet received the annual award for the best building from the Barcelona City Council, the only award that Gaudí received during his lifetime.

In 1927 the Calvets sold the building to Joan Boyer, whose descendants are the current owners. The old Calvet fabric store is now a restaurant.