Eixample: Modernisme Beyond Gaudí

Gaudí gets the headlines, which is fair, but the Modernisme movement in Barcelona was never a one-man show. Between roughly 1885 and 1920, an entire generation of architects, designers, and craftsmen turned the Eixample district into an open-air museum of decorative excess, structural ambition, and competitive ego. The grid itself — designed by Ildefons Cerdà in 1859 — was meant to be egalitarian. Every block the same size, every corner chamfered at 45 degrees so carriages could turn. The architects took that rational framework and filled it with dragons, flowers, stained glass, and wrought iron twisted into shapes that iron has no business taking.

The Manzana de la Discòrdia on Passeig de Gràcia is the block where you see it all at once. Three buildings by three rival architects — Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch, and Gaudí — standing side by side, each trying to outdo the others. Domènech went with intricate tilework and sculptural clusters. Puig i Cadafalch went medieval-Flemish. Gaudí went full ocean hallucination. The neighbors must have had opinions.

Lluís Domènech i Montaner is the one who deserves more attention than he gets. His Hospital de Sant Pau is a campus of Moderniste pavilions connected by underground tunnels, built so that patients could see gardens from every bed. It functioned as a working hospital until 2009. The mosaics, the stained glass, the ceramic work — all designed to make sick people feel less sick. It is the most humane building in Barcelona, and most visitors have never heard of it.

The Eixample’s secret is its interior courtyards. Cerdà designed the blocks to be open in the center, with gardens and light for every apartment. Speculation filled most of them in by the early 20th century, but some survive, and they are lush and quiet and invisible from the street. You walk past them constantly without knowing.

There is a pharmacy on Carrer de Mallorca with an original Moderniste interior — carved wood, painted tiles, apothecary jars in glass cabinets — and it still fills prescriptions. The pharmacist works surrounded by art nouveau flourishes as if that were normal.

Ten stops across the grid, following the architects who made Barcelona look like nowhere else on earth.