The architectural landscape of Barcelona is unique, of exceptional artistic quality and of enormous extension and enhanced with an unmistakable personality. The secret of this aesthetic practice has been provided since ancient times by the sgraffito technique.
The sgraffito is a spectacular polychrome wrapping that adorns the facade with the originality that introduces the anarchist brushstroke to the local rausa. Here is the house’s unmistakable brand.
The sgraffito comes from afar and contributed by Italian plasterers; it was the 17th century. It began with a simple and unpretentious performance, the stubbornness that visually reaffirmed the lime trees. The first to inventory them was Ramon Nonat Comas in 1913.
It didn’t take long to assert itself, thanks to his kindness, a technique that immediately incorporated color and soon after an attractive and stately polychrome palette. This practice remained strong and authoritative, despite successive stylistic changes, with the parade of Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism, until, having overcome a gap, it reappears with dazzling splendor bursting through the powerful grandeur of Modernism. Without a doubt, the best architects of the time, who were not few, contributed to their projects by very professional workers, so much so that even thanks to the experience accumulated in several family generations, they improved the projects drawn by the still young graduates.
The designer and photographer Lluís Duran insisted on composing a personal anthology of 148 facades from among the more than 1,500 that enrich the skin of our architecture everywhere. The result is surprising and very much to be appreciated, as it reveals countless facades that go unnoticed, either due to lack of attention, due to the narrowness of certain streets in the old city or especially due to the lushness of the grove lined up along the entire Eixample.
And it highlights the fundamental collaboration based on the most demanding scientific rigor that distinguishes the architect Joan Casadevall i Serra (trained in the family workshop), who faithfully and meticulously documents all the houses in the anthology, since not without reason carried out two inventories, Déu n’hi do, initiated with his ambitious and necessary Color Plan of 1992. The art historian Daniel Pifarré traces the framework in which all this artisanal work contributed by so many hands is developed which makes each building even more unique that shines when it exhibits the sgraffito.
Until then the city seemed gray to us, but in reality it was only dirty. Until the “Barcelona, ??pose’t guapa” campaign discovered the colors sgraffito using stucco.
The book Barcelona sgraffiada (published by Barcelona City Council) will be an essential guide.
