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 was provided by the sgraffito technique since ancient times.
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 was contributed by Italian stuccoers; It was the 17th century. It began with a simple and unpretentious performance, the wrapping that visually reaffirmed the ashlars. The first to invent them was Ramon Nonat Comas in 1913.
It did not take long for a technique that immediately incorporated color and immediately afterwards an attractive and stately polychrome palette to establish itself thanks to its benefits. Such a practice was maintained with strength and authority despite successive stylistic changes, with the parade of Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism, until a void was overcome and it reappeared with dazzling splendor when it exploded through the powerful grandeur of Modernisme. The best architects of the time contributed without a doubt to this, of which there were not a few, their projects served by the most professional workshops, 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 endeavored to compose a personal anthology of 148 facades among the more than 1,500 that enrich the skin of our architecture everywhere. The result is surprising and very appreciated, as we discover countless facades that go unnoticed, either due to lack of attention, due to the narrowness of certain streets of the ancient city and above all due to the lushness of the trees lined along the entire length. the 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 documents all the houses in the anthology with fidelity and detail, since it was not in vain that he carried out two inventories. , there is nothing, initiated with his ambitious and necessary Pla del Color of 1992. The art historian Daniel Pifarré traces the framework in which all this artisan work is developed contributed by so many hands that further singles out each building that shines so much by exhibiting what sgraffito
Until then the city seemed gray to us, but in reality it was just dirty. Until the Barcelona campaign, posat guapa showed us the colors sgraffito using stucco.
The book Sgraffito Barcelona (published by the City Council) will be the essential guide.
