El capricho de Gaudí

El Capricho

In 1883, Máximo Díaz de Quijano (whose sister was the sister-in-law of Antonio López y López, first Marquis of Comillas and, like him, a Spaniard returned home wealthy from America) commissioned Gaudí with the design of a summer chalet close to the marquis’s palace in Sobrellano, in the Cantabrian village of Comillas: El Capricho. This building (1883-1885) is contemporary with the Casa Vicens (1883-1888), which Gaudí erected in Barcelona. For this reason, construction of El Capricho was supervised on-site by Cristóbal Cascante, friend and colleague in developing Gaudí’s work. And although Cascante had a scale model and highly detailed plans by Gaudí, whom he consulted with all his queries, in view of the minute details involved in El Capricho and the perfection of the finishes, it is hard to believe that he was never in Comillas itself. In fact, the sculptor, Joan Matamala, wrote in his memoires that Gaudí had told him that he had travelled incognito to Santiago de Compostela, between 1883 and 1885, passing through Burgos and Comillas.

The importance of El Capricho and of the Casa Vicens is that these are the first buildings by Gaudí and, therefore, are extremely important works as regards the future of the architect’s career, as well as being essential for studying his work as a whole for being distinctive in terms of the style marking his first era. This stands out, as noted by J. E. Cirlot, for the Mudejar influence, for the alternation between this orientalistic suggestion and medievalism, and for the gradual appearance of elements corresponding to Gaudí’s mature stage.

The exterior of the building is characterized by the use of stone, in the lower part, of open-face brick adorned with fringes of glazed ceramics representing sunflowers and leaves on the rest, and the superimposition of the curved surface facing the straight surface.

El Capricho is an example of Gaudí’s orientalist trend in its fullness where the architect found excellent solutions, such as the Persian tower-minaret, this being the distinguishing feature of this work and the first to come from an architectural solution that was to appear in future constructions such as Bellesguard or the Güell Park Pavillions. On the edge of the tower, all covered with the same ceramics as on the borders, thus accentuating its verticality, stands a splendid shrine sustained by four foundation columns where the geometrization of the dome, according to Cirlot cited earlier, is an outright cubism made a quarter of a century before its time.

It should also be noted that, in this first work by Gaudí (and this was to be a constant), we see the extraordinary adaptation to the characteristics set by the contractor. In fact, Díaz de Quijano was an amateur musician and collector of exotic plants. El Capricho, whim or caprice, evokes free, fantasizing musical composition, has a U-shaped ground floor to shelter a large south-facing greenhouse from the north wind where the owner treasured his plants brought from abroad. Gaudí echoed the owner’s passion for music in various elements, both in interior and exterior decoration. Such is the case of the dragonfly in the glazing with a guitar and the sparrow on an organ, or the bench-balcony, where the counterweights of the guillotine window were metal tubes which, when raised or lowered, were hit by a rod let out pleasant musical sounds.

Josep Liz. Triangle Postals