Casa de les Punxes

Casa de les Punxes stands where three streets cross in the Eixample district of Barcelona. The plot is triangular, an exception to the district's regular grid. Josep Puig i Cadafalch answered it in the early twentieth century with a single block of six corners. Bartomeu Terradas Brutau, prominent in the textile industry, commissioned the house for his three sisters, Angela, Josefa and Rosa. He asked for a dwelling for each of them. Instead, the architect raised one structure that looks like a medieval castle, crowned by six pointed towers with conical spikes. Northern European castle forms meet Catalan Modernisme across the façades.

The three sisters surface all over the façade's decoration. Enric Monserdà carved a panel with an angel for Angela, and Rosa's side carries a vase of roses with her initials, RTB. A sundial and calendar mark the four seasons in zodiac signs beneath a phrase from Virgil's Georgics. Josefa's section holds a ceramic panel of Saint George slaying the dragon, the emblem of Catalonia. Just below it, Puig i Cadafalch sculpted his own face into the stone. Clovers, pomegranates and apples recur in the reliefs, in stained glass from the Amigó workshop, and in ironwork forged by Manuel Ballarín. Under all of it, cast iron pillars and metal beams carry the ground floor instead of load-bearing walls. That choice opened flexible ground-floor space, intended for commercial use from the start.

Spain declared the house a historic monument and a cultural asset of national interest in the nineteen seventies. Major restorations in the nineteen nineties and the early two thousands earned a European heritage award. A project finished in two thousand sixteen brought back the Modernista features and the original open spaces. Inside, Monserdà's neo-Gothic chapel and furniture carry the same hand that shaped the stone outside.