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Casa Vicens was Gaudí's first major commission, completed in 1885 when he was barely thirty, and the building already contains the argument he would spend the rest of his career elaborating: that ornament and structure are not separate concerns, that a surface can do both things at once without apology. The façade's vertical fins — stepped and serrated along their edges, clad in the marigold-and-leaf tiles he designed specifically for the building — are load-bearing in their logic even where they are purely decorative in their function, casting hard geometry onto the coral render behind them. Here the afternoon sun has done the compositional work, throwing each fin's shadow at a steep diagonal so that the wall becomes a study in alternating bands of vivid coral and near-black, the tile strips running between them like a repeated green-and-gold refrain. At the bottom of the frame, the register shifts abruptly: a checkerboard band of turquoise and white cuts across the rhythm, a reminder that Gaudí's system was never just one idea but several, stacked. For a first building, it shows remarkable confidence; for a last word on ornament, it still hasn't been topped.
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