Designing from architecture: the Casa Batlló, Barcelona Part Two

Course Work; a valuable resource. 

 I was fascinated by the buildings by Gaudi, in particular the Casa Batlló in Barcelona. The outside of the building is wonderful but the staircase inside is a lovely exercise in  the use of shading. 

Robert Hughes says that 'Under the skylight where they take the most light, the skin of the internal walls is flat, a cobalt blue. The walls get lighter in colour and develop a ripple of texture (to catch the light falling from above) as they descend from floor to floor. They pass from cobalt to sky blue, and thence to pearly grey, before becoming white at street level for maximum reflection.'

Roberto Hughes Barcelona (1992) p 512. This is my picture of the internal stairwell.  

I was fascinated by the way in which Gaudi had used shading to bring the light down into the stairwell. The tiles shaded upwards so that the top of the stairwell is darker blue and resembles the sky when looking up.  The bottom of the stairwell is white to reflect the light. Nowadays you can go on a virtual tour. This is amazing and you get to see so many areas of the building which were not open to the public when I went. 

https://www.casabatllo.es/en/virtual-tour/

The remit from the HNC course was to design materials for a range of purposes. Here are some of my samples inspired by the stairwell tiles.

Weave structure: Monks belt - for a cushion cover.

This is an interesting structure with regular floats on a plain weave background. 

Weave draft Monks Belt

The woven sample

Weave structure: Boulevard weave - for a cushion cover

Weave draft for Boulevard weave.

For the weave draft, I used different colours to show up the weave structure. For the actual design I used five shades of blue 16/2 cotton. 

Boulevard weave

Weave structure:   Inlay

Inlay

reverse of inlay sample

Some of the entries in my sketch book.

  

Weave structure:   Double weave 1  cushion covers.

I used 16/2 cotton at 32 epi for both layers. The weft is 5 shades of blue 16/2 cotton. 

I have used this design for cushion covers for my living room. 

Double weave 2

Once double weave is set up on the loom, the weaving can be varied.  I tried to shade the colours and to change the length of the coloured pattern on the surface.  It gives a pleasing effect.  

I hope that you have enjoyed looking at these old samples.  They may be old but are a rich source of inspiration for me particularly as I had not viewed them for some time.

Happy weaving

Susan J Foulkes 2023