Gaudí’s legacy reaches the future. Casa Batlló becomes the first Unesco World Heritage Site to make its way into digital art.
Living Architecture: Casa Batlló is the culmination of a collaboration between Casa Batlló and Refik Anadol. A year ago, Casa Batlló launched its new immersive, awardwinning tour of Gaudí’s masterpiece, conceived as a journey through Gaudí’s genius redefining the museum experience. For the visit’s grand finale, Casa Batlló commissioned Refik Anadol the digital artwork “In the Mind of Gaudí.” This piece is performed in the world’s first six-walls LED cube room, a 360-experience through AI and visual sculpting inside a 6-screen space in the building’s basement, generating instant acclaim.
Living Architecture: Casa Batlló
by Refik Anadol.
Today, the collaboration continues with a historical event: Barcelona’s iconic 1906 Gaudí building becomes the first Unesco World Heritage Site to take the form of live dynamic NFT. This monumental generative artwork inspired by Casa Batlló’s iconic façade will also highlight Christie’s 21st century evening sale. The artwork will be the only NFT on sale within the 5-day series
of Christie’s Spring Marquee Weeksales: a historic auction featuring works by Warhol, Van Gogh, Monet, and Basquiat, among others. Christie’s pioneers new technologies that are redefining the business of art, including the creation of viewing and bidding experiences that integrate augmented reality, global live streaming, buy-now channels, and hybrid sales formats.
Façade of Casa Batlló, Barcelona, 2022.
Photo: Claudia Maurino
Casa Batlló is a masterpiece by Gaudí, one of the greatest architects of all time, created in his heyday. Conceived in its artistic maturity and total creative freedom, Casa Batlló is a eulogy for happiness, a marine-inspired canvas, and an oneiric world that evokes nature and fantasy. Its façade is the gateway to this symbolic universe, and contemplating it inspires feelings that have a continuous dialogue with light
and color. Its spectacular nature leaves no one indifferent and makes passersby stop to look at it at any time of the day. Exuberant and marine, it contains involuntary sculptures, recycled materials, and decontextualized objects Gaudí turned into art. Living Architecture: Casa Batlló will bring Gaudí’s façade both to the forefront in our collective cultural memory and establish its place in the digital space in this historic sale.
Exhibition Rendering at Casa Batlló, Courtesy of the designer, Isern Serra.
To celebrate this milestone, Casa Batlló exhibits the work in the building with a unique staging. On the one hand, the design of the space by Isern Serra, an intervention that wishes to merge the
physical and digital world, that upon visiting, one feels as if transformed into an entirely digitally fabricated, oniric world.
Moreover, as part of this immersive experience, Refik Anadol and Casa Batlló worked with Firmenich, the world’s largest privately-owned fragrance and taste company, to create a bespoke fragrance for this unique installation. Firmenich’s digital innovation hub, D-LAB, used visual data from images of the house combined with Barcelonaspecific olfactive descriptors, and fed them into their AI algorithm. This generated the formula for an olfactive Barcelona experience. Reflecting on the challenge of reinterpreting Gaudí’s work and principles, Pioneering AI Artist and Digital Architect Refik Anadol comments, “Gaudí is an amazing inspiration for any creator and Casa Batlló a dream work to dive into. From its organic architecture, inspired in nature, to the smallest details on its many mosaics, it is a privilege to reinterpret such an alive legacy and bring it to the 21st century, guided by Artificial Intelligence.”
Gary Gautier, Casa Batlló’s Manager, reflects on choosing Refik Anadol to propel Gaudí’s legacy into the heritage of tomorrow: “Casa Batlló’s mission is to amplify Gaudí’s magic, and Refik Anadol is the perfect fellow traveler for this journey. His work resides between art and technology, expands the possibilities of architecture, and brings a new outlook beyond space and time. Refik connects past, present, and future, reminding us of the innovative, humanist and visionary Gaudí.”
Beatriz Ordovas, Christie’s Head of PostWar & Contemporary, Iberia, remarks, “It is a pleasure Christie’s to present this groundbreaking work by Refik Anadol, one of the leading digital artists in the space, in collaboration with Casa Batlló. This is a remarkable work which has brought back to life Gaudi´s most iconic building, using environmental data gathered in real-time. ‘Casa Batlló: Living Architecture’ not only brings a new vibrant experience for the viewer but it has also created a new narrative in the NFT world.”
A Historic Auction for the Neurodiversity
Since the beginning of 2021, Casa Batlló has had an entire neurodivergent visitor care team (with autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, etc.), thanks to the strategic alliance with social organization Specialisterne. Therefore, a percentage of the donation from the auction of the work will go to two local institutions specialized in comprehensive care and family support for people with
neurodivergence: the Aprenem Autisme Association, with an annual attendance of more than 6,000 people working towards the inclusion of people with autism through a family care program, and the Adana Foundation, which offers ongoing treatment to more than 900 children and youth, from early diagnosis to therapeutic plan.
Christies Lot Essay by Noah Davis
“La originalidad consiste en el retorno al origen; así pues, original es aquello que vuelve a la simplicidad de las primeras soluciones.’’
“Originality consists in returning to the origin; thus, that which is original returns to the simplicity of the first solutions.” Antoni Gaudí.’’
In contemplating this famous quotation from legendary Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, it’s important to consider the complexity of the operative verb, volver. The simplest English translation is “to return,” but volver can connote multitudes of movement in liminal spaces—both physical and metaphorical. It’s an incredibly versatile, slippery piece of language which can be combined with various prefixes to form many common Spanish verbs. Depending on the context of its use, it can represent a return to or from—a turning inside or out, and in
some cases, it can be more accurately translated as “to become,” which is precisely why it’s the perfect verb to deploy in this instance. Gaudí’s elliptical definition of originality in creativity becomes ever more vitally relevant as we press ahead into this exciting and uncertain future. His conviction in the unknowable but infinite spiritual resonance of specific shapes, colors and visual rhythms is, in a way, deeply comforting to hold onto, especially as science and technology have clarified much of the mystery of our reality.
Another artist deeply attuned to this kind of magical, perhaps even heavenly aspect of natural aesthetics is the contemporary multimedia pioneer, Refik Anadol. His groundbreaking series of Data Paintings (which employ neither paint nor canvas) perfectly illustrates Gaudí’s tenets regarding the power of shapes and colors drawn from the world around us. Utilizing massive sets of information sourced from virtual databases or instruments for recording environmental conditions, Anadol creates rule-based algorithms to transform raw information into
cosmically beautiful, often interactive and always immersive abstract artworks. At the heart of all of Anadol’s output is a meditative fascination with the ways in which machines can augment our perceived reality as human beings, from the superficial experience of the visual to the fundamental experience of time and space.
Utilizing massive sets of information sourced from virtual databases or instruments for recording environmental conditions, Anadol creates rule-based algorithms to transform raw information into cosmically beautiful, often interactive and always immersive abstract artworks.
Installation rendering of present lot, courtesy of the artist
Beyond his fascination with Light and Space artists such as James Turrell, Anadol is a leading practitioner of the newly explosive movement of generative art, in which the artists mostly prefer custom software and computers to a loaded paintbrush and canvas. While generative art is by no means a brand new phenomenon—early examples of modern artists working in a generative mode include Ellsworth Kelly and Hans Haacke; one could even make a compelling argument that the famous fugues of classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach are examples of generative art in music—the increasingly sophisticated technology available to artists today has led to a renewed interest and a veritable renaissance in the field. Given most of the compelling new work in the movement is of a digital origin, it makes sense that the preferred medium for its dissemination and collection is via NFTs (non-fungible tokens are indelible
entries on a decentralized blockchain, and they are especially useful for giving currency to ephemeral goods such as conceptual or digital art). What sets Anadol apart from most artists in the NFT space is his spellbinding installations, which in recent years have captivated audiences around the globe, from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia— where Anadol exhibited his Quantum Memories on a monumental LED screen towering over visitors—to the beaches of Miami, Florida—where his Machine Hallucinations: Coral was installed outdoors, viewable 24/7, day and night against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the objective fact that Anadol creates artwork without a physical form, he has perfected its transformation into three-dimensional space, maximizing its impact on his audience. Simply put: Anadol’s installations inspire awe and cause jaws to drop.
Façade detail of Casa Batlló, Barcelona, 2022.
Photo: Claudia Maurino
The present lot, titled Living Architecture, is the artist’s homage to and radical reinterpretation of Antoni Gaudí’s famous Casa Batlló in Barcelona, Spain. In 1904, textile magnate Josep Batlló commissioned Gaudí to redesign the home he had bought for his family on the Passeig de Gràcia, one of the most prestigious and fashionable districts of the city at the time. Dissatisfied with the previous design of the building, Batlló hoped Gaudí would demolish the site and build something completely anew; however, the architect convinced Batlló that a renovation, albeit an extreme one, would suffice. By 1906, Gaudí had completed his masterful refurbishment
of the building. What was once an entirely unremarkable façade had been transformed into a flowing, sinuous mosaic of colorful tiles, tinted glass and sculpted stonework. A popular local nickname for the Casa Batlló is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones)—another common interpretation compares the arched roof of the house to the spine of a dragon; in this reading, the turret and cross towards the center-left of the rooftop represents the lance of St. George (patron saint of Catalonia, Gaudí’s home) plunging into the dragon’s back. Today, the Casa Batlló is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and museum dedicated to the preservation of the architect’s legacy.
Wassili Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 9, 1910. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Living Architecture: Casa Batlló utilizes the building’s iconic façade as the armature for an algorithmically generated, ever-morphing fractalized abstraction: roiling waves of red, blue and yellow pixels glide through the virtually rendered white-box frame, creating a hectic yet beautiful web of color and serpentine forms. Further amplifying the visual and physical manifestation of his work, Anadol has created a custom scent and audio soundtrack for the installation in Rockefeller Plaza during the presale exhibition which will contend
with the ambiance of the surrounding hyper-urban environment. The visual output of Living Architecture will be determined by an artificial intelligence designed by the artist in real time using environmental data gathered from cutting-edge sensors placed nearby the Casa Batlló on the Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. Hence, the title of the work— Living Architecture—is much more than symbolic… it is true. –Noah Davis, Specialist, Head of Digital Art & Online Sales
Living Architecture: Casa Batlló by Refik Anadol.
