London is famous for Big Ben, Paris for the Eiffel Tower and Rome for the Coliseum. Barcelona, on the other hand, is associated not with one or two buildings but with the creations of an entire movement, Modernisme, which straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book, besides constituting a survey of the most significant buildings by Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Maria Jujol and Puig i Cadafalch, is also a detailed analysis of the forms created by the most important craftsmen of the period, many of whom have been relegated for decades to absolute anonymity.

The fact that Antoni Gaudí was one of the best architects of his day and age, a member of that transitional generation between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is now undisputed, particularly if as well as appreciating the objective quality of his oeuvre we value its originality, the creative inventiveness of its new formal elements and bold structural proposals. Yet, in spite of the decisive crisis suffered by Modern Movement, when Ignasi de Solà-Morales carried out this in-depth study of Gaudí’s work Gaudí was still being called into question.

Modernista architecture was not only the product of the convictions of innumerable architects, it also received the unconditional support of property owners. A series of favorable social conditions, but above all this meeting of passions, led to the emergence of Barcelona's Eixample, a unique urban project. In the pages of this book we discover an array of astonishing works by following an itinerary designed to be both instructive and pleasurable.