Qualla: Josep Maria Jujol

Josep Maria Jujol: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Canaan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Millions of visitors have sat on the great serpentine bench that curls around the terrace at Park Güell in Barcelona, running their hands over its river of broken tile. Almost none of them know the name of the man who gave it that skin. The swirling mosaic of shattered ceramic, arranged like a fever dream of color, was designed by Josep Maria Jujol, Antoni Gaudí's most gifted collaborator and, for a century, his most overlooked. Where Gaudí gave Catalan Modernisme its bones, Jujol so often gave it its surface: the color, the pattern, the shimmer that people remember without knowing whom to thank.

Read more: Josep Maria Jujol on Qualla

Image: Canaan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Josep Maria Jujol: A Childhood Above the Classroom

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jujol was born in 1879 in Tarragona, in about the most fitting place imaginable for a future architect of light and pattern: the top floor of a public school. His father, Andreu Jujol, ran the Sant Joan school, and the family lived above the classrooms for nine years. The boy dre...

Read more: Josep Maria Jujol on Qualla

Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0

Josep Maria Jujol: The Man Behind Gaudí's Color

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benutzer:Bautsch, Public domain. He qualified as an architect in 1906, the same year he met Gaudí through a mutual friend, Dr. Santaló. The partnership was immediate and lasting. Their first project together was Casa Batlló, where Jujol worked on the building's ceramic facade and its first floor; at Casa Milà, t...

Read more: Josep Maria Jujol on Qualla

Image: Benutzer:Bautsch | Public domain

Josep Maria Jujol: Dreamer of Impossible Things

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lwill027, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jujol's imagination ran past what patrons would pay for. As a young draughtsman he drew up plans for an amusement park modeled on the Solar System, a whirling scheme that was never built and never revived. His most personal work met a slower fate. In the mid-1920s he began a sanc...

Read more: Josep Maria Jujol on Qualla

Image: Lwill027 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Josep Maria Jujol: The Long Homecoming

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gab01, Public domain. The story did not end at his death. In 1984, decades after Jujol was gone, builders returned to the hill at Montferri and took up his drawings again. They completed the sanctuary in 1999, pale and spiky and strange, rising from the vineyards like a smaller, wilder cousin of the S...

Read more: Josep Maria Jujol on Qualla

Image: Gab01 | Public domain