The first house. The architect's house. The manifesto house.

Casa Vicens is the driving force for all the exhibitions, presenting the context in which it was built and helping visitors interpret it.

This temporary exhibition aims to put Casa Vicens in an international context with a view of single-family homes designed by Gaudí’s most important contemporaries: the timeline of these figures begins with Viollet-le-Duc and William Morris, who were key in Gaudí’s training, and then moves to great American architects from the first generation of the Modern Architecture movement (Richardson, Sullivan and Wright), European architects of the same generation (Berlage, Wagner and others), and finishes up with various expressions of Art Nouveau (Horta, Guimard, Mackintosh and Olbirch).

One house by each architect has been chosen for the exhibition, either because it was the first one they designed and built or because it was their own home or a manifest home, meaning a construction with which they experimented with the styles and forms that would later become characteristic of the architect’s work, not only in terms of architecture but also decoration and furniture. Finally, the houses were all built roughly about the same time as Casa Vicens.

The exhibitions are designed to cover topics and contexts based on the international influences, sources and cultural and aesthetic motivations at Casa Vicens, such as Orientalism, Japonism, ornamentation, nature and colour theory; as well as houses built at the same time as Casa Vicens around the world.