Casa Batlló, local name Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), is a skeletal-shaped building located in Barcelona designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He is known for designing fluid, stone-clad Casa Milà in the early 1900s (or La Pedrera, the ‘stone quarry’) and Sagrada Família, the infamous church which has been under construction since 1882 – and, of course, Casa Batlló, which is equally as impressive with its irregular oval windows, sculptural stonework, wiggly formations and a facade that’s decorated with ceramic tiles.
Originally a townhouse, it was remodelled by Gaudí in 1904. And now, the building’s second floor – previously used as residential apartments and later a conservation and maintenance workshop – is being transformed into an exhibition space, set to host two exhibitions per year. Launched over the weekend, the inaugural exhibition Beyond the Facade was taken over by United Visual Artists, a London-based art practice founded by Matt Clark, known for creating immersive, site-specific installations that toe the line between tech, sculpture, performance and architecture. Alongside the exhibition, Clark has also been commissioned to create a new public artwork on the facade, titled Hidden Order, which marks the fifth edition of the annual facade project Casa Batlló’s 2026 Mapping. After a successful launch in 2022 with a data-driven piece by Refik Anadol, followed by Sofia Crespo’s nature-inspired forms presented in 2024, and Quayola’s tree-like structures in 2025 – the projection takes place every first weekend of February, in which visitors can marvel at a 10-minute digital display every half an hour.
To work with a building as freighted as Casa Batlló is to inherit its mythology as much as its material presence. Ever since Clark encountered Casa Batlló and Gaudí’s other creations, it has left a lasting impression. “Casa Batlló is full of forms and symbols that are never explicitly explained, leaving space for visitors to interpret what they see. In that sense, it feels closer to encountering a painting or a sculpture than a conventional building,” he says. “For me, the facade felt almost anatomical like skin and bone on the outside, with interior spaces feeling more like organs within a living body.” The unusual structures, lack of fixed viewpoints and absence of straight lines is what has stayed with him the most – an architecture that seems to make more sense as you move around it, rather than when you stand still. “That led me away from thinking of the facade as an image and towards thinking of it as a living surface, something that could hold rhythm, breath and movement over time.”
Gaudí’s buildings, Clark suggests, are something that you experience physically. “There is a strangeness to them, something you can’t quite put your finger on. It is an experience that is felt through embodiment and movement.” That sensibility became central to Hidden Order. Instead of layering new imagery onto a surface, which Clark describes as “already incredibly dense, full of detail and deeply resolved”, he deliberately avoided producing something overtly Gaudí-esque. Instead, he focused on the architect’s methods: observation, geometry and his belief in natural systems. “I tried to engage with his way of thinking,” says Clark. “For him, geometry was a way of understanding how forces move through the world and a source of evidence for divine order.” He adds, “The visual language grew out of systems, cycles and transformations, rather than fixed imagery. In that sense, the work is less about representing the building visually and more about revealing its rhythms, its pulse and Gaudí’s broader interest in the geometry of space and nature in general.”
As the project developed, Casa Batlló began to take on the role of a performer. “That shift naturally led me to the relationship between body and architecture,” he says, opening the door to a collaboration with dance artists Fukiko Takase. Having worked with choreographers and dance institutions in the past – like Benjamin Millepied and the Paris Opéra Ballet in 2015 – Clark often returns to movement as a way of understanding space. So when Joana Seguro, the project’s producer, introduced him to Takase, the alignment was immediate. “I was struck by her ability to create dynamic compositions within very confined spaces, which was important given our intention to capture her movements through motion capture,” says Clark.
From there, Clark invited Takase to spend time inside Casa Batlló, moving through its rooms and corridors, absorbing its spatial rhythms and gaining an understanding of how the choreography can also be shaped through the engagement with the building itself. Her movements were recorded using motion-capture technology and later transformed into dynamic visual structures that animate the facade. A score by Daniel J Thibaut accompanies visuals, creating a feast of an audio sensory experience.
Despite its scale, Hidden Order’s greatest challenge was its forms, especially as this was Clark’s first projection mapping project. “I quickly learned that creating convincing depth and spatial illusion is far more straightforward on buildings with straight lines and right angles,” he explains – something that Casa Batlló has none of. Curved surfaces, expanses of glass and ambient street light all shaped how the work could be perceived. “The process felt closer to architecture,” he says. “You can plan, construct and visualise endlessly, but you can only really understand how something works once it exists in situ.” For him, that understanding arrived just days before the work went live.
On the street, Hidden Order is a large-scale public performance. Inside, Beyond the Facade slows the pace, drawing visitors away from the daylight outside and into a darker, more contemplative setting. This is where Clark brings together light studies, motion-based projections and kinetic elements that enable audiences to look closer at the ideas and processes underpinning the work on the facade. “There is a great deal of anxiety about the future at the moment, and quite rightly so. I hope the work can offer a brief pause or moment of escape and a sense of togetherness that arises at these kinds of events.”
“If there is a takeaway [from the exhibition],” Clark adds, “it is perhaps a heightened awareness of how order and uncertainty coexist, not just in architecture or art, but in how we perceive the world more broadly.”
Hidden Order can be viewed online here, and Beyond the Facade is open to the public until 17 May 2026. Find out more here
