Two buildings here, one on each side of the little street, and they are the same building twice. Same rippling stonework, same curved windows, same wave running along the top as if the whole façade is slowly melting. Stand between them and they mirror each other.
They were built for a man who sold cakes.
Josep Casasayas ran a pastry shop in this city — Can Frasquet — and around nineteen oh-eight he commissioned not one modernista building but a matched pair, facing off across Carrer de Santacília. The architect was Francesc Roca i Simó, and Guillem Reynés finished the job.
That is a confectioner's project, and I mean that as a compliment. Look at what the stone is doing. The window openings don't sit in the wall so much as get pressed into it, the mouldings run in soft continuous curves, and the top of each building rolls in a wave. It is masonry behaving like piped icing — a hard material worked until it looks soft, which is precisely the trick his day job involved.
These were als
o, straightforwardly, an investment. Shop at street level, the family on the good floor, apartments above to rent out. Modernisme in Palma was not built by aesthetes; it was built by successful tradesmen who had money and wanted a building that announced it.
Now, if you own two buildings and they're twenty feet apart, and it's nineteen ten and modernisme is in the air and everything is possible,
