From Gaudí to Calatrava: Seven Buildings Built on Bones

"It should be harsh and cruel, as if made of bones," Antoni Gaudí wrote beside his sketch of the Passion Façade at the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The Catalan architect's note captures a design lineage that runs from 7,200 BCE skull displays to a 61,000-square-meter fashion headquarters in China.

Gaudí deployed skeletal forms to evoke suffering on the basilica's west entrance, in deliberate contrast to the pictorial Nativity Façade opposite. He wasn't starting from scratch. As early as 7,200 BCE, Middle Eastern communities displayed human skulls in homes to honor ancestors. The Aztecs built skull racks called tzompantli to display the remains of sacrificial captives. After the Black Death, memento mori — symbolic reminders of death's inevitability — spread skulls through European art and architecture, while overcrowded cemeteries pushed remains into crypts with skeletal decoration, such as Portugal's 16th-century Capela dos Ossos and the Czech Republic's Sedlec Ossuary.

What does this change for architects? By the late 19th century, the skeleton shifted from ornament to actual structure, on the logic that a building, like a body, depends on its skeleton for the life within.

Wat Rong Khun, Chiang Rai, Thailand

Artist Chalermchai Kositpipat's White Temple, started in 1997 and still evolving, is an unconventional Buddhist temple and art installation depicting the stages of Nirvana. Visitors cross a bridge over sculpted hands and skulls, symbolizing desire and the cycle of suffering on the path to enlightenment. White ornamentation and mirrored glass stand for purity and wisdom.

Casa Batlló, Barcelona

Created from 1904 to 1906 for textile industrialist Josep Batlló, the UNESCO-listed "House of Bones" helped pioneer Catalan Modernism, a movement rejecting rigid geometry in favor of nature's structural principles. Its balconies resemble skulls, its columns are bone-like, and its iridescent scaled roof evokes a dragon's spine. The building now operates as a museum.

Casa Milà, Barcelona

Built between 1906 and 1912, Gaudí's Casa Milà, also known as La Pedrera, contains the Whale-Bone Attic: 270 repeating brick catenary arches that expand and contract like a giant whale's rib cage. Gaudí conceived the whole building as an animal body — internal columns as bones, the sculptural stone façade as skin. The UNESCO World Heritage Site remains partly residential, with the attic, rooftop chimneys and historic spaces open to visitors.

Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport Railway Station, France

Completed in 1994, Santiago Calatrava's station pairs skeletal engineering with the image of a bird taking flight. "Sometimes I say [I'm inspired by] the human skeleton, because it's true that there's something essential in the construction of our body," Calatrava told Fast Company in 2010. The central hall's steel framework of intersecting arches meets rib-supported concrete vaults over the platforms, with a tapering spine and wing-shaped silhouette.

Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum

Calatrava's 2001 pavilion emulates a mythical winged skeleton. Windhover Hall pairs white concrete ribs and pointed arches with a 90-foot glass ceiling. Outside, the Burke Brise Soleil — 72 steel fins spanning 217 feet when fully extended — opens and closes like enormous wings.

World Trade Center Oculus, New York City

Conceived by Calatrava as a symbol of renewal after the September 11 attacks, the Oculus was inspired by a bird released from a child's hands. Repeating white steel ribs extend into wing-like canopies around a cathedral-like hall of steel and glass, with a central skylight flooding the space with natural light.

Xinhee Design Center, Xiamen, China

Beijing-based MAD Architects opened this 61,000-square-meter headquarters for fashion company Xinhee in 2017 as a literal "skin and bones" structure: a diagonal steel skeleton wrapped in translucent PTFE membrane that filters light and drives natural ventilation in the subtropical climate. Six radiating wings each house an atrium, linked by a suspended footbridge that doubles as a fashion runway, with elevated gardens threading nature through the frame.

Two centuries after ossuaries, the skeleton has become a working structural model — and, for MAD, a way to fuse fashion with architecture.