From Gaudí to MAD Architects: Seven Buildings Built on Bones

By Elena Vasquez

Antoni Gaudí sketched a direct instruction beside his design for the Passion Façade at the Sagrada Família: "It should be harsh and cruel, as if made of bones." That 20th-century sketch anchors a longer history, traced by Architectural Digest, of architects using skeletal anatomy as ornament, structure and symbol.

How old is the skeleton motif?

Very old. As early as 7,200 BCE, Middle Eastern communities displayed human skulls in domestic spaces to honor ancestors. The Aztecs built elaborate skull racks, known as tzompantli, to display the remains of sacrificial captives as a demonstration of power. After the Black Death, memento mori imagery spread skulls across medieval European art and architecture. Overcrowded cemeteries led to exhumed remains relocated into crypts with skeletal displays, such as Portugal's 16th-century Capela dos Ossos and the Czech Republic's Sedlec Ossuary.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, architects such as Gaudí studied skeletal anatomy not merely as decoration but as a building's actual framework — much as the human body depends on its skeleton.

Which buildings carry the bone legacy?

Wat Rong Khun, Chiang Rai, Thailand. Artist Chalermchai Kositpipat's unconventional Buddhist temple and art installation, started in 1997 and still evolving, depicts the stages of Nirvana. Visitors cross a bridge over sculpted hands and skulls symbolizing desire and suffering on the path to enlightenment. White ornamentation and mirrored glass stand for purity and wisdom.

Casa Batlló, Barcelona, 1904–1906. The "House of Bones," a cornerstone of Catalan Modernism, features skull-like balconies, bone-like columns and a roof of iridescent scales evoking a dragon's spine. Built for textile industrialist Josep Batlló, the UNESCO-listed building is now a museum.

Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona, 1906–1912. The Whale-Bone Attic holds 270 repeating brick catenary arches that expand and contract like a giant whale's rib cage. Gaudí conceived the building as an animal body: internal columns as bones, the stone façade as skin. The UNESCO World Heritage Site remains partly residential.

What drives Calatrava's skeletal engineering?

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has built the motif into infrastructure on two continents. "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," he told Fast Company in 2010.

His Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport Railway Station, completed in 1994, shelters platforms beneath a vaulted concrete roof carried by rib-like structures, with a curved spine and wing-shaped silhouette evoking a bird taking flight.

The Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum, completed in 2001, pairs white concrete ribs with a 90-foot-high glass ceiling. Its Burke Brise Soleil — 72 steel fins opening and closing like enormous wings — spans 217 feet when fully extended.

The World Trade Center Oculus in New York repeats white steel ribs into wing-like canopies. Calatrava conceived the transportation hub, inspired by a bird released from a child's hands, as a symbol of hope and renewal after the September 11 attacks.

Where is the skeleton heading next?

Xinhee Design Center, Xiamen, 2017. Beijing-based MAD Architects designed the 61,000-square-meter headquarters for fashion company Xinhee as a structure of "skin and bones": a diagonal steel skeleton wrapped in translucent PTFE membrane that filters light and aids ventilation in the subtropical climate. Six radiating wings each house an atrium, connected by a suspended footbridge that doubles as a fashion runway, with elevated gardens woven through the frame.

From ossuaries to runways, the skeletal metaphor keeps migrating into new building types — proof that anatomy remains one of architecture's most durable structural teachers.