ArchitectureBuildings to visit
Seven skeleton-inspired buildings, from Gaudí's Barcelona to Calatrava's Oculus
From Gaudí's House of Bones to a Xiamen fashion headquarters, a tour of buildings shaped by ribs, spines and skulls.
Architectural Digest has gathered seven buildings that borrow from the skeleton, a theme with a long and fairly macabre history. The piece opens with Gaudí, who noted beside his sketch for the Sagrada Família's Passion Façade that it should look as if made of bones, and runs through skull racks, memento mori and ossuaries such as Portugal's Capela dos Ossos and the Czech Sedlec Ossuary.
Barcelona supplies two entries. Casa Batlló, the House of Bones, has skull-like balconies, bone-thin columns and a scaled roof like a dragon's spine, and is now a museum. Casa Milà, or La Pedrera, has a Whale-Bone Attic of 270 brick arches that swell and shrink like a rib cage; the attic and rooftop chimneys are open to visitors. In Chiang Rai, Chalermchai Kositpipat's White Temple, begun in 1997 and still growing, is reached across a bridge over sculpted hands and skulls.
Santiago Calatrava gets three: the bird-like railway station at Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport, the winged Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and New York's ribbed World Trade Center Oculus. MAD Architects' Xinhee Design Center in Xiamen, a steel skeleton wrapped in fabric-like membrane, closes the list.
A good list for anyone planning a Gaudí day or passing through these cities with an eye for structure.
Our summary of a story from Architectural Digest, published 30 October 2026. Read the original
8 photos
From Architectural Digest