Vizcaya Museum & Gardens

You are looking down a street lined with striking cubic buildings made of painted plaster, defined by stark white central blocks flanked by vibrant, solid blue and red protruding sections. We were just wandering through the French Garden, and funnily enough, the land you are standing on right now used to be its neighbor, the Italian Garden, laid out back in the seventeenth century for royalty.

But there is nothing seventeenth-century about these blocks. This is the Italian Garden Estate, built between 1924 and 1926 by architect Otto Haesler. It is a masterpiece of a movement called Neues Bauen, or New Objectivity, an architectural style that tossed out fussy historical decorations in favor of clean, rational lines and practical living spaces. Take a look at your screen to see an aerial view of how radical these flat roofs looked back then. In a town famous for slanted, half-timbered roofs, locals were so puzzled by these flat tops that they jokingly called the neighborhood New Jerusalem or Morocco.

Haesler did not just build boxes, though. He teamed up with artist Karl Völker to create the very first color-designed modernist housing estate. The colors actually tell you what is inside. The bold blue sections housed massive, 129 square meter apartments with four rooms, while the red sections held slightly smaller three-room flats. Check out your app to see how those windows wrap right around the corners of the colored blocks. Haesler borrowed that trick from De Stijl, a famous Dutch art movement that loved pure geometry and primary colors.

Now, the original plan for this whole project was to solve a local housing shortage for everyday workers. But there was a major catch. The apartments were built so incredibly spacious, even including tiny bedrooms for live-in maids and huge 250 square meter backyard gardens for growing food. Because of this luxury, they cost a fortune to build, and the rents were sky-high. Instead of factory workers moving in, the neighborhood filled up with upper-middle-class professionals like doctors, teachers, and merchants. The local paper even complained that the cooperative had built palaces instead of practical housing.

If you look back toward the main road, you will notice two massive buildings with slanted roofs acting like a gateway. Haesler actually designed those in an Expressionist style, a slightly older trend using dramatic, emotional shapes, specifically to shield his wild, brightly colored flat-roofed experiment from the conservative main street.

These colorful buildings have survived a lot, including a disastrous 1970s remodel that painted them pink and light green. Luckily, a massive restoration later brought back the brilliant red and blue you see today, though they did add thick modern insulation that slightly bulked up the original sleek proportions. If you ever want to learn more from the local historical sites around here, note that most operate Monday through Sunday from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM, but remain closed on Tuesdays.