The first commission for which Gaudí was wholly responsible is the house of Don Manuel Vicens at 24-26 Carrer de les Carolines in Barcelona. This was erected in 1878-80, immediately upon his graduation from the local Escuela Superior de Arquitectura, and in it no trace of Second Empire influence, French or international, remains. A large suburban villa built of rubble masonry liberally banded with polychrome tiles, the Casa Vicens passes beyond the extravagances of a Teulon or a Lamb in the sixties into a world of fantasy that only one or two High Victorian designers such as the Scottish Frederick T. Pilkington (1832-98) ever entered. Yet Gaudí’s general inspiration came definitely from the medieval past. In Spain that past included the semi-Islamic Mudéjar, however, and much of the detailing which appears most original to non-Spanish eyes is, in fact, dependent on local precedents of one sort or another. For example, the floral tiles are merely what the Iberian world knows as _azulejos_ and has continued to use down to the present time, especially in Portugal and Brazil (see Chapter 25). In all the flamboyance of the decoration of the Casa Vicens, the most personal note is in the ironwork. This is naturalistic in theme and bold in scale; it also includes curious linear elements that wave and bend in a way which is more than a little premonitory of the Art Nouveau of the nineties (see Chapter 16). The entrance grille is a masterpiece of decorative art of this period, rivalled only by some of Morris’s contemporary stained glass. The very utilitarian industrial warehouse for La Obrera Mataronense of 1878-82 at Mataró, with its great arched principals of laminated wood, should be mentioned to balance the Casa Vicens. Here Gaudí’s prowess as an imaginative constructor—almost a straight engineer—was very evident, as also the fact that the unfamiliar forms he continually used—the shape of the arches here was parabolic not semicircular or pointed—were not a matter of personal crankiness but selected for statical reasons: Gothic in theory, that is, like some of Soufflot’s vaulting, though not very Gothic in appearance.