“It should be harsh and cruel, as if made of bones,” Antoni Gaudí wrote next to his sketch of the Passion Façade, the west-facing entrance of his magnum opus, the Sagrada Família. In stark contrast to the organic, pictorial design of the Nativity Façade on the opposite side of the basilica, which depicts the birth of Jesus, Gaudí employed skeletal forms to evoke human suffering and Christ’s final days.

While the Catalan architect drew inspiration from skeletons for multiple projects—most notably Barcelona’s Casa Batlló, a residential building known as the House of Bones for its dragon-vertebrae-inspired design, and Casa Milà, with its undulating, rib cage–like arches—he was not the first to do so. Skeletons have long served as sacred ornamentation across cultures, representing the transience of life. As early as 7,200 BCE, Middle Eastern communities displayed human skulls in domestic spaces to honor their ancestors, while in Mesoamerica, the Aztecs erected elaborate skull racks known as tzompantli to display sacrificial captives’ remains as a demonstration of power. Following the Black Death in medieval Europe, memento mori, symbolic reminders of death’s inevitability, further ubiquitized skulls in art and architecture. Meanwhile, as European cemeteries became increasingly inundated from the Middle Ages into the early modern period, carcasses were exhumed and relocated to crypts featuring skeletal decorative 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 Antoni Gaudí began studying skeletal anatomy not merely for adornment, but as the actual framework for buildings. After all, much like the human body, a building relies on its skeleton as the foundation for life within. From an avant-garde temple to to contemporary buildings constructed to resemble skeletal forms, below are architectural marvels that reveal why skeletons remain an enduring muse for architects.