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Casa Milà
AKA La Pedrera (Catalan for 'The Quarry')

  92 Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona, Spain

Exterior

Interior

See also: P. J. O'Rourke, God's Engineer Includes commentary on Casa Mila


Architect: Antoni Gaudi (Pronounced an TONIO gow DEE on the La Pedrera museum English version Audio Guide)
Built: 1905-10, officially completed in 1912
Style: Art Nouveau  (Modernist)
Status: UNESCO World Heritage Site "Works of Antoni Gaudí"

Casa Milà, commonly known as La Pedrera, is the largest civil building designed by Antoni Gaudi. The apartment block was constructed between 1906 and 1910. It was Gaudi's last work before devoting himself to the construction of the Sagrada Familia.

It breaks with traditional architecture by using not a single straight line. The building does not use load-bearing walls, but rest on pillars and arches. Together with the use of steel this allowed the architect to create completely irregular floor plans. Even the height of the pillars and ceilings differ from one to another. In order to allow light in all the rooms, the apartments are arranged around two central courtyards, one circular and the other oval shaped.

Some people see the facade as a cliff-like rock with caves. During construction, people dubbed it a quarry, or 'Pedrera'. To date, people still call the building 'La Pedrera' rather than 'Casa Milà'.

- Casa Milà   (1/2011)
It was built for the married couple, Rosario Segimon and Pere Milà. Rosario Segimon was the wealthy widow of José Guardiola, an Indiano, a term applied locally to the Catalans returning from the American colonies with tremendous wealth. Her second husband, Pere Milà, was a developer who was criticized for his flamboyant lifestyle and ridiculed by the contemporary residents of Barcelona, when they joked about his love of money and opulence, wondering if he was not rather more interested in "the widow’s guardiola" (piggy bank), than in "Guardiola’s widow".

Gaudi wanted the people who lived in the flats to all know each other therefore there were only lifts on every second floor so people had to communicate with one another on different floors.
- Wikipedia (1/2011)



Photos and their arrangement © 2010 Chuck LaChiusa
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