Casa Milà

Interesting facts

Gaudí installed lifts only on every other floor, so that residents of different storeys would meet on the stairs and come to know one another.

When Roser Segimon complained there was no straight wall for her Steinway piano, Gaudí reportedly told her to take up the violin instead.

According to a popular story, Gaudí topped one rooftop chimney with glass from the empty bottles left after the building's inauguration party.

The attic arches were set out with hanging chains: their sagging curve was traced on a wall and used as the template for each brick vault.

Gaudí agreed to remove a pillar on the basement ramp because a future resident's Rolls-Royce could not otherwise get into the garage.

The hexagonal blue floor tiles with sea motifs were first designed for Gaudí's nearby Casa Batlló before being reused here.

Neighbouring owners on Passeig de Gràcia stopped greeting Milà, convinced Gaudí's strange building would drag down local land prices.

The planning dispute ended in December 1909, when a commission ruled the building monumental and therefore exempt from strict compliance with the bylaws.

Gaudí later sued Milà over his fees, won 105,000 pesetas in 1916, and gave the entire sum to charity.

A piece of its original wrought-iron balcony work, removed when a shop opened on the ground floor in 1928, is now held by MoMA in New York.

Why it is worth it

On Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia, a building without a single straight line on its face rolls along the street like a weathered sea cliff, its pale stone front rising in waves and fringed with tangled wrought-iron balconies. Casa Milà was Antoni Gaudí's last private residence, built between 1906 and 1912 for the businessman Pere Milà and his wife Roser Segimon. People in Barcelona found its rough, undulating mass so odd that they nicknamed it La Pedrera, "the stone quarry", and the name stuck.

Behind the sculptural front lay a radical structure. The stone facade, made of large limestone blocks from the Garraf massif on the lower floors and from another quarry for the upper ones, carries itself, tied back to the floors with curved iron beams, while the inside rests on columns rather than load-bearing walls, so that apartments could be divided freely. Two large courtyards bring light down through the nine levels of the building. Under the roof, the attic is spanned by 270 parabolic brick arches of varying height, and the roof itself is a landscape of stairways, skylights and 28 chimneys that the poet Pere Gimferrer called a garden of warriors, standing guard over the skylights. Gaudí's collaborator Josep Maria Jujol worked on many of the details, including the iron gates of the entrance.

The project was controversial from the start. In 1908 the city found that the building exceeded its permitted volume and threatened a heavy fine or partial demolition. Gaudí had also planned a large bronze statue of the Virgin of the Rosary for the top of the facade, but the owners turned it down, and only a carved invocation to Mary remains. In 1984 Casa Milà was inscribed by UNESCO among the World Heritage works of Antoni Gaudí. Two years later the savings bank Caixa de Catalunya bought it and restored it, turning the main floor into an exhibition space and opening the fourth-floor apartment and the roof to visitors.

Getting there

Casa Milà stands on Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district of central Barcelona, Spain. The nearest airport is Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat (BCN), about 13 km away.

Casa Milà

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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