Colloquially known as La Pedrera — “the stone quarry,” due to its distinctive hewn rock-like facade — was completed in 1912, having been commissioned in 1906 by industrialist Pere Mila.
Casa Mila History
Mila and his wife intended to use the ground floor as their family home while renting out the apartments above. Gaudi designed two interconnected apartment blocks, sharing a facade and arranged around two large interior courtyards in a sinuous form calculated to provide maximum natural light.
The building fell into disrepair later in the twentieth century, until it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984. It has been been undergoing extensive (and ongoing) refurbishment under the sponsorship Caixa Catalunya, open to the public since 1996.
Utopian Modern Living at Casa Mila
La Pedrera now functions as a museum. The Espai Gaudi on the attic floor houses a permanent exhibit on Gaudi, perhaps best known for his ambitious cathedral, La Sagrada Familia; while one of the original apartments has been restored and furnished with immaculate period detail.
The display apartment offers a fascinating glimpse both at early-twentieth-century life and, perhaps more important, the innovations Gaudi contributed to the ever elusive ideal of modern living.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by a concerted attempt on the part of architects and designers to develop a new blueprint for domestic living: clean, modern, functional — houses, apartment buildings and whole housing estates were designed to facilitate a Utopian ideal of modern living. From Sir Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” and indeed right up to the reviled brutalist tower blocks of the 1960s and ‘70s, much of the history of modern architecture has been about the search for a mode of building suited to our rapidly changing world and lives.
Often, the most innovative of these projects have been the most roundly criticised on their debut. La Pedrera was no exception, though marginally more successful than Gaudi’s own take on the English Garden City, Park Güell.
La Pedrera — Integrated Art and Design
One of the hallmarks of La Pedrera — in common with residential projects by such modern architecture luminaries as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright — is an integrated approach to art, design and architecture. This is most strikingly illustrated by La Pedrera’s celebrated rooftop, where Gaudi ingeniously “disguised” such prosaic building elements as the stairwells, ventilation towers and chimneys within fantastical sculptural forms.
This is also where Gaudi’s idiosyncratic personality is most blatantly displayed. Yet while instantly recognisable as a typical Gaudi design, La Pedrera is strikingly distinct from the neighbouring Casa Batllo, a structure ambitiously redesigned by Gaudi in 1904-1906 as a grand single family residence for Josep Batllo. There, a rich whimsy — most markedly notable in the scale-like facade crowned by a serpentine arch — dominates the character of the building in an overtly individualistic way that would have been unacceptable and inappropriate in a multiple-dwelling project like the Casa Mila.
Form and Function Gaudi Style
With its deft marriage of Gaudi’s inimitable form with strikingly innovative utilitarian function, La Pedrera is an admirable example of design for modern living that does not sacrifice character for utility.
Reference:
- Zerbst, R. Antoni Gaudi, Taschen, 1985.
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