Spain - Table of Contents ...................... Architecture Around the World
AKA La Pedrera (Catalan for 'The Quarry')
92 Passeig de GrÓcia, Barcelona, Spain
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 GaudÝ"
MilÓ, 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 MilÓ'.
- Casa MilÓ (1/2011)
|It was built for the married couple, Rosario Segimon and Pere MilÓ. Rosario Segimon was the wealthy widow of JosÚ Guardiola, an Indiano,
a term applied locally to the Catalans returning from the American
colonies with tremendous wealth. Her second husband, Pere MilÓ, 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
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)