Casa Milà (La Pedrera)

Gaudí’s last apartment building on the Passeig de Gràcia looks like a cliff shaped by the waves. The limestone façade has no straight lines, the balconies are thickets of wrought iron and the roof is a landscape of chimneys resembling warriors. The people of Barcelona called it La Pedrera, the quarry.

Pere Milà and Roser Segimon commissioned Gaudí in 1906. The building was constructed with a frame of columns and beams instead of load-bearing walls, which made it possible to place the walls freely on each floor and let the façade hang as a curtain of stone. It is an early example of what Le Corbusier later called the free plan.

The building aroused both admiration and ridicule. The owners and Gaudí quarrelled over money and over a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary that was to stand on the roof but was never put up. After Gaudí’s death in 1926 the building fell into disrepair; a bank bought it in 1986 and restored it, and today it is a museum and cultural centre. Casa Milà is a World Heritage Site together with other buildings by Gaudí.

• Art Nouveau
• Antoni Gaudí