CASA MILA BY AR.ANTONI GAUDI

ARCHITECT
 Antoni Gaudi was born on 25th June 1852 in
Resus , Catalonia , Spain.
 He studied Architecture in Barcelona , Spain
at the Escola Tecnica Superior d’Arquitectura.
 In 1878 ,Gaudi officially became an Architect.
 Most of his works are located in Barcelona .
 During his lifetime , Gaudi worked in many
styles . These included Orientalism , Neo –
Gothic , Gothic Revival , Naturalism , and an
Overarching Modernism .
 Gaudi disliked straight lines and angles
because they don’t often appear naturally .
Instead he based design on the swirling curves
of nature.
 He was known for integrating ceramics ,
stained glass , wrought ironwork, and
carpentry into his designs.
 You can see the characteristics of ART
NOUVEAU in Gaudi’s work.
 The main work of Gaudi is the church of
SAGRADA FAMILIA to which he devoted
more than 40 years of his life and is still
remains unfinished.

ANTONI GAUDI’S WORKS
SAGRADA FAMILIA PARKGUELL

ANTONI GAUDI’S WORKS
CASA MILA CASA BALTO

ABOUT THE BUILDING
CASA MILA popularly known as LA PEDRERA or
OPEN QUARRY , a reference to its unconvectional
rough – hewn appearance , is a modernist building in
Barcelona , Catalonia , Spain .
It got the name open quarry due to unusual
construction.
It was the last private building designed by Architect
Antoni Gaudi .
It was built between 1906 and 1912 .
In 1984 , it was declared a WORLD HERITAGE SITE by
UNESCO .

OWNER’S OF CASA MILA
PERE MILACAMPS ROSER SEGIMON

OWNER’S OF CASA MILA
 Casa Mila was built for Roser Segimon and her husband Pere
Mila.
 In September, they commissioned Gaudi for building them a
new house with the idea of living in the main floor and
renting out the rest of the apartments.
 On February 2, 1906, the project was presented to the
Barcelona City Council and the works began.
 The building was completed in December 1910 and the owner
asked Gaudi to make a certificate to inhabit the main floor,
which the City Council authorized in October 1911, and the
couple moved in.

WHY WAS CASA MILA FAMOUS ?
 It is probably one of the most famous buildings of the
Catalan Modernism or Catalan Art Nouveau period and one
of the architect Antoni Gaudi’s most ambitious worksacade
that conveys the rhythm of the interior.
 Casa Mila was built as two apartment blocks with
independent entrances linked by two large inner
courtyards and a sinuous common Casa Mila, popularly
known as ‘La Pedrera’.
 The building marked a break with the architectural
language of Gaudi’s work in terms of innovation in both
the functional aspects and the constructive and
ornamental ones.

FACT’S ABOUT CASA MILA
 The Casa Mila was made in art nouveau style. It is a style of art
and architecture which embraces vivid decorative shapes and
prefers curves over straight lines.
 Casa Mila is one of the most fascinating buildings in the world.
 Casa Mila have a spectacular roof.
 Gaudi designed the Casa Mila exclusively with natural forms, in
result not a single right angle can be found.
 The two halls are fully polychrome with paintings oil on plaster
surface, showing a repertoire eclectic references mythology and
flowers.
 Areas open to the public are the attic, rooftop and top floor. The
top floor apartment gives visitors an idea of what the interior
looked like at the start of the twentieth century.
 The main floor is the former residence of the Mila’s.
 It was opened as an exhibition hall in 1992.

FACT’S ABOUT CASA MILA
 On the roof stands chimneys and ventilation.
 There is also a level difference and several staircases on the roof,
which makes it all look more like a landscape than a rooftop.
 Composed of 270 parabolic brick arches of varying height, the
spine-like rib structure creates a varied topography of attic.
 Gaudi put lifts on every 2nd floor because he wanted the
people who lived in the flats to get to know each other, the idea
was that the people on different floors should communicate with
one another.
 The entire facade is made of natural stone, with white ceramic
tiles around the upper edge of the building.

DESIGN OF CASA MILA
 The building is 1,323 m2 per floor on a plot of 1,620 m2.
 Gaudi made the first sketches in his workshop in the Sagrada
Familia.
 He designed the house as a constant curve, both outside and
inside, incorporating ruled geometry and naturalistic elements.
 Casa Mila consists of two buildings, which are structured around
two courtyards that provide light to the nine storeys: basement,
ground floor, mezzanine, main (or noble) floor, four upper floors,
and an attic.
 The basement was intended to be the garage, the main floor the
residence of the Mila’s (a flat of all 1,323 m2), and the rest
distributed over 20 apartments.
 The resulting layout is shaped like an asymmetrical "8" because of
the different shapes and sizes of the courtyards.

DESIGN OF CASA MILA
 The attic housed the laundry and drying areas, forming an insulating
space for the building and simultaneously determining the levels of the
roof.
 One of the most notable elements of the building is the roof, crowned
with skylights/ staircase exits, fans, and chimneys.
 All of these elements, constructed out of brick covered with
lime, broken marble, or glass have a specific architectural function but
are also real sculptures integrated into the building.
 The stairways were intended as service entries, with the main access to
the apartments by elevator except for the noble floor, where Gaudi
added a prominent interior staircase. Gaudi wanted the people who
lived in the flats to know each other. Therefore, there were only
elevators on every other floor, so people on different floors would meet
one another.

STRUCTURE OF CASA MILA
 Casa Mila is characterized by its self-supporting stone
facade, meaning that it is free of load-bearing walls.
 The facade connects to the internal structure of each floor
by means of curved iron beams surrounding the perimeter
of each floor. This construction system allows, on one
hand, large openings in the facade which give light to the
homes, and on the other, free structuring of the different
levels, so that internal walls can be added and demolished
without affecting the stability of the building.
 This allows the owners to change their minds at will and to
modify, without problems, the interior layout of the homes.

FACADE OF BUILDING
 The large stone slabs of the facade were attached first and
then worked on by the stonemasons.
 The front of the house looks like a massive rock, broken
only by wavy lines and iron ornaments.
 The bright stone and the otherwise colourless facade of this
building distinguishes it from Gaudi's other works and
looks very expressionistic.
 The house consists of two components, which are
connected only by the facade, the ground floor and the
roof. Each has its own yard and entrance.

FACADE OF BUILDING
 It stands in contrast to Casa Batlo, with its
colourful and playful facade.
Gaudi deliberately focused on the design of the
building, used very little paint and left the
materials natural.
 The curved facade is a unique example of organic
architecture .
Gaudi's original facade had some of its lower-level
ironwork removed.

FACADE
 The facade is composed of large blocks of limestone from
the Garraf Massif on the first floor and from the Ville
franche quarry for the higher levels.
 The blocks were cut to follow the plot of the projection of the
model, then raised to their location and adjusted to align in a
continuous curve to the pieces around them.
 Viewed from the outside the building has three parts: the
main body of the six-storey blocks with winding stone floors,
two floors set a block back with a different curve, similar to
waves, a smoother texture and whiter colour, and with small
holes that look like embrasures, and finally the body of the
roof.

FACADE
 In 1928, the tailor Mosella opened the first store in La
Pedrera , and he eliminated the bars.
 The ironwork was lost until a few years later, when
Americans donated one of them to the MoMa , where it is
on display.
 This did not concern anyone, because in the middle of
twentieth century, wrought ironwork had little importance
 With restoration initiatives launched in 1987, the facade
was rejoined to some pieces of stone that had fallen.
 In order to respect the fidelity of the original, material was
obtained from the Ville franche quarry , even though by
then it was no longer operating.

HALL AND COURTYARD’S
The building uses a completely original solution to
solve the issue of a lobby being too closed and dark.
Its open and airy courtyards provide a place of transit
and are directly visible to those accessing the building.
 There are two patios on the side of the Passeig de
Gracia and of the street Provence.
Patios, structurally, are key as supporting loads of
interior facades.
The floor of the courtyard is supported by pillars
of cast iron.

HALL AND COURTYARDS
 In the courtyard, there are traditional elliptical beams and girders
but Gaudi applied an ingenious solution of using two concentric
cylindrical beams with stretched radial beams, like the spokes of a
bicycle.
 They form a point outside of the beam to two points above and
below, making the function of the central girder a keystone and
working in tension and compression simultaneously.
 This supported structure is twelve feet in diameter and is
considered "the soul of the building" with a clear resemblance to
Gothic crypts.
 The centrepiece was built in a shipyard by Josep Maria
Carandell who copied a steering wheel, interpreting Gaudi’s intent
as to represent the helm of the ship of life.

INTERIOR GATE
Access is protected by a massive iron gate with a design
attributed to Jujol .
It was originally used by both people and cars, as
access to the garage is in the basement, now
an auditorium.
The two halls are fully polychrome with
oil paintings on the plaster surfaces,
with eclectic references to mythology and flowers.
During construction there was a problem including a
basement as a garage for cars, the new invention that
was thrilling the bourgeois at the time.

INTERIOR GATE
 Gaudi agreed to remove a pillar on the ramp that led into
the garage so that Felix, who was establishing sales and
factory in Walls of Valles , could go to both places with his
car from La Pedrera .
 For the floors of Casa Mila, Gaudi used a model
of floor forms of square timbers with two colours, and
the hydraulic pavement hexagonal pieces of blue and sea
motifs that had originally been designed for the Batlo
house.

LOFT
 Like in Casa Batlo , Gaudi shows the application of the catenary
arch as a support structure for the roof, a form which he had
already used shortly after graduating in the wood frameworks
of Mataro's co-operative known as L'Obrera Mataronense .
 The attic, where the laundry rooms were located, was a clear
room under a Catalan vault roof supported by 270 parabolic
vaults of different heights and spaced by about 80 cm.
 The roof resembles both the ribs of a huge animal and a palm,
giving the roof-deck a very unconventional shape similar to a
landscape of hills and valleys.

LOFT
The shape and location of the courtyards makes the
arches higher when the space is narrowed and lower
,when the space expands.
First the face of a wide wall was filled with mortar and
plastered.
 Canaleta indicated the opening of each arch and Bay
put a nail at each starting point of the arch at the top
of the wall.
From these nails was dangled a chain so that the
lowest point coincided with the deflection of the arch.
 Gaudi wanted to add a longitudinal axis of bricks
connecting all vaults at their keystone.

ROOF’S AND CHIMNEY’S
 The work of Gaudi on the roof top of La Pedrera
brought his experience at Palau Guell together with
solutions that were clearly more innovative – this time
creating shapes and volumes with more body, more
prominence, and less polychromasia .
 On the rooftop there are six skylights/staircase exits
(four of which were covered with broken pottery and
some that ended in a double cross typical of Gaudi).
 Twenty-eight chimneys in several groupings, two half-
hidden vents whose function is to renew the air in the
building, and four domes that discharged to the facade.
 The staircases also house the water tanks; some of
which are snail-shaped.

ROOF’S AND CHIMNEY’S
 The stepped roof of La Pedrera , called "the garden of warriors" by
the poet Pere Gimferrer because the chimneys appear to be
protecting the skylights, has undergone a radical restoration,
removing chimneys added in interventions after Gaudi , television
antennas, and other elements that degraded the space.
 The restoration brought back the splendour to the chimneys and
the skylights that were covered with fragments of marble and
broken Valencia tiles.
 One of the chimneys was topped with glass pieces – it was said that
Gaudi did that the day after the inauguration of the building,
taking advantage of the empty bottles from the party.
 It was restored with the bases of champagne bottles from the early
twentieth century.

FURNITURE’S
 Gaudi , as he had done in Casa Batlo ; designed furniture specifically
for the main floor.
 This was part of the concept artwork itself integral to modernism in
which the architect assumed responsibility for global issues such as the
structure and the facade, as well as every detail of the decor, designing
furniture and accessories such as lamps, planters, floors or ceilings.
 This was another point of friction with Segimon , who complained that
there was no straight wall to place her Steinway piano.
 The result of these disagreements has been the loss of the decorative
legacy of Gaudi , as most of the furniture was removed due to climate
change and the changes she made to the main floor when Gaudi died.

FURNITURE’S
 Some remain in private collections, including a
curtain made of oak 4 m. long by 1.96 m. high in
the Museum of Catalan Modernism; and a chair
and desktop of Mila .
 Gaudi carved oak doors similar to what he had
done for the Casa y Bardes , but these were only
included on two floors as when Segimon
discovered the price, she decided there would be
no more at that quality.

RESTORATION / RENOVATION
 Gaudi's work was designated a historic and artistic monument on July 24, 1969.
 Casa Mila was in poor condition in the early 1980s.
 It had been painted a dreary brown and many of its interior colour schemes
had been abandoned or allowed to deteriorate, but it has been restored since
and many of the original colours revived.
 In 1984 the building became part of a World Heritage Site encompassing some
of Gaudi's works.
 The Barcelonan city council tried to rent the main floor as an office for
the 1992 Olympic bid.
 On February 19, 1987, urgently needed work began on the restoration and
cleaning of the facade. The work was done by the architects Joseph Emilio
Hernandez-Cross and Rafael Vila.
 The renovated main floor opened in 1990 as part of the Cultural Olympiad of
Barcelona. The floor became an exhibition room with an example
of modernism in the Eixample.

ATRIUM AT DUSK AFTER RESTORATION

ISSUES
 In December 1907 the City Hall stopped work on the building
because of a pillar which occupied part of the sidewalk, not
respecting the alignment of facades.
 Again on August 17, 1908, more problems occurred when the
building surpassed the predicted height and borders of its
construction site by 4,000 square metres (43,000 sq ft).
 The Council called for a fine of 100,000 pesetas (approximately 25%
of the cost of work) or for the demolition of the attic and roof.
 The dispute was resolved a year and a half later, December 28, 1909,
when the Commission certified that it was a monumental building
and thus not required to have a 'strict compliance' with the bylaws.

CASA MILA BY AR.ANTONI GAUDI

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