The final secular design of the Spanish surrealist Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà Barcelona is an apartment building with a fanciful aura. Wavy walls made of rough-chipped stone suggest fossilized ocean waves. Doors and windows look like they are dug out of sand. A comical array of chimney stacks dances across the roof.
This unique building is widely but unofficially known as La Pedrera (the Quarry). In 1984, UNESCO classified Casa Milà as a World Heritage site. Today, Casa Milà is used for cultural expositions
Casa Milà, better known as La Pedrera (Catalan for 'The Quarry'), is a building designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and built during the years 1906–1910, being considered officially completed in 1912. It is located at 92, Passeig de Gràcia (passeig is Catalan for promenade) in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
It was built for the married couple, Rosario Segimon and Pere Milà. Rosario Segimon was the wealthy widow of José Guardiola, an Indiano, a term applied locally to the Catalans returning from the American colonies with tremendous wealth. Her second husband, Pere Milà, 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 "Guardiola’s widow
The design by Gaudi was not followed in some aspects. The local government objected to some aspects of the project, fined the owners for many infractions of building codes, ordered the demolition of aspects exceeding the height standard for the city, and refused to approve the installation of a huge sculpture atop the building—described as "the Virgin"—but said by Gijs van Hensbergen in his biography of Gaudi, to represent the primeval earth goddess, Gaia.
Casa Milà was in poor condition in the early 1980s. It had been painted a dreary brown and many of its interior color schemes had been abandoned or allowed to deteriorate, but it has been restored and many of the original colors revived.
The building is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Works of Antoni Gaudí". The building is now owned by Caixa Catalunya.
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