History and architecture of Casa Milà

Between 1906 and 1912, Gaudí built a residential building on Passeig de Gràcia that managed to upset the municipal administration, the satirical press, the residents of the street, the couple who had commissioned it, and, fifteen years later, the woman who lived inside. The owners of the neighboring properties stopped greeting the Milàs, convinced that this oddity would devalue their land. The municipal file ended in a fine, the commission ended in a lawsuit, and the decoration of the main floor ended up in a dumpster.

It's best to start with the money, because it explains half the story, and it's a story that is rarely told. Pere Milà did not buy the land. On June 9, 1905, Roser Segimon bought, in her own name, a tower with a garden of 1,835 square meters on Passeig de Gràcia. The money came from her first husband, Josep Guardiola i Grau (1831-1901), an immigrant from India who had made his fortune with coffee in Guatemala, on the Chocolá estate, and who in 1872 patented machines for peeling and drying the beans. They were thirty-nine years apart and had no children. Milà, who married her later, referred to Guardiola as "my predecessor."

Barcelona at that time summarized it in a saying that is still circulating: it was unclear whether Perico Milà had married "the widow Guardiola or the widow's caretaker," playing on the fact that guardiola, in Catalan, is a piggy bank. It is often attributed to Santiago Rusiñol, but there is no source to support this: it is anonymous. Another clarification, this one regarding the website of the building itself: Roser Segimon was born on 2 de octubre de 1870, not in 1871, and died in 1964. Pere Milà i Camps lived between 1873 and 1940.

The commission, moreover, came from a house that is only 540 meters from here. Milà met Gaudí at the home of Josep Batlló, a business partner of his father, while the architect was renovating Casa Batlló. La Pedrera was conceived in the living room of the previous project. And a detail about the label it carries: it is called the "last work of Gaudí" and was the last civil work. After 1912, Park Güell and the cathedral of Mallorca were still under construction until 1914, the Escoles de la Sagrada Família date from 1909, and he worked on the temple until the very end. The precise fact is that he never built another house for anyone.

The underlying concept of the building is that the facade does not support the building. The weight is borne by iron and stone pillars and beams distributed throughout the interior, and the exterior walls hang from that structure like a stone curtain. In 1906, this was not the norm: a block of apartments was built on load-bearing walls, and those walls definitively determined where the partition walls of all the floors could be located.

By freeing the facade from its structural function, Gaudí also freed the floor plan. No floor plan has to repeat the layout of the one above, and a partition can be moved without touching anything that supports weight. The free floor plan would eventually become a common feature of 20th-century architecture; here, it is applied to a building designed for affluent families in the Eixample district, decades before it became a standard practice.

A catenary arch is the shape that a chain takes when suspended from its two ends, viewed from below. The Sagrada Familia's description captures it better than any paraphrase: "The shape adopted by a rope or chain suspended from both ends. It is stable on its own and does not require any other supporting elements." That's where its advantage lies. The arch doesn's push outwards, so there's no need for buttresses or tie rods to support it, and an entire nave can be covered with ordinary bricks.

Gaudí called them balanced arches, and the building's website still refers to them by that name. The official informational brochure for the Sagrada Família, on the other hand, describes them as parabolic. This is not a mistake by anyone. The catenary is the curve of a chain under its own weight distributed along the chain; the parabola is the curve of a cable under a weight distributed horizontally, like the deck of a suspension bridge. Over a short distance, the two curves overlap almost point by point, and that's why reputable sources often use either term when referring to the same structure.

The number is significant when compared. The attic of Casa Batlló, which the same architect completed in the same year that construction began here, has sixty catenary arches. The first time Gaudí used this system was much earlier, in the building of the Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense, between 1878 and 1882: twelve arches over a floor plan of 48 by 12 meters. La Pedrera has 270.

The mosaic technique, using broken and reassembled ceramic pieces, is often cited as a way to save materials or as an early form of recycling. However, this wasn't the primary reason; the glazed ceramic was chosen for how it interacts with light. Furthermore, the mosaic technique itself didn't originate here. While the workshop at the Güell Estate is often cited as the first application, this claim lacks solid evidence. The first documented examples are the chimneys of the Palau Güell, between 1886 and 1890, using ceramic from the Pujol i Bausis factory. It truly becomes a complete artistic language in the Park Güell, largely thanks to Josep Maria Jujol.

If the facade cannot support weight, it may buckle. The problem is how to construct a stone surface that is never repeated. Gaudí did not solve this with blueprints; instead, he commissioned the plasterer Joan Bertran to create a plaster model of the facade, and then the model was broken up, and the pieces were taken to the construction site so that each stonemason could copy their own piece to full size. The consequence must be taken literally: there are no two identical blocks on the entire facade.

The scene is not tourist folklore. It was recounted by Josep Bayó i Font, the builder who oversaw this project and who had also directed the work on Casa Batlló, and it was recorded by the historian Joan Bassegoda. It deserves clarification because many anecdotes about Gaudí circulate without any more support than repetition, and this one has a named witness and a researcher who transcribed it.

The first to protest was the City Council, and it did so twice. In December 1907, it halted the work because a pillar was encroaching on the sidewalk. Gaudí responded that if they wanted, "we will cut the pillar as if it were cheese, and on the polished surface that remains, we will sculpt a legend that says: Cut by order of the City Council...". The pillar remains where it was.

The second case was more serious: the building exceeded the height and volume allowed by the regulations, and the property faced a fine of 100,000 pesetas. The matter was resolved on December 28, 1909. The year is not coincidental: 1909 was the year when everything went wrong here.

Because the next issue was with the property, and it left a mark that is still visible: the facade is unfinished. Gaudí had planned to crown it with a sculptural group of the Virgin of the Rosary, commissioned from the sculptor Carles Mani, who, in March 1909, was ready to have it cast. It was never installed.

Why it wasn't installed has two circulating explanations, and neither is definitively settled. The most repeated explanation is that the owners backed out for fear of displaying a religious image of that size after the Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of July 1909, when eighty religious buildings burned in Barcelona. The other explanation is defended by the researcher Rojo Albarrán in a 1998 study, and it is more prosaic: that the group simply didn't appeal to Pere Milà. Both explanations remain alive in the bibliography, and anyone who tells you which one is correct is giving you their preference, not a fact.

The outcome was a lawsuit. Gaudí left the direction of the project and sued Pere Milà for his fees. He won the lawsuit in 1916: 105,000 pesetas, which Milà had to pay by mortgaging the building, not by selling it, as is sometimes read. Gaudí donated the entire sum, and here the sources diverge: some say he donated it to charity, and others say he donated it to the Jesuits. It is important to keep this in mind every time Gaudí is described as an ascetic uninterested in the world. He claimed his invoice in court, he collected the full amount, and then he gave it away: both things are true at the same time.

Living with Roser Segimon hadn't gone well. The anecdote that has survived, and which is documented, perfectly encapsulates the entire disconnect.

The response is amusing because it describes the building. It was Joan Bergós, his disciple, who published it in 1954. He is also responsible for the architect's most quoted phrase, "the straight line is of men; the curve is of God," which should be used with caution: there is no text by Gaudí himself where this phrase appears in writing.

In March 1927, a year after Gaudí's death, Segimon renovated the main floor where he lived. The invoice gives an idea of the work done: 532.50 square meters of false ceilings were demolished and rebuilt in Louis XVI style, twenty doors and windows were replaced, with a cost of 19,481.25 pesetas. The Gaudinian interiors of the main floor were lost due to the decision of its owner, not due to a war or a speculative renovation.

With a detail that is almost never mentioned and that changes the ending: several original elements were not destroyed, but rather covered up, and reappeared during the 1990 restoration. Another revealing detail from the same period: the carved doors, made by the Casas i Bardés workshop, were made only for the Milà apartment and for the showroom apartment, because when Mrs. Milà learned the price, she decided that no more would be made to that quality.

The building continued to have lives separate from its architecture. During the civil war, the PSUC requisitioned it as the party's headquarters. And in 1954, the architect Francisco Barba Corsini built thirteen rental apartments within the nave of the arches. They were there until 1996, and were only removed when the building was opened to the public. That's forty-two years: the attic that is now shown as a piece of architecture was a rental apartment for longer than it has been open to visitors.

The hexagonal tile on Passeig de Gràcia, with its relief of starfish, ammonites, and algae, was designed by Gaudí, and the manufacturer confirms this. Each piece shows one-third of each motif, so seven tiles are needed to see the three complete ones. Today, it covers 60,000 square meters of the street. It is not the panot with a four-petal flower, which is the standard paving of Barcelona.

The story, however, goes exactly the opposite of how the guidebooks tell it. Gaudí designed it in 1904 for the Casa Batlló, modeling the design in wax with his fingers, and it never actually made it to that location due to manufacturing delays; it ended up in the service areas and kitchens of the Casa Milà. Escofet produced it between 1906 and 1964. It arrived on the sidewalk of Passeig de Gràcia in 1971, as a reinterpretation, and the one you walk on today is a redesign from 1997, with the relief inverted. Gaudí never saw his own design in a pavement.

The balcony railings are made of wrought iron, each one different from the others, and they are the second thing people photograph after the roof. There are three sources and three answers regarding who designed them: they are attributed to Josep Maria Jujol; they are attributed to the Badia brothers, who were the ones who forged them; and the official website of the building states that the first one was directed by Gaudí himself in the workshop, without mentioning Jujol at any point. Based on what has been published, there is no way to resolve the issue, and we are saying this instead of choosing the version that sounds best.

That ambiguity is not a peculiarity of La Pedrera: it is the norm in Gaudí's workshop, and it has a very specific documentary cause. Francesc Berenguer, his most constant collaborator, left the architecture program in 1888 without obtaining the degree, so he could not sign projects. The Catalan College of Architects acknowledges this in writing: it is common to find projects of his signed by Gaudí. From this, a discomforting and difficult-to-avoid conclusion arises: a signature by Gaudí does not prove that the project is by Gaudí.

With Jujol, something similar happened, but in reverse. He obtained the title on 18th May 1906, the same year he began working on this project, and he had been working with Gaudí for some time without yet being an architect. When he exactly started is a matter of debate: some historians place him in 1904 or 1905, and Bassegoda after 1906. In the Casa Milà, he is widely credited with the stuccos and paintings. The railings, no. There is more about that way of working in the Gaudí method.

The deed of sale from June 9, 1905, is returned. She bought the land, with her own money, and the building bears his last name. This is not an isolated case in Gaudí's work, and when viewed as a whole, it is striking. The Bellesguard Tower was purchased by Maria Sagués, a widow, and Gaudí signed the deed on her behalf because she could not write; it is protected as "Casa Figueras," the last name of a husband who had died thirteen years before the project began. The deed for Casa Calvet was signed by Juliana Pintó, a widow, and the building bears the name of her husband. In Casa Vicens, the land was acquired through inheritance from her mother.

The historian Isabel Segura Soriano, on the Bellesguard website, puts it better than we could here: it's about "a memory that is often very selective when it comes to remembering initiatives led by women." There's no need to rewrite the names of the buildings. It's enough to simply explain where the money came from.

Before discussing the recognition, it's important to understand why there were so many unusual buildings on that street at the same time. The 1891 municipal ordinances increased the building density of the Ensanche (expansion area) and relaxed restrictions on the design of facades, allowing for more elaborate decorative elements and larger projecting sections. Suddenly, it became profitable to demolish the small houses and build rental buildings with architect-designed facades. The facades of Passeig de Gràcia are, to a large extent, a result of these regulations. We explain everything in detail in Gaudí and Catalan Modernism.

Barcelona was then rewarding architecture. Since June 23, 1899, the City Council held an annual competition for artistic buildings, which was active until 1930, and recognized around sixty buildings. Gaudí won it once, in 1900, with the Casa Calvet, which was also the first building to be awarded in the series, and it was the only award he received during his lifetime. Neither the Casa Batlló nor the Casa Milà ever won. The two of his works that are now the image of the city did not seem worthy of an award from the city that housed them.

The recognition came late and in stages. On July 24, 1969, a decree declared seventeen works by Gaudí as historical-artistic monuments all at once, including the Casa Milà; he was the first contemporary artist to achieve this in Spain, because until then, the rule required a century of antiquity. On November 2, 1984, it was included on the UNESCO list along with the Park Güell and the Palau Güell, in a file that did not even bear Gaudí's name: it was titled "Park Güell, Palau Güell, and Casa Milà, in Barcelona." The name "Works of Antoni Gaudí" was added in the 2005 expansion.

A savings bank purchased it in December 1986 and restored it. It opened to the public in June 1996, the same year the attic was emptied, and since 2013 it has been managed by the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera. In 2024, it was visited by 1,126,112 people. In 2019, there were 1,080,519 visitors: five years later, practically the same number. During that period, Casa Batlló went from 1,065,222 to 1,908,052 visitors, almost double, and it is located 540 meters from here.

In June 2026, the International Gaudí Congress was held in this building. One hundred and twenty years after the project was submitted to the city council, the house that the city council once fined is now the venue where the work of its author is discussed.