LegendThe champagne bottles
The green glass on one stair-head comes from the bottles drunk at the party when the house was finished.
Source: Told by guides at the house
The story
Pere Milà was a man about town who had just married the richest widow in Barcelona, Roser Segimon. The joke in the cafés was that nobody knew whether he had married the widow of Guardiola or the widow's piggy bank, which in Catalan is the same word. He saw Casa Batlló going up down the avenue and wanted a bigger one.
He got a building of nine levels on a corner plot, with the couple's flat on the main floor and sixteen flats to let above. The work ran from 1906 to 1912. In China these are the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and the first of the Republic.
Close by, with a page of its own: Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Sagrada Família.
What is here
One day ticket covers the courts, the flat, the loft and the roof. The night visit is a different ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The front, from the street | Free |
| The courtyards | Day ticket |
| The furnished flat | Day ticket |
| The loft | Day ticket |
| The roof | Day ticket; closed in rain |
If you have one minute
On the corner across the street
The front is a cliff of pale stone that rolls round the corner without a break. There is no edge where two streets meet.
This stone carries nothing. It hangs on iron beams from a frame of columns behind. Because no wall inside holds the building up, every flat could be divided as the tenant liked, and no two floors are the same. Architects did not do this as a rule until the 1920s.
Look at the balconies. The railings are tangles of iron like seaweed thrown up on a rock. They were hammered out of scrap.
Now look at the roof line. Those shapes against the sky are chimneys and stair-heads. Go up and you will find yourself among them.
Things people often get wrong
"La Pedrera is its proper name." It is a nickname and was meant unkindly. Cartoons of 1910 showed it as a garage for airships and as an Easter cake. The owners' name for it was Casa Milà.
"It is a museum." Most of it is offices and exhibition rooms run by a foundation, but a few flats are still let to tenants on old contracts.
"The stone front holds it up." See above: the front is a curtain.
"It was finished as Gaudí wished." It was to carry a group of the Virgin and two angels in bronze, four metres high, at the top of the corner. The owner refused it.
People who stood here
- Roser Segimon (owner, 1870–1964)The money was hers. She never liked Gaudí's rooms, and when he died in 1926 she had the columns and ceilings of her flat covered over in the style of Louis XVI. She lived here until she died at ninety-four.
- Pere Milà (developer, 1874–1940)After the anticlerical riots of July 1909, when eighty religious buildings in Barcelona were burned in a week, he would not have a Virgin on his roof for fear the house would be taken for a convent. Gaudí almost walked off the job.
- Antoni Gaudí (Catalan architect, 1852–1926; the builder of the Sagrada Família)He quarrelled with the Milàs over his fee and took them to court. In 1916 the judges awarded him 105,000 pesetas. Roser Segimon had to mortgage the house to pay it. He gave the money away to a convent.
- Josep Maria Jujol (architect, 1879–1949)He drew the iron of the balconies and worked beside the smiths as they beat it out, and he designed the plaster ceilings that ripple like sand under shallow water.
- Francisco Juan Barba Corsini (architect, 1916–2008)In the 1950s, when nobody valued the building, he fitted thirteen modern flats into the loft among the brick arches, with furniture he designed himself. They were taken out in the 1990s; his chairs are now collected.
- Michelangelo Antonioni (Italian film director)In The Passenger (1975) Jack Nicholson, playing a man who has taken a dead stranger's name, follows a young woman up to this roof. They talk among the chimneys.
- Hiroshi Teshigahara (Japanese film director, 1927–2001)His film Antonio Gaudí (1984) has almost no words. The camera moves slowly over this front and this roof for minutes at a time. It did much to make Gaudí loved in Japan.
Go deeper: seven stops, from the corner to the roof
The day ticket covers all seven stops.
1. The front
The stone came from two quarries south of the city. The blocks were set in place rough and carved on the wall, with Gaudí directing from the street.
Along the very top, cut into the stone, run the Latin words of the angel's greeting to Mary, with a rose in the middle. Rosa is Roser, the owner's name. The statue was to stand above the rose.
The house broke the building rules. It was taller than allowed, and one column stood on the public pavement. The city fined Milà and threatened to cut the column off. In 1909 a committee ruled that the building was a monument and need not obey.
2. The gates and the courtyards
The two doors are webs of iron and glass, with small panes low down, where feet might kick them, and large panes above. Carriages and motor cars drove straight in and down a ramp to a garage in the basement, one of the first in the city.
Inside are two open courts, one round and one oval. Every room has a window on the street or on a court. Look up from the bottom: the walls are painted with flowers and the sky is a shape cut out of stone.
3. The flat
One flat on the fourth floor is furnished as a well-off family had it about 1910: the maid's room, the kitchen with its coal range, the bathroom with a shower. Look at the ceilings. Each is a different swirl of plaster.
Look at the door handles and the peepholes. Gaudí shaped them to the hand and the eye.
4. The loft
The top floor was the laundry. It is a tunnel of 270 arches of thin brick laid on edge, each a little different in height, so that the roof above them rises and falls. It kept the flats below cool in summer and warm in winter.
It now holds models that show how Gaudí worked out his shapes: with hanging chains, weights and mirrors.
5. The roof
The roof is not flat. It climbs and dips over the arches in steps, round the two wells of the courts.
The six big shapes are the heads of the stairs. Four are covered in broken white marble and tile. Look for the one whose top is green: it is faced with the bottoms of champagne bottles.
The smaller figures in groups are chimneys, about thirty of them. With their hooded heads and slit eyes they look like sentries. The Catalans call them witch-scarers.
The same shot: one of the stair-heads has an arch cut through it. Stand a few steps back on the side away from the street and the towers of the Sagrada Família sit exactly inside the arch.
6. The view down
Look down into a court from the roof. You can see how thin the building is: a ribbon of rooms wound round two holes.
The other way, the avenue runs down towards the old city and the sea.
7. Black, then white
By the 1980s the stone was black with soot, the ground floor held a bingo hall, and the roof was a store for water tanks and aerials. A savings bank bought the building in 1986 and spent ten years cleaning and repairing it. What you see is the colour of 1912.