Casa Mila (La Pedrera) and Casa Batllo – discord on all sides

I learned a lot on my private early morning small-group tour of Casa Mila. We had access to the building alone and to places not normally visited. The docent also talked a lot about Casa Batllo. So most of this is based on my notes from the tour.

Casa Batllo

Casa Batllo is an early Gaudi masterpiece (completed in 1906), and this site is notable for its use of AR to show you how the rooms used to look. At each numbered location you can click on a button on the device they give you. When you aim it around the room you’ll see what the room used to look like. This really eases the annoyance of crowds, as there are no people in that view.

It is odd when you look around the real room and just see people staring at their phones like they’re on a train or something, but the effect on your understanding of the rooms is amazing, and I hope more places institute this technology. For example, the animations show how the windows are shaped like turtles by turning the windows into turtles and having them swim away. They also show how Gaudi allowed for air circulation control by the use of groups of louvered grills like fish gills (which is illustrated with a fish).

Casa Mila

Sr Mila and Sr Batllo were business partners, so Mila felt he needed to up the ante. He wanted to have an even more splendid house than what Gaudi built for Batllo. So he hired Gaudi, who designed the wavy stone masterpiece we know today as Casa Mila or La Pedrera. If only it were that simple.

Gaudi designed and built the house (completed in 1912). But he decided to ignore the local code and built the building up to the legal limit. However, he then put on all the roof decorations and towers (they all hide necessary items like chimneys, but very decoratively). Well, this made it so that the Milas had to pay the city an extra 25% of the cost of the house in tax. The other alternative would be they had to take off all the roof items. That would be a lot of work, and what would they do for chimneys, etc?

So the Milas paid the fine, but with all the cost overruns and the fine, they were now broke, AND they hated the home. It had no straight lines so Sra Mila said there was nowhere to put her piano. Well, they took Gaudi to court over everything and he finally won and they had to pay him.

Casa Mila’s famous rooftop

You can see the result of the financial trouble on the roof, where the traditional tiling is absent for the most part because Gaudi had no money to buy colored tiles. While the roof undulates and has fanciful chimneys, that’s as far as the money went. Gaudi used old tiles from the rest of the building first. And then he used some wine bottles and champagne bottles that he drank his sorrow.

Most of the fixtures on the roof have no ornamentation as they usually would. Additionally, there was no railing to prevent you from falling into the light well of the building. So now there is an ugly 20th-century style fence there. It really detracts from the look of the rooftop as it clashes substantially with everything around it.

On the rooftop, Gaudi ensured that his next project, the Sagrada Familia, is framed by a decorative arch, which makes for a lovely photo.

The house was a futuristic wonder at the time, with “modern” bathrooms with tubs, bidets, sinks, etc . It also had a full garage underneath the building. Technically the home is 2 separate buildings each with 2 apartments on the top 4 floors, a full cross-building floor for the Milas, and a lower floor for offices (since passersby could see into the first floor. The parking area is now an auditorium and open space for dances and music. The apartments still have 3 tenants, but most have died/moved out. The current tenants can continue but can’t pass the units on to their heirs. The rent is currently only $400/month due to the noise and hassle of having thousands of people go through each day.

The other apartments are now parts of the museum area, spaces for artists in residence, and other work areas.

Where did the money come to build the home? Well, interestingly, it wasn’t Sr Mila’s money. He had married a rich widow, whose husband’s last name was “piggy bank” in Spanish. So people said he married the widow of Piggybank, but then changed it to he married the piggybank of the widow.

The building had one of the first elevators in Spain, but it took 8 minutes to get to the top floor, so it has a bench so you could read your paper while you waited. Gaudi designed the elevator himself, so he did pretty well, even at that speed. There was a back staircase (still beautiful, but not ostentatious like much of the building), and laundry rooms in the attic (clothes could be hung between the parabolic arches in the attic; the home had all the modern conveniences.

Even the door handles are ergonomically shaped to make for easy use. Everything was designed according to function as much as form. The Milas hated Gaudi till his death. When he died, they broke down all the curved walls in their apartment and put in straight ones. And then they threw all the furniture he had made for it out on the street with the trash. I just wonder why they waited until he was dead to do that. The locals hated the building at first too, they called it the stone quarry (La Pedrera) and thought it ugly. They hated him until the day they died. This was Gaudi’s last completed commission. After this, he put all his energy into the Sagrada Familia, which is expected to be finished in the 2020s at this point.

In an interesting twist, the current owners of the building use about half of the receipts from ticket sales to benefit the elderly, disabled, youth, and ecology.

For more about Gaudi’s work in Barcelona see here