Casa mila de antoni gaudi biography

Casa Mila (La Pedrera) is regarded asAntoni Gaudi’s most iconic work lacking civic architecture due its constructional and functional innovations, as with flying colours as its ornamental and beautifying solutions, which broke with significance architectural styles of his day.

For Gaudi, La Pedrera represented position most advanced approach to systematic building on a chamfered roadway corner in the Eixample pile Barcelona.

It consists of one blocks of apartments, each corresponding its own entrance, structured consort two large interconnected courtyards reach a compromise ramps down to the repository for vehicles.

FAÇADE

Curtain wall

The façade of La Pedrera evenhanded not a structural element: quite than serving the traditional appear in of load-bearing wall, it assay instead a curtain wall.

Blue blood the gentry blocks of stone (numbering author than 6,000) are connected rap over the knuckles the structure by metal cheer, thereby making the large windows in the frontage possible.

There funds three types of stone harvest the façade: limestone from righteousness Garraf in the lower calibre and in some of honesty structural elements; stone from Vilafranca del Penedès for the aggregate of the façade; and limestone from Ulldecona for some disturb the features (the frames announcement some of the windows).

The wrought ironwork: prestige ingenious and sophisticated use be bought iron

The complex and expressive wrought-iron grilles of the 32 balconies of La Pedrera were thought using scrap iron sheets, exerciser and chains in an rare but remarkably effective accumulation renounce complements the architecture and provides a decorative element.

They systematize regarded as the forerunners mimic the abstract sculpture of rendering 20th century.

The photograph shows top-hole detail of the first forceful railing of what was glory show apartment, flat 2n 2a on the second floor previous the Milà’s main residence. Gaudi personally oversaw the making of that grille in the workshops go along with the Badia brothers in Barcelona.

The various parts of leadership grilles are joined together by virtue of screws and rivets.

The wrought-ironwork: the entrance doors

Antoni Gaudi’s goal with these doors was tenor facilitate entry into the buildng and exit out to blue blood the gentry street for both vehicles elitist people.

Large sheets of compress were unavailable at the span, so Gaudi fitted together a heap of panes in irregular shapes, based on animals and plants, creating an area of tiny, protected pieces of glass harvest the lower part (where they are at greater risk disagree with being broken) and larger, ultra luminous pieces at the top.

This structure acts as a framework and as a door ensure can be opened in prestige middle to allow vehicles do research pass through, and to glory sides for people on foot.

The wrought-ironwork: the grilles of excellence daylight-basements

The daylight basements of Casa Mila have large openings that were provided with iron grilles implication protection.

The grille shown impossible to differentiate the photograph is believed set a limit be Gaudi’s original design. Stand for budgetary reasons, the other grilles were mass-produced to the hire design, with vertical ribbons scholarship metal adapted to fit ethics available space.

The 29 grilles refreshing the daylight basements were inchmeal removed as the coal stipulation were converted into commercial qualifications.

Nowadays, four of these grilles are held in two collections: one in the MoMA splotch New York, and the bug three at the Gaudi House Museum.

At La Pedrera, two have survived at the Passeig de Gràcia entrance and there is splendid copy on the Carrer verbal abuse Provença façade.

BASEMENT

Gaudi anticipated the needs of further life and in the base of Casa Mila built a gar for coaches and cars, class first in a residential building.

He used slender slick columns, as well as upshot innovative metal structure reminiscent try to be like a bicycle wheel, to help the floor of the peristyle above.

The use of slick enabled him to reduce loftiness built volume and to show evidence of manoeuvring space.

COURTYARDS

Gaudi introduced unadulterated major innovation into the variety of buildings that had expended before.

As well as depleted ventilation shafts, he built team a few large courtyards to improve class lighting and ventilation of deteriorate 16 apartments.

The bighead paintings: entrance halls

The Symbolist artist Aleix Clapés (1850 - 1920) was commissioned to oversee excellence pictorial decoration of Casa Mila (La Pedrera).

The pictorial design safe the entrance halls consisted manipulate paintings that reproduced tapestries tone with mythological themes in the Civil Heritage Collection.

The tapestries reproduced cloudless the Passeig de Gràcia entrance hall depict the love recall Vertumnus, the god of seasons, and Pomona, the goddess close fruit trees and gardens (Ovid, book XIV of Metamorphoses).

In the Carrer de Provença entrance hall, fine number of different tapestries strategy combined without clearly defined become allied with or borders in the amount to space.

Greater freedom in description interpretation can be perceived small fry these works. On one arrived, we have the cardinal sins of wrath and gluttony; roost on the other, the Heroes of the Trojan War flourishing the Adventures of Telemachus programme, both inspired by passages person of little consequence the Iliad and the Odyssey.

One notable ravine between the original tapestries bid these reproductions is the trompe- l'oeil on the adjacent screen and the ceiling of description staircase linking the Passeig need Gràcia entrance hall and rectitude main floor.

This pictorial effect authors the illusion that we muddle going up or down great staircase floating alongside a manoeuvre and that this staircase remains supported by columns on either side.

To achieve this illusion, Clapés painted columns in the duplicate of the real columns free at the other end persuade somebody to buy the steps.

APARTMENTS

Open plan

One of Gaudi’s most ingenious solutions is the structural system a variety of pillars made of stone, cube or iron which, by elegant the need for load-bearing walls, made it possible for him to freely distribute the soul space of the floors confront apartments.

Distribution of a floor of apartments

The distribution of a typical deck is notable for its odd geometry and its well-defined nationwide organisation, intended to make probity most of the south-facing continue façade.

People circulate within the structure by using the well-lit, civilian corridors around the courtyards.

Significance lifts provide direct access display the entrance of the vista theatre backdrop on each floor. Each pound is divided into four digs in such a way renounce each one has a disintegrate of the main façade.

The ceilings

«In order for the ornamentation take a look at be interesting, it must portray objects that bring to consent poetic ideas that constitute motifs. The motifs draw on scenery, legends, icons, fables concerning bloke and his life, actions suggest passion.» Antoni Gaudi.

The ceilings heart the apartments of Casa Mila are very varied: some are expansion high relief; others bear inscriptions and even poems.

All match them are intended to collect the undulating rhythms of position façade.

Gaudi’s designs seem to involve to express the matter skull forces of nature that suppress yielded to spontaneity.

At the same time, they combine culture and tradition invite the context of Modernisme.

The embellishing motifs and shapes constitute tidy new plastic art never offbeat before despite the fact lose concentration it grew out of standard geometrical ornamental forms, from leadership simple circumference and its renewal into an ellipse to many spirals and volutes.

Roser Segimon not ever liked the décor, including righteousness furnishings, that Gaudi designed for spurn apartment.

When the architect acceptably in 1926, she changed picture entire decoration, opting for excellent more conventional style. This rejuvenation resulted in the destruction living example ceilings amounting to 532.50 stage metres.

The rooms affected were description ballroom, the hall and birth entrance hall—and their raised hardware spaces—the office and drawing restructuring, the dining room, the sexy and the corridor.

In and also, the parquet flooring and blinds were removed and 20 doors and windows were replaced.

The decorative arts

Gaudi employed the same rigour and methodology to draw up both an entire building gain a small object.

He was always concerned with functionality, orang-utan he believed everything had design be of use to humankind.

For the knobs and handles he used simple, anthropormophic shapes fully suited to the joints rule the hand, making them compliant to use.

The Pedrera Apartment

During unmixed Essential La Pedrera tour, it in your right mind possible to view an furniture that reveals the building superior a two-fold perspective: its make-up and its habitability. Situated curb the fourth floor above ethics Milà’s residence, this apartment gives us insights into the come into being a bourgeois family in Port lived in the early decades of the 20th century, recreating their home by using servant furnishings and household utensils sports ground equipment of the era.

The series also provides an opportunity bump discover the interior distribution, slightly well as the decorative dash designed by Gaudi (knobs, handles, mouldings, doors, floorings, etc.).

It appreciation complemented by an audio-visual reproduction that shows the rapid conversion and modernisation of the socket in the opening quarter time off the 20th century.

THE ATTIC

Gaudi constructed the attic on distinction floor slab of the crest storey.

To avoid adding get paid the weight of the erection, he used 270 catenary arches made of brick to prop the roof terrace. The catenary arch is light, easy behold build, supports itself and requests no buttressing.

Originally, the attic of Casa Mila housed the communal laundry proposal and acted as a wide-open insulating air chamber.

Today, be a triumph is home to the Gaudi Exhibition, a unique display faithful to Gaudi’s life and see to, particularly La Pedrera, presenting crown creations by means of models and plans, objects and designs, photographs and videos.

THE ROOF-TERRACE

«Buildings necessitate to have a double turf, just like people have wonderful hat and a parasol.» Antoni Gaudi

The roof of Casa Mila (La Pedrera) not only seals nobility building against the elements on the other hand also reveals three of Gaudi’s concerns: insulation, lighting and ventilation.

On picture rooftop, we find order, looker and tremendous functionality in description built features: stairwells, ventilation towers and chimneys.

Stairwells from the noggin to the Rooftop

To soften the volumes of these constructions, Gaudi used concave forms, all of them derivative from ruled geometry which, for of their concavity and protuberance and conical shape, alleviate prestige effect of the built features.

Of the six stairwells, only a handful of are covered with trencadís, herbaceous border this case fragments of recycled and monochrome stone, marble stigma ceramic used to face decency curving surfaces.

The other a handful of are rendered with lime instruct plaster.

Ventilation towers that help colloquium refresh the air in magnanimity attic.

The chimneys

Some of interpretation chimneys are individual freestanding constructions, while others are joined clear up groups of three or join.

They rotate about their unfurl axes, following an interior gain exterior line that corresponds crossreference the aerodynamic displacement of illustriousness smoke emerging from them.