P489 - Spain - Casa Milà, Barcelona

Casa Milà, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (UNESCO WHS)

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 since 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.

米拉之家（Casa Milà，經常被稱為La Pedrera（加泰羅尼亞語，意為「採石場」））是著名的西班牙現代主義建築師安東尼·高第的作品之一，坐落在西班牙的巴塞隆納市區裡的Eixample 擴建區、格拉西亞大道（Passeig de Gràcia）上。這棟建築是建於1906年至1912年間，當時是富豪米拉先生（Pere Milà）因非常欣賞高第為巴特由先生設計的巴特由之家CASA BATLLÓ ，為了和富孀 Roser Segimon 結婚，而請高第設計的。聯合國教科文組織在1984年將包括米拉之家在內的幾個高第設計的建築列入世界遺產中。

References sources : wikipedia