*안토니우 가우디 카사밀라 [ Antoni Gaudí ] Casa Mila

With its undulating façade and surrealist sculptural roof, Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Mila appears more organic than artificial, as if it were carved straight from the ground. Known as La Pedera, the quarry, the building was inspired by the Modernista movement, Spain’s version of Art Nouveau..

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Architects: Antoni Gaudí
Location: Casa Mila
Architect In Charge: Antoni Gaudi
Client: Roser Segimon and Pere Milà
Year: 1912
Photographs: Courtesy of Samuel Ludwig

Structurally, the building is divided between structure and skin. The stone façade has no load-bearing function. Steel beams with the same curvature support the facade’s weight by attaching to the structure. This allowed Gaudi to design the façade without structural constraints, and ultimately enabled his conception of a continuously curved façade. The structure holding up the roof, too, allows for an organic geometry. Composed of 270 parabolic brick arches of varying height, the spine-like rib structure creates a varied topography above it.

Formally, the façade can be read in three sections: the street façade, spanning the ground floor; the main façade, including the main and upper floors; and the roof structure, which houses the attic and supports the roof garden. Made of limestone blocks, the curve of the main façade has a weighty and textured quality of the organic. Above it is a curvaceous mass on which surrealist anthropomorphic sculptures perch. Their presence contributes to the almost flowing dynamism of the building’s aesthetic.

The Casa Mila, which was ultimately a controversial building, contributed greatly to the Modernista movement and modernism as a whole. It pushed formal boundaries of rectilinearity and, as Gaudi intentionally drew from natural and organic forms for the building’s shape, significantly inspired practices of biomimicry. Gaudi was a genius of structure and form, and the Casa Mila attests to that.

from  archdaily