It’s a little ironic that my first encounter with Antoni Gaudí came by way of the last residential building he ever built. After Casa Milà, he foreswore residential commissions entirely and devoted himself fully to the Sagrada Família. Which makes sense. After this job, I wouldn’t have wanted to work with rich people again, either.
Locals called it La Pedrera (the quarry) because to them it looked less like architecture and more like a pile of leftover rubble. Or a landslide someone forgot to clean up. Standing on Passeig de Gràcia, squinting up at its billowing façade, I didn’t see a quarry. I saw an enormous pavlova. Glossy, domed, overly sweet. I don’t prefer it.
Casa Milà was commissioned in 1905 by a nouveau riche couple. Roser Segimon was a widow who’d inherited a fortune from her late husband’s investments in Guatemala, Brazil, and—of course—the Panama Canal. Pere Milà was Roser’s new husband. Pere had a pedigree—his father was a prominent textile industrialist, and his uncle had recently been mayor—but the family money was running low. A convenient match, to be sure, though it raised some society eyebrows. As did their new house.
Gaudí was already famous when they hired him, having just completed remodeling the dazzling Casa Batlló up the street for Pere’s father’s business partner. Rich people and a renowned architect? Sounds like a match made in heaven. But almost immediately, it all began to unravel.
The Milàs wanted something “just like Casa Batlló,” but bigger, brasher, and more attention-getting. Gaudí wasn’t into repeats, though, and he deliberately pivoted to a more sculptural, free-form aesthetic. So instead of French elegance, fanciful flourishes, and fairy tale windows, they got six stories of rippling stone balconies, courtyards, and iron vines that looked nothing like they’d imagined.
And the creative divergence only widened over time. Gaudí's architectural vision didn't come with floor plans so much as plaster models and mystical certainty. He redesigned things mid-build. He ignored rules. He overran the budget. A lot. He built too close to the sidewalk. At one point, the city threatened to fine the Milàs because one of the columns spilled into public space. Gaudí said he'd build it anyway, but deface it by carving "Cut by order of the City Council" into it. The city backed down.
The Milàs, meanwhile, were increasingly panicked by the soaring costs—and confused by the look of their future home. Gaudí refused to add straight lines. He filled their flat with sculpted columns and ceiling swirls that they decidedly had not asked for. In return, they stiffed him on his final fees. Gaudí sued. He won. But Roser got the last word. She waited until he died in 1926 and then plastered over the decorative columns in her apartment. All 14 of them.
But if you set aside the bickering and lawsuits, what’s left is staggering. Casa Milà may be one of the most forward-thinking residential buildings of its time—and easily one of the most original ever constructed. Gaudí wasn’t just playing with forms. He rethought how a city building could work.
Instead of using load-bearing walls (there’s not a single load-bearing wall in the entire building), he designed an interior framework of columns and beams—an open-plan structure that allowed rooms to be shaped and reshaped as needed. The building breathes. Two massive interior courtyards funnel light and air to every apartment. The basement houses one of Barcelona’s first private automobile garages. The elevator was the primary access to each unit (unheard of in 1910), and the attic’s 270 catenary brick arches arranged like the ribcage of a mythological beast served as a thermal insulator. Today, it also serves as the perfect place to get quietly blown away by Gaudí's genius.
The Milàs’ personal flat had more than 35 rooms over 14,000 square feet, including a private oratory, dining hall, study, and multiple servant quarters. Gaudí even changed the floors for each room—parquet in the salons, stone in the hallways, and tile in the kitchens. He treated the ceilings like canvases, swirled into organic patterns by his collaborator Jujol. Roser was not amused.
The floors above were rented out to well-heeled tenants who, while not living in quite as much sprawl, still enjoyed enormous apartments—some over 6,000 square feet—with custom layouts, flowing rooms, and light from the central courtyards. Gaudí treated them with the same structural and decorative generosity. If you couldn’t be a Milà, this was the next best thing.
And then there’s the roof.
Some buildings have rooftop terraces. La Pedrera has a rooftop situation. Gaudí turned what should’ve been a flat slab of tar and tile into a surreal sculpture garden of chimneys, vents, and stairwells—each one a twisted, swirling figure in ochre stucco or broken-glass mosaics. The shapes are so eccentric that George Lucas is rumored to have used them as inspiration for his stormtrooper helmets. You can kind of see it.
The roof isn’t flat, either—it rises and dips like a meringue left in the sun, echoing the arches beneath and offering odd, shifting views of chimneys, of the city, of fellow tourists with their mouths open. There’s no railing. Just warning signs and artistic menace.
Even now, more than a hundred years after it was built, La Pedrera feels more alive than most buildings ever will. The stone ripples in the sun. The iron railings writhe like seaweed. The ceilings spin with sculpted whorls. Some people describe the whole thing as a living organism. Others call it a manifesto. For Gaudí, it was probably just a natural evolution of form—his belief that buildings could function, breathe, and inspire, all at once.
Technically, La Pedrera remains unfinished. Gaudí had backed away from the project by about 1911, frustrated by cost-cutting, compromises, and the slow erosion of his plans. By the end, he’d grown so disillusioned he barely visited the site. The joy was gone. He’d planned to crown the chamfered façade with a statue of the Virgin and archangels, but it was never installed. Sculpted details were abandoned and rooftop forms simplified. Time, politics, and money all chipped away at the edges. But what’s left is still overwhelming.
For Gaudí, it marked the end of one chapter. His last residential project. His last argument over invoices. After this, he disappeared into religious obsession, and by 1914 had devoted himself entirely to the magnificent Sagrada Família, a spiritual architect unbothered by zoning laws or rich couples with strong opinions about wallpaper.
But here, at the height of his earthly powers, he built something that’s still impossible to categorize. Not a palace. Not a tenement. Not a sculpture. Not just a building.
Like a pavlova, maybe.
But better.
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