Storm Watch on La Pedrera.

Storm Watch on La Pedrera.

I was lucky when I’ve been in Barcelona. Great weather all the time and no any rain… almost… Exactly on my Gaudi-day the sky was covered by clouds and the storm began to approach…
I was right near Casa Milà, better known as La Pedrera (Catalan for ‘The Quarry’), one of the best creation of the genius. Almost black clouds hanged over the city and I understood that only stone guardian (figurative chimneys) on the roof of the building can be protectors of Barcelona, like real Storm Watch…
The impression was so strong that I made my shot immediately…

Casa Milà, or La Pedrera, is a building designed by Antoni Gaudí and built during the years 1906–1910, being considered officially completed in 1912. 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 Mila, 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".

Gaudí did not conceive the Casa Milà as a simple residential building, but as a complete work that ventured from architecture into the realm of sculpture. The facade, influenced by the early international Art Nouveau movement, is clad in limestone blocks that were rough-hewn to achieve a matte finish, forming characteristic curved volumes and sinuous arabesques that recall a sea cliff with cave dwellings marked by evocatively shaped wrought iron balconies. The lower part of the facade is built with stone from the Garraf Massif and the upper part with stone from Vilafranca del Penedès, both south of Barcelona. Originally, Gaudí aimed to convert La Pedrera into a religious allegory of the Holy Rosary, culminating atop the façade with a four-metre-high bronze medallion. However, the Setmana Tràgica (Tragic Week, a social revolt sparked in 1909 by the mobilisation of the Catalan reservists to fight in Morocco, during which churches were attacked and burnt) persuaded Milà that a residential dwelling with 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, would undoubtedly become the next target for anti-clerical mobs. He therefore quietly cancelled this part of the scheme. This image was replaced by the chimneys and accesses to the roof terrace that look like sentinels with helmets, which the poet Pere Gimferrer called a “warriors’ garden”…

Casa Milà was listed World Heritage by UNESCO in 1984.

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