ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

Designed by Antoni Gaudí, completed in 1910 Barcelona, Spain Casa Milá, located at the corner of the Paseo de Gracia and the Calle Provenza in Barcelona, Spain, was designed and built between 1906 and 1910. It exemplifies the exuberant forms and distinctly personal architectural sensibility of Antoni Gaudí (1852– 1926), whose work influenced the development of Modernismo, the Catalan adaptation of Art Nouveau. Popularly known as “La Pedrera” (The Quarry), the large apartment building, commissioned by wealthy businessman Pedro Milá i Camps and his wife, Rosario Segimón Artells, received widespread critical attention for its massive, undulating facade and innovative architectural and structural details. Although Casa Milá has been described as a precursor of the Einstein Tower (1921) in Potsdam, designed by Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953), the explicitly organic references of Gaudí’s structure exhibit closer stylistic affinities to Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) than to the German Expressionism o...

Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish province of Catalonia, was an epicenter of 20thcentury architectural vanguardism. The city’s geographic position on the northeast face of the Iberian Peninsula—ostensibly with its back to the Castilian capital of Madrid and its face toward the Mediterranean countries of Europe and North Africa—has sustained its cosmopolitan dimensions throughout its history. From the century’s onset and the separatist-regionalist concepts associated with Catalan modernisme, Barcelona’s architectural primacy has endured two dictatorships, the suppression of its people’s native language, and the dramatic social upheavals associated with industrial expansion and rapid population growth. From the mid-19th century, Barcelona’s municipal authorities sought to cope with the newly industrialized city’s adolescence. The socialist Ildefonso Cerdà i Sunyer (1815–76) created a Haussmannian solution for unifying Barcelona’s Old City with the independent villages of the peripher...