BARCELONA [1] La Pedrera by Gaudi

[hkskyline]

Barcelona Trip Highlights

During my trip planning to Paris, I had originally intended to visit Brussels, Rotterdam (to meet up with the Dutch crowd), and Amsterdam. However, my friends urged me to visit Barcelona because of a famous Taiwanese TV series starring the group F4 that filmed there. I reluctantly bowed to their demands and luckily found cheap flights to Girona on Ryanair. After consulting several Hong Kong forumers living in Europe, I was quite curious why all of them gave glowing reviews of Barcelona. I had to see for myself what all the buzz was about. Unfortunately that arrangement forced me to ditch my tour of the Netherlands and I was quite disappointed.

However, Barcelona exceeded my expectations many-fold. If you are interested in urban design, urban planning, or architecture, I implore you to visit this amazing city. I hope to convey this message to you in this Barcelona series. It's also not expensive to live and get around. I stayed right next to the beach and an amazing breakfast came with my fare of less than 20 euros a night per person. I guess having just arrived from Paris and Brussels, I was expecting 3 euros for a bottle of water to begin with.

I will make it back to Holland another time.

About the City

Almost 4.5 million people live in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The city enjoys a prime location, bathed by the sea and has excellent transport links with the rest of Europe. The Mediterranean and Europe are the defining characteristics of Catalonia.

Barcelona enjoys a Mediterranean climate, with mild winters and warm summers. It is a coastal city and has over four kilometres of urban beaches and large areas of nearby forest.

La Pedrera

Between the late 19th and early 20th century, the district of the Eixample became the main hub of Barcelona's expansion, thus supplanting the bourgeois residential area of Ciutat Vella.

The industrialist Pere Mila and his wife commissioned Gaudi to construct a building on the boundary separating Barcelona from Gracia, with the aim of turning the main floor into the family residence and leasing out the rest of the dwellings.

Gaudi built 2 blocks of apartment houses with independent entrances around two large, interconnecting interior patios in order to illuminate all the dwellings. The structure rested on pillars instead of using weight-bearing walls, which allowed for independent floors with large apertures in the facade. Owing the way its facade appears to be carved out of rock, the Casa Mila was nicknamed "La Pedrera", which means stone quarry.

It became a World Heritage Site in 1984.

The Roof

The View

Inside

From the bottom :

Facade