The roof of Casa Milà - and the flats beneath it

Barcelona · Passeig de Gràcia, 92 · 1906–1912

What is there to see on the roof of Casa Milà? Gaudí's building on Passeig de Gràcia, better known as La Pedrera, does not end in a flat terrace. Its roof climbs and drops in steps, and on it stand stair exits, chimneys and ventilation towers. The foundation that owns the building says that every part of it was designed to serve a purpose.

The roof nearly did not stay. With the attic beneath it, it took the house about 4,000 cubic metres over the volume the city allowed, and both could have been pulled down. On 28 December 1909 the Eixample Commission decided that the building was a monument in character and need not keep strictly to the building code; a payment estimated at 100,000 pesetas settled the rest. Gaudí certified the house finished in October 1912.

Under the roof is the attic. Gaudí built it on 270 brick catenary arches set about 80 cm apart: light, quick to build and standing without buttresses. They are taller where the house narrows between its two courtyards and lower where it widens, and the roof follows them - which is why it rises and falls. The attic held the communal laundry, the clotheslines, storerooms and the lift machinery, and it shielded the flats below: in summer its windows were opened for a draught, in winter they were kept shut to hold the sun's heat. "Buildings need to have a double roof," Gaudí said, "just like people have a hat and a parasol." From the street, the attic is the pale band of small windows above the stone floors.

On top, the largest forms are the six stair exits, each with a spiral staircase up from the attic and a cross at the top. Four are covered in trencadís - broken pieces of Ulldecona stone, white marble and white Valencian tile - which keeps the rain out. Around thirty chimneys, the flues of the coal-fired heating, stand alone or in groups of two, five or seven, rendered in lime mortar; only one group is clad, in fragments of dark green champagne bottles. Two ventilation towers, about five metres high, renewed the air in the attic. The poet Pere Gimferrer called the roof "the garden of warriors": the chimneys seem to guard the stairs. On either side of two stair exits stand small arches in white trencadís, and one of them frames the Sagrada Família.

By the 1950s the house had changed hands. Milà's widow, Rosario Segimon, sold it in 1946 to Compañía Inmobiliaria Provenza, and in 1953 the company asked the architect Francisco Juan Barba Corsini to turn the attic into flats. He found it, he wrote, full of useless junk and overrun by rats. By 1955 there were thirteen flats of about forty square metres each, meant for short stays - for couples, artists and foreigners, as La Vanguardia later wrote. A corridor ran round the two courtyards, and the flats used the height of the arches for sleeping lofts - "duplexes", in his word. He kept Gaudí's arches as they were and worked in plain materials: common brick, firebrick, ceramic, stone, Galician pine, glazed tile in three or four colours a piece. "Colour is our fourth dimension in architecture," he wrote. He designed the furniture too, having found nothing decent to buy; one of his chairs is still known as the Pedrera chair. Up on the roof, each flat got a chimney of its own, made in imitation of Gaudí's.

The flats lasted some thirty-five years. Francesc Català-Roca photographed them, and Barba Corsini published them in Cuadernos de Arquitectura in 1955; Ferran Amat of Vinçon, the Barcelona design shop, lived in one for a decade. Caixa de Catalunya bought the building in December 1986 and began restoring it in 1987, with the attic set aside for a permanent exhibition on Gaudí and the roof for visitors. The head of the works first meant to keep one flat as a sample; in the end the whole floor went back to Gaudí's open arches, and around 1990 the thirteen flats were taken down - flats that, as Barcelona's Modernisme Route notes, had architectural merit of their own. The roof, which Raquel Lacuesta, in charge of its restoration, called a "forest of chimneys", lost the thirteen added for the flats and its television aerials; only Gaudí's chimneys were kept. The restored building opened in June 1996, and in 1997 the work on the attic and the roof received Catalonia's National Culture Prize.

What visitors walk on today is Gaudí's roof, restored to its original materials, textures and colours; about half of the material on it is new. The flats beneath it, as La Vanguardia wrote when Barba Corsini died in 2008, live on only in the memory of those who lived in or visited them, and in Català-Roca's photographs.

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Sources: La Pedrera - Casa Milà, official site: History, Architecture, Heritage, Conservation; F. J. Barba Corsini, "Apartamentos en la planta desván de 'La Pedrera'", Cuadernos de Arquitectura 22, 1955; COAC, arquitecturacatalana.cat: "Nous apartaments a les golfes de la Casa Milà"; La Vanguardia, 1995 and 2008; El Temps, 1996; Ajuntament de Barcelona, Ruta del Modernisme; Wikipedia: "La Pedrera, Barcelona", "Casa Milà" (Catalan and Spanish). Photographs: MYT'.