La Pedrera Souvenir Buildings

Another Gaudi building which has a souvenir building is the Casa Mila, better known as La Pedrera, in Barcelona, Spain. The all-metal facade (flat) souvenir building is 2" tall and 2.25" wide. The real Casa Milà, also know as La Pedrera (Catalan for 'The Quarry'), was designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and built during the years 1906–1912. Located at 92, Passeig de Gràcia (passeig is Catalan for promenade) in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was built for Rosario Segimon and Pere Milà. 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." The design by Gaudi was not followed in some aspects. The local government objected to some parts of the project, fined the owners for many infractions of building codes, ordered the demolition of aspects exceeding the height standard for the city and refused to approve the installation of 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.Casa Milà was in poor condition in the early 1980s. It had been painted a dreary brown and many of its interior color schemes had been abandoned or allowed to deteriorate, but it has been restored and many of the original colors revived. The building is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Works of Antoni Gaudí." The building is now owned by Caixa Catalunya. Check out a virtural tour. Do you know of other souvenir replicas of Gaudi-designed architecture?