Following some initial collaborations, Gonzalo Milá founded the Milá Diseño studio together with Miguel and Micaela Milá After two years at Santa & Cole, he opened his own firm in 2001, where he puts into practice his rigorous essentialism and his human way of designing, with concern for the importance of usefulness. Since then, Gonzalo has collaborated with numerous companies, creating elements that decorate and illuminate, and for which he has received various design awards.
Gonzalo Milá obtained a degree in industrial design from the ELISAVA School.
Son of famous industrial designer Miguel Milá, Gonzalo began his professional career balancing his architecture studies with his work in his father’s interior and industrial design studio. He was awarded the second furniture award of the Community of Castilla-La Mancha together with Luis Victory for their design of the Agarrón coat stand. His meticulous work with small objects and close contact with the philosophy and praxis of the discipline led a young Gonzalo to study industrial design in the ELISAVA School.
At the beginning of the 90s, he founded the Gòtic Sud studio, a group of young architects, photographers and designers with the ambition of meeting the creative demand of day-to-day objects. There he met Juan Carlos Inés with whom he decided to create a firm in 1994. They called it Inés-Milá and together they designed a series of objects that were picked up by large firms for their catalogues. In 1999, he joined the Urban Division of Santa & Cole, now Urbidermis, in the production and product editing departments and after this phase, in 2001, he decided to go back to the free exercising of his profession, subsequently participating in the founding of the Milá Diseño studio together with his father and sister. Said period gave rise to the reconstruction of a period apartment in the Pedrera de Gaudi and the Rama streetlamp (2000), ADI FAD 2001 Delta de Plata Award, awarded, according to the judges, “for the versatility provided by the possibility of installing the streetlamps at different heights and with different orientations”, to cover any scope of lighting with a unified formal solution.
In the years that followed, Gonzalo Milá continued to collaborate with Santa & Cole’s Urban Division, now Urbidermis, creating other emblematic urban furniture and lighting products. His versatility has contributed to the modernisation of the city with more functional, discreet elements, as he says: “The shape of urban furniture has to be very clean and discreet, contributing to the street without filling it.”
He has also been involved in teaching, giving industrial design classes in the ELISAVA and EINA schools and the Barcelona Higher Technical School for Architecture (ETSAB).
Gonzalo Milá is currently working in his studio, designing elements that contribute to day-to-day convenience, applying technology and observing rigorous functional usefulness, in both indoor and outdoor spaces.
Gonzalo is the designer behind the Rama streelamp (2000), a versatile element to place lighting at different heights and with different orientations, blending well into the surroundings, the Candela streetlamp (2009), another flexible lighting element for large urban roads, the Bina wastepaper bin (2004), of great capacity, hard-wearing, weather-resistant and stackable, the Harpo family (2015), an extensive series of solutions for rest, formally humble and very comfortable and the Basic family (2021), for terraces and gardens or private outdoor spaces, collaborating on the latter two with his father, Miguel Milá.
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