Login or register
Commercial network
Gonzalo Milá is a Barcelona-born architect. After setting up his first studio with a friend, he founded the Milá Diseño studio, together with Miguel and Micaela Milá, his father and sister. He is the designer of the Rama street lamp, edited by Urbidermis and winner of the 2001 Silver Delta Award, the year in which he opened his studio. His work displays a rigorous essentialism and humanity, based on a belief in the importance of an object’s usefulness.
Born in 1967, Gonzalo Milá began his Architecture degree in Barcelona. He combined his studies with his professional work at Miguel Milà’s interior and industrial design studio, winning second prize, in collaboration with Luis Victory, in the Castilla-La Mancha Furniture Awards for the Agarrón Espiga clothes hanger. His work with small objects and avid interest in all project phases led him to study industrial design at the ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona.
In the early 90s he founded the Gòtic Sud studio, together with a group of architects, designers and photographers, for which they refurbished a large industrial warehouse in Barcelona’s historic quarter. This was where he teamed up with Juan Carlos Inés to create the Inés-Milá industrial design studio. During this period they entered a large number of competitions, calls and trade shows with a diverse range of objects: the Tutombas Pranha lounger, designed to stretch the user’s back and winner of the first prize in the 1994 Valencia Furniture Trade Show; Sillarga and Sicurta, two granite loungers for the Bogatell beach on Barcelona’s waterfront; the Teula bottle rack and the Segado boundary marker, a playful space divider for terraces and markets.
In 1999, Gonzalo Milá joined Santa & Cole’s nascent Urban Division that has since become Urbidermis, where he collaborated in the production and editing departments. Two years later, in 2001, he decided to return to working freelance and inventing “small, useful objects designed to surprise and which make use of novel technologies or traditional technologies applied to new concepts”. Shortly afterwards, Gonzalo Milá took an active part in founding the Milá Diseño studio, where he worked for three years, alongside his father and sister. A notable project from this time was the reconstruction of a period apartment in Gaudí’s La Pedrera and the creation of the Rama family of luminaires (2000-2004), winner of the 2001 ADI-FAD Silver Delta, which was praised by the jury for “its versatility, since it offers the possibility to adjust the lights for different heights and directions”; a unified formal solution that could meet the lighting needs of any space.
Gonzalo Milá is a prominent figure in the development of urban furniture for Santa & Cole Urbidermis, having designed a number of entries in their catalogues. Thanks to their versatility, his designs can be seen in various European cities, his vision thereby making a valuable contribution to 21st-century urban design: “urban furniture needs a clean, discrete form, which contributes to a street without filling it”.
Today, Gonzalo Milá works in his studio designing urban garden lighting and small objects aimed at enhancing comfort in everyday life, both for interior and outdoor spaces.
