1948-2020

On the first of May, in the Barcelona of his birth in 1948, the architect, historian, critic, and publisher Carlos Martí Aris died of the coronavirus. He was a cultural reference for the entire profession and a member of the brilliant generation of Catalan critics and theorists that included Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Josep Quetglas, and Félix de Azúa. He earned his architecture degree in 1972 and his doctorate in 1988, both from the Barcelona school, where he would teach, and wrote texts of theory and criticism, among them Variations of Identity: Type in Architecture, first released in Milan in 1990 as Le variazioni dell’identità, and then in two Spanish editions, the second of which, published by Fundación Arquia, sold out fast. Martí was also a practicing architect, in partnership with Antonio Armesto, and a conscientious and daring publisher. In 1972 he founded the magazine 2C, a collective project which gave Rossi’s Tendenza a voice in Spain, and he knew how to disseminate the best of contemporary architecture. He was the driving force behind DPA, the ETSAB’s magazine, and the creator of Fundación Arquia’s arquia/tesis series.