(1955-2000)

Fleeting and brilliant like fireworks, the life of Enric Miralles ended as precociously and unexpectedly as his talent had burst onto Barcelona’s professional scene in the eighties. A professor at the ETSAB and Frankfurt’s Städel Schule by the age of thirty, he provided with the archery facilities in Catalunya’s capital city or the civic center of Hostalets, both designed with Carmé Pinós, a visceral and exuberant counterpoint to the minimalist Barcelona that was preparing for the Olympic festivities. Through constructions made of fragments and superposed discourses, his oeuvre unfurls a non-narrative interpretation of landscape that seduced institutions and developers beyond Spanish frontiers. Together with his wife and partner Benedetta Tagliabue, he spent the last decade working on projects like the housing development in Amsterdam, the Music School in Hamburg, or the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, an ambitious and controversial project which the architect will never see completed. On 3 July his remains were laid to rest in the cemetery of Igualada, possibly his finest work.