Enric Tous

1925-2017

In the Barcelona of the 1960s and 1970s, Enric Tous and his partner Josep Maria Fargas designed buildings that departed from Catalonian modernity, linked to the European schools and to a great extent tutored by the great Italian masters. In contrast, or complementing this architecture, that of Tous and Fargas was based on solutions bordering on high-tech and acknowledged its debt to Mies, Neutra, or Ellwood. Tous, who passed away on 1 May, was born in Barcelona in 1925 and graduated from the architecture school of the city in 1953. The following year he set up with Fargas a partnership that lasted until 1992, completing prominent buildings that stand out for their clean and daring lines, that resort to modular solutions of corporate architecture – the curtain wall, in particular –, and that use markedly industrial materials; buildings like the one for Banca Catalana – with its prefabricated hyperbolic paraboloid –, the Banco Industrial de Bilbao – with its striking bracing at ground level –, or the current headquarters of Editorial Planeta, where the high-tech language swerves towards a very expressive organicism based on the use of reinforced concrete.