1929-2021

Bohigas’s death at 95 means the disappearance of one of the most influential masters of the second half of the 20th century, but also of a whole way of understanding the profession, the power and the sphere that connects both: the city. Bohigas had a protracted career as an architect. In the precarious 1950s he practiced an efficient rationalism, sometimes dry and sometimes more organicist. During developmentalism, the Barcelona architect – and his studio MBM – turned housing into a field of typological testing and commitment with natural and urban landscapes. And with the arrival of the Transition and democracy, he chose a modern eclecticism that allowed him to successfully address the programs needed at the time. A polyhedric figure, there was the Bohigas builder and the Bohigas intellectual and professor, connected to Arquitecturas Bis and to books on history and critique, always idiosyncratic. All in all, his biggest contribution had to do with the transformation of Olympic Barcelona, as much as iron surgeon who did not hesitate to ‘hygienize and monumentalize’ when needed, and as intelligent architectural conscience of the city.