David Cohn’s New Book Traces the Roots of Modernism in Spain

The new book by Madrid-based architecture critic and RECORD contributing editor David Cohn traces the roots of modernism in Spain, from the Spanish Enlightenment through the 21st century. But the book primarily centers on the years 1910–2008, a period that includes the fall of a monarchy, the turbulent Second Republic in the 1930s, a civil war, and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Following is an excerpt that explores the short but influential career of the Barcelona architect Enric Miralles, whose inventive projects from the 1980s and ’90s brought him international recognition.

Spain: Modern Architectures in History, by David Cohn. Reaktion Books, 344 pages, $40.

The most spectacular debut at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics was the Archery Range at Vall d’Hebron by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, his first wife and partner. Their winning competition design transformed a modest commission for a pair of pavilions, little more than dressing rooms, into a radical formal manifesto (1989–91, partially demolished). The design created a new imaginative world of forms, but its vision represented a repudiation of the dry Minimalism of his former employers, Albert Viaplana and Helio Piñón, which Miralles and Pinós swept away in an energizing surfeit of creative inventiveness.

Miralles and Pinós’s Olympic Archery Range, built for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, has been partially demolished. Photo © David Cohn, click to enlarge.

The two pavilions were banked into the terrain overlooking the shooting range. In the surviving structure, a series of tilting and bent roof planes jostle together at different angles. Supported by tilting columns, they project over a sequence of rhythmically angled and curving walls topped by clerestory windows. The interiors are further convulsed by the sinuously curving back wall and angled partitions. The raw finishes and earthy atmosphere recall the fresh, tactile Mediterraneanism of José Luis Sert, while the formal inventiveness and fusion into the landscape bring to mind Gaudí’s Park Güell. But the fragmentation of the compositions into repetitive, varied plays of angled and curving elements in both vertical and horizontal planes create a music of their own, complex, dynamic, and lyrical. The method could be likened to a hyper-agitation of the modular, cellular designs of Organicism, while anticipating the formal options opened by computer-aided design. These qualities extend to the calligraphic plans, which raise architectural draftsmanship, on the eve of its disappearance, to the level of a new art form.

Projects like the Olympic Archery Range helped launch Miralles internationally. But his career was cut short with his premature death from a brain tumor in 2000, at the age of 45. His trajectory blazed brightly through the 1990s, as he completed works begun with Pinós (1984–89) and began competing for international work with his second wife, the Italian architect Benedetta Tagliabue (1993–2000).

The most memorable work he completed with Pinós is the Igualada Cemetery (Province of Barcelona, 1985–94). As with the Archery Range, the design fuses architecture and landscape, with broken lines of repetitive elements, in this case the inclined berms of the mortuary niches that shape and meld into the terraced terrain, creating a descending, winding route to a small plaza. Visitors are immersed in a semi-urban, semi-natural setting, at once earthy and otherworldly.

The partnership with Pinós disciplined and focused Miralles’ torrential creativity. His subsequent designs, on his own and then with Tagliabue, were more ambitious and daring, challenging every formal and structural preconception. In one case, the outlandish structure for a basketball stadium in Huesca (1994), in which eccentric roof trusses were supported on cables spanning crosswise below them, collapsed during construction. In another, the 22-story tower for Gas Natural in Barcelona (1999–2006) incongruously sported a massive horizontal volume cantilevered from its midsection, the “aircraft carrier,” as Tagliabue called it. More successful were the flowing interiors of the National Center of Rhythmic Gymnastics in Alicante (1993, begun with Pinós), where visitors move on curving ramps and raised platforms around the performance and training spaces, or the student union at the University of Vigo in Galicia (1999-2003), a semicircular raised structure poised on the edge of a mountainside terrace.

In the mid-1990s, Miralles and Tagliabue won a series of international competitions that culminated with their 1998 commission to build the Scottish National Parliament in Edinburgh, finished by Tagliabue in 2005. The project was their crowning achievement, though it was plagued by changes in program, cost overruns, and hostile, politically charged press coverage, receiving a degree of public scrutiny unheard of in Spain. Their design is full of brilliant moments but fails to cohere as a whole, perhaps precisely because they sought to upend traditional representations of political authority. “This is not a building in a park,” they wrote, “but rather the form of people gathering, physically shaping the act of sitting together.” The project thus eschews the iconic for more Organicist ideas of psycho-social and phenomenological space, which can be traced in part, within Miralles’s wide-ranging formation, to his early friendship with Alison and Peter Smithson.

Composed intuitively from the inside out, the building is a collage of heterogeneous functional elements: the main debating chamber, visitors’ spaces, a tower housing committee hearing rooms, and a multistory slab for members of Parliament’s offices. The embracing, curving spaces are naturally lit, often from multiple directions, and often with the indirect, dappled light of the Organicists’ “Essential Forest.” This effect is augmented by what Tagliabue describes as the “visual vibration” of surfaces and details, created by the repetitions and variations of visual elements. This can be seen in the sweep of notched, irregular wood desktops for MPs in the Debating Chamber, or its roof assembly of heavy timber trusses interlaced with thin stainless-steel tension rods. The latter illustrate a characteristic design strategy, in which the architects separate assemblies into contrasting components so that each can express a specific tectonic “task.”

Miralles’s and Tagliabue’s best-known work in Barcelona, the renovation of the Santa Caterina Market in the Gothic Quarter (1997–2005), features a similar layering of structural elements, filtered natural light, and visual vibration, transforming the dour original 1845 structure into a vibrant field of incident, as exemplified in their new roof, an undulating carpet of ceramic tiles splashed with colors taken from fruit and produce. The intervention extended to the market’s depressed surroundings. The architects demolished the back of the structure to create a small plaza bordered by two modest new towers of senior housing, and sutured the urban wounds left by an incomplete 19th-century boulevard with small, focused interventions. For example, they narrowed the avenue’s aborted path to create a pedestrian-scaled gateway framed by new public housing that was literally extended from existing buildings.

This urban microsurgery was an advance over the wholesale demolitions of the 1980s under Oriol Bohigas in the Raval, and Postmodern concepts of morphological urban space in general. It permitted renewal and the reduction of unhealthy densities in the Gothic Quarter without erasing its historic identity and idiosyncrasies. As in the Scottish Parliament and other works, Miralles and his partners pioneered a singular path forward out of the formal obsessions of the era, though with a creative flair that few could match. Pinós and Tagliabue continued to develop their individual lines of work from these premises. But one can only wonder how Miralles himself might have evolved. As fate would have it, he was buried in the Igualada Cemetery, in a tomb overlooking its small plaza from an upper terrace, beside a solitary cypress.