Architect Manuel Gausa dies at 66

BarcelonaArchitect Manuel Gausa (Barcelona, ​​​​1959 - 2025) died unexpectedly this Saturday at the age of 66, according to ARA from close sources. In Catalonia, Gausa is known as a transgressive architect and theorist who approached the discipline from the idea of ​​"environmental architecture," that is, not as a formalist object but, as he himself said, "as scenarios at a crossroads, between stairs and places, between tensions and demands, between limits and borders, beyond old ones. Thus, Gausa proposed approaching the city and the territory "beyond the old paradigms of traditional urban planning." On the contrary, his approach admitted contributions from the art world and from fields such as physics, mathematics, computer science, biogenetics, literature and philosophy. The fruit of all this is "reactive architectures" capable of reacting to the environment.

Throughout his career, Gausa was the co-founder of the architectural publishing house Actar with Ramon Prat. He directed the magazine Architecture and Urban Planning Notebooks between 1991 and 2000 and was also co-founder of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). On the international scene, since 2014 he has been a professor of architecture and landscape architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Genoa (UNIGE), and also coordinated a doctorate in architecture and design and an urban and territorial research laboratory. "Manuel Gausa was a key figure in the transition of modern architecture into the 21st century. He clearly understood the impact of the information society and digitalization on our discipline, opening new avenues of thought and practice," says Ricardo Devesa, editor-in-chief of Actar and urbanNext, and a professor at the Escola. "For me," he adds, "he was above all a teacher: with his editorial work at the helm of the journal Architecture and Urban Planning Notebooks He offered me the opportunity to learn the critical value of written and shared architecture. I will personally remember him as a generous person with the new generations, brave in his convictions, and enthusiastic in everything he undertook."

An architect with great unease

"Gausa's death is a great loss," laments Vicente Guallart, co-founder of the IAAC. "I think she was deeply concerned," he adds, "because in Italy she was made a professor, while here, on the other hand, she never held a relevant position. It's very rare that someone who carries a lot of weight here has to leave for academic recognition." Guallart also recalls that Gausa was the eldest of the generation that emerged "after the International Union of Architects congress in 1996." Regarding Gausa's time at the magazine NotebooksGuallart recalls how he always supported young people. The College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC) also mourned Gausa's loss in a post on X.

Gausa was one of the driving forces behind the Metapolis group, along with Vicente Guallart and Willy Müller. In 2000, they were invited to the Venice Architecture Biennale by Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, in an edition remembered for the motto "More ethics, less aesthetics." They were the only Spanish team to participate. And, later, the IAAC emerged from that creative outburst.

Among their most notable articles and publications are Housing, new alternatives, new systems [Housing, new alternatives, new systems],Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture [Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture],HiperCatalunya: Research Territories [HiperCatalunya: research territories] andOperative Optimis [Operational Optimism].

Born in Barcelona in 1959, Manuel Gausa graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 1986 and was a professor between 1995 and 2000. He received his doctorate from the same university in 2005. Among other institutional positions, he held the position of Sustainable Development (CADS) for the Generalitat of Catalonia between 2008 and 2012, and between 2011 and 2014 he was a member of the Urban Habitat Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Council. He was currently responsible for the theoretical part of the IAAC. As for his office, in recent years he had won several competitions to design housing in Paris. Among the awards he received is the French Medal of Architecture.