Enric Miralles's disciples: "He was a source of surprises, always going a step further than you thought."

BarcelonaThe legacy of Enric Miralles (1955-2000) is full of powerful yet lyrical gestures: the deceased in the Igualada cemetery are always underground, the pergolas of the Olympic Village evoke a procession of giants and tadpoles, and a former hall of the Círculo de Lector. Later, he incorporated the image of Highland boats into the design of the Scottish Parliament and conceived the roof of the Santa Caterina Market as a sinuous display of the most varied fruits and vegetables. Miralles is considered a brilliant architect, and one of the cornerstones of his career is that he always worked in partnership. Miralles founded his first studio with Carme Pinós, then had a solo studio, and later another with Benedetta Tagliabue. And throughout these times, he worked with a group of younger architects who were captivated by his creative power and bonhomie, both in the classroom and in his studio and on construction sites. As next Thursday marks the 25th anniversary of his death, we spoke with some of them, who remember it all as if they had been part of a very special family. "He was capable of constructing metaphors that go far beyond history, literature, and cinema," says Josep Bohigas, who taught Miralles and worked in his studio. "Enric was very Catalan and very interested in establishing these roots, while at the same time escaping," he explains.

This group of architects worked tirelessly day, night, and weekends, and two constants from their experiences are that they felt they had a special relationship with him and that they had a lot of fun. "He was destined to be the Le Corbusier of the 21st century," says Josep Salló. "He knew how to ignite a flame of commitment to architecture in me that I haven't found anywhere else," says Rodrigo Prats. For Basque architect Rocío Peña, Miralles's vision was exceptional. "He could turn a drawing upside down to provoke change and achieve progress." "He taught you to look differently; he always gave us the faith to be able to complete a project," explains Peña.

A special vision, building a block

Miralles often found his collaborators among his students. They remember him always coming into class carrying a bag full of books to accompany his explanations. Furthermore, in his studio, these architects would find books not in the school library, which Miralles would buy during his travels, among which stood out the exclusive edition of Le Corbusier's works from the Garland Architecture Archives. Rocío Peña met Miralles very early on, when he was working in the studio of Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana and teaching Federico Correa's course at the Etsab. "There were only thirteen of us in the class, an outrage, like having a private lesson," says the architect, who had Miralles teach her first-year design class. From those classes, she remembers exercises such as having them explain their drawings to the fifth-year students and vice versa, so that they would realize that the differences between them weren't that great. "He had an irresistible personality, he was very charismatic, and when you showed him your project, with all your insecurity and shyness, he would explain it differently, and you felt that your project, and those of your classmates, were absolutely wonderful," says Peña. "In subsequent years, without that perspective, we felt orphaned." On the other hand, she recalls how Miralles was interested in architecture beyond styles: "He could look at classical architecture just as he looked at modern architecture; for him, they were the same."

Josep Miàs worked alongside Miralles for a decade, until his death. "I was fortunate to have a master, from every point of view," he says. Compared to his other collaborators, Miàs stands out because he also worked with Miralles as an assistant when he was a professor, both in Barcelona and at various European universities and at Harvard. His teaching method was unique: "We didn't teach classes to explain what we knew how to do, but rather what we didn't yet know how to do. The interesting thing was that his classes were a very unique area of research and reflection with respect to the practice," says Miàs. This led to some tense situations: "Enric wanted to teach the last class of the last master's degree he completed at the UPC: he came into the room where all the professors were gathered together and asked me to close the door. He said, 'We'll build an island, but don't tell anyone, because they'll think we're crazy.'" Another of the collaborators, Josep Ustrell, was so fascinated by his drawings that he changed the school's schedule so he could have Miralles as his professor in his final year. While he had found the other professors too academic, he was captivated by the "freedom" he gave him. "More than half the class were foreigners; they knew him better abroad than here," says Ustrell. "Enric was a magnificent professor," says Josep Bohigas, who also worked in his studio. "Enric was able to connect everything around the architectural project," explains Bohigas, "and turned it into a cultural machine. The act of creating a project went beyond solving a functional problem; it amplified it in the cultural sphere."

In the case of Pep Salló, who lives in Girona, he studied with Miralles, who tutored him for his final year project. To carry out the corrections, Miralles would call him to meet at night, and they would work until the early hours. "They gave me a ten, and Enric never forgave me for not taking advantage of a scholarship to attend Harvard for two years," he explains. Salló was eager to start working and began working in the family carpentry shop and collaborating with Miralles on projects including the Círculo de Lectores in Madrid, which they built, and the complex InesTable table, named in homage to his second daughter, who had just been born. "Enric was extraordinarily brilliant, and you had to be by his side absorbing everything you could. He didn't make the typical drawing that he would pass on to a cabinetmaker; rather, the creation process was collaborative, very creative, and very inspiring, and then the prototypes would be modified." "I studied architecture, very convinced of what I was doing, but meeting him meant a radical change."

Speaking while drawing

Enric Miralles is remembered as an extraordinary draftsman, something especially important because these architects began working with him before the profession began to digitize. "Anyone who wants to understand Enric Miralles's architecture can go see his works, but his architecture is in the drawings," Miàs warns. "He would tell you about the projects by drawing," he adds, "and you would understand what was going through his mind by superimposing the drawings he was making: how the building interacted with the city, with the program that had been proposed to him... Everything was through drawing." Architect Pia Wortham, who studied with Miralles at Columbia and followed him to Barcelona, ​​was struck by the fact that he would start drawing with the last sheet of the tracing paper block, so the first one included all the changes he had made. "He would end up with a topography of drawings, with layers and layers of drawings. His drawing was more elaborate than I had ever seen, and Enric had an impressive ability to think in three dimensions," she recalls. "In the United States, there was this tradition where you would make a drawing on a paper napkin and the building would emerge from it, but Enric's drawings, on the other hand, were very elaborate." However, her father, who was associated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, distrusted Miralles's architecture and asked Rafael Moneo, who had designed a building, what he thought about his daughter working there. Although Moneo had raised eyebrows when he refused to evaluate Miralles's thesis during an initial revision, he replied that he was a first-class architect.

These disciples have very special memories, especially of the studio that Enric Miralles had in a former carpet workshop in a mansion on Carrer Aviñón during the early 1990s. "That was foundational: we set up a studio [Gòtic Sud], we all lived in one building, we went on excursions, and... from Etsab for a few years to dedicate himself completely to work alongside Miralles. "That work had a very complete dimension, because you didn't just make architecture but you learned to look at it, to speak about it, and to love it." His father even opened a copy shop, which he gave the symbolic name of La Fundació. They have long remembered how they worked happily from dawn to dusk and on weekends. And the snacks, and the basketball games on the terrace, and how Miralles, who had been a professional player, always wanted to win. "Just like in school, in the studio he had open books and fragments of a model that were part of the conversation, and Enric was very aware of that," says Pla. "Today "Nobody would do it," adds Joan Callís. "One day, after four months, Enric came and gave you a check and you remembered that this was a job," Pla concludes.

However, Miralles never stopped working beyond the projects he had most in progress. When he left his desk, his collaborators often came to see what he was doing. Among those sketches, Pla remembers those of a classroom building for the University of Valencia that never came to fruition. "It was a very exciting time, it's not that something new appeared but rather a typology. Enric approached things by explaining to us and to the world that a university could be a roof; it seemed like a gift to all of us!" he explains."Enric had a brutal work ethic," recalls Rodrigo Prats, the only one of those collaborators who didn't study with Miralles. "He didn't have the status of any other," he adds, "but rather an emotionally superior status, that of a revered professor, due to the ease with which he explained what he wanted to do and how he did it. And since he knew your commitment, he let you." Prats began working with Miralles when he shared a studio with Carme Pinós, and worked primarily on the Olympic archery buildings and the Morella boarding school. From that time, he was struck by the "freedom," revolutionary at the time, with which they designed buildings, far removed from what you do, you do it if you don't do it if you don't plan it. "It's the volume, the floor plan, the section, the program, and the client's needs," he explains.

A unique feature of that office was that Miralles wanted only architects to be part of it, so they had to answer the phone, at a time when his architecture was receiving increasing attention. "You were always producing an original and we were obliged to do it as well as we knew how. We lived very focused, the drawings were always very large, you spent many hours, many days on the same drawing, and we drew in a way that on the floor plan you would find the plan that seemed most to you. You constructed the drawing and, if you weren't very deep, you could get lost," says Pla.

The structuralist Agustí Obiol (1953-2023) was key to Miralles' architecture. Robert Brufau, his partner at the time and who took Miralles in for a few months, welcomed Miralles into the kitchen on the days when he was most tense: "Enric was a very good architect, but when it came to structures, they had judgment, but they didn't know. So, when he came up with an idea for a new project, he would give him some preliminary designs and contact Agustí." The meetings between Miralles and Obiol usually lasted an afternoon, and he would leave satisfied because he already had the project. "Agustí was a very considerable intuitive, understanding that intuition is foresight. He had a sufficiently large and broad base that, whenever a problem arose, he would have the most appropriate option. He was a professor of structures and, therefore, well acquainted with all the steps that had been taken over five or six centuries, and perhaps he would give you an 18th-century solution." Miralles liked this way of working very much. "Enric was a well of surprises, always going a step beyond what you thought. When you thought he'd reached a point that was right, he'd go further. And that's why Agustí suited him so well, because it gave him continuity and even allowed him to go further."

A whole career alongside Miralles

Joan Callís occupies an exceptional place among his colleagues: he began working with Miralles in the studio he owned with Carme Pinós thanks to the model maker Miquel Lluch, and he followed him until his death. In the studio on Avinyó Street, he met Pia Wortham, and they started a family. Also, unlike the others, Callís had Miralles as a teacher later, in his final year of university. "Miquel Lluch called me to come and help him make some models. I didn't know who Miralles was, and back then there was no internet to look him up," says Callís. "It was a bit strange working with him and having him as your final year project teacher. He'd come in and tell you that he wasn't going to tell you that day, that day, that he wasn't going to tell you that day. It was good because Enric didn't explain much, and then you went to class and you could make connections." One of Callís's milestones at the EMBT studio was the completion of the Scottish Parliament following Miralles's death: he traveled back and forth to Edinburgh frequently for seven years. "Enric designed the entire Parliament; it was all there. No matter how much work there was, Enric was the one who designed it. If you were more experienced, you could interpret some things," he explains. For Ricardo Flores, Miralles had "a brutal power of synthesis." "If you looked at the sketches very carefully, you realized everything was there," he emphasizes. Flores left his native Buenos Aires to work alongside Miralles and collaborated at the studio on Avinyó Street and later at the EMBT studio as head of the demanding competitions department. He overlapped for a year at Avinyó Street with his partner and colleague, Eva Prats. "With Enric, we were able to develop a project that didn't consist of looking for an A or B solution, but rather one that accumulated desires and things you thought you could offer. His way of drawing was through approximations, accepting things that weren't quite there yet, but you could add to them and improve them, so a project felt like what you felt."

Another trait of Miralles's character that Callís experienced firsthand was his difficulty in considering projects finished and the changes he made during construction. In Scotland, too, he worked hard on the shape of the chamber to capture the Scottish idiosyncrasies. "Enric used geometry to try to figure out how the debates would work," he recalls.

The importance of models

Models are a key element in the creation of a building, enabling them to begin to verify that the drawings correspond to a geometric reality. Valencian Miquel Lluch joined the studio of Miralles and Carme Pinós to create the models for the rhythmic gymnastics center in Alicante and later continued his involvement with the studios of Pinós and Benedetta Tagliabue. "Enric's imagination was extremely broad; not only was he well-read, but he could also turn anything into an architectural motif; it was extraordinary," recalls Lluch, who often worked two or three weeks on a project while simultaneously training the studio's collaborators in charge of the models. "The beauty of all this is that the model wasn't just a final result; it was part of the process, and changes were made, even if they weren't many. I really liked making them like a cardboard foldout," he explains. One of his later works was the solid wood model of the competition proposal for the Alicante airport control tower. "It took me a day and a half to make it, and when it was done, he held it like a baby and made the gesture of putting it into the computer, because drawing up plans was much more complicated. When I work, I feel like a musician who's been given sheet music, but one to which you can make your own contribution. And, in that sense, working with ."

Disciples with many responsibilities

Before meeting and working with him, Ustrell believed that Miralles's ideas could be drawn, but not executed. "I saw very clearly that he drew and executed them, so he gave me a push to be bold, to put my thoughts into drawings and be able to execute them," he recalls. And after studying with him, he followed him into the studio, where Miralles gave him an important responsibility: the supervision of the construction of the Huesca Sports Palace. "I have always been grateful for the support and trust he gave me, because you were going into a project of this magnitude with little experience," he recalls. And, after his death, he directed the construction of the Palafolls Library and the Gas Tower. "He had a very unique way of working. The important thing was the place: many of his works can only be understood by traveling from Barcelona to the place where they are located, how you arrive and what you see around you—all of this was his great inspiration."

Francesc Pla, Josep Salló, and Inaki Baquero were involved in the construction of the former headquarters of the Círculo de Lectores in Madrid, now called Espacio Bertelsmann. "One of the things I learned in that studio, because we put it into practice every day, was how to approach architecture from every staircase," says Iñaki Baquero: "When you design a façade, for example, you have to jump to a detail so that everything you're thinking can be fulfilled. A constant leap between linearity and constant jumping and recovering from one side to the other."

The dilemma of staying or leaving

However, the vast majority of collaborators stopped working with Miralles to pursue their own paths: Francesc Pla returned to Etsab to finish his studies, while others founded their own studios, such as Josep Ustrell and Josep Salló. Eva Prats began her own path when she won one of the Europan competitions alongside a collaborator from the Miralles Pinós studio, Se Duch. "It was very difficult to leave the office because it gave you so much," says Prats. "Miralles was a character like Alvaro Siza," Flores concludes, "you could stay by his side forever. If you don't leave these studios in time, you can get trapped." "Life isn't that long when it comes to trying your own architecture, and you need a few years to understand what you want to do and how. If you don't leave with the desire to try this alone, if you don't have the youth to try it, you can't get started."