Miralles, Enric (1955–2000)

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The Spanish architect Enric Miralles, in his short life, influenced the urban fabric of his home city, Barcelona. His architecture utilized a layered mosaic of materials to create playful façades. Miralles began his architectural career when he graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona. He first worked with the architects Helio Piñon and Alberto Viaplana (1973–1985), and opened a firm with Carme Pinós in 1984. In 1993, he joined with Benedetta Tagliabue to form the practice EMBT Arquitectes Associats SL.21 Their urban spaces, Plaça dels Paisos Catalans and the Park in Besós in Barcelona, use color-ful active screens to enliven these public parks.

Kinetic in nature, these sculptural constructions also act as shading devices for a perpetually sunny city. Other projects from the office of Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue collaborative include: the Scottish Parliament Building on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh’s Old Town (1998); Construction of the Reader’s Circle Headquarters in Madrid (1991); Utrecht Civic Center (1995); first prize for IUV Headquarters, Venice (1999); and the Mollet del Valles Park and Civic Center in Barcelona, Spain (2000). The Parliament Building grows out of the site resembling a collection of upturned boats and seashore imagery. The design employs a leaf theme (based on a flower motif by Charles Rennie Mackintosh) accented by a steel and glass roof with laminated oak beams. Miralles was a visiting professor at universities in the United States, Britain, Italy and Austria. He directed postgraduate studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Harvard University, and the Architectural University in Barcelona (Zabalbeascoa and Marcos, 1999).

This is a sketch for the Mollet del Valles Park and Civic Center. Colorful and expressive, this image uses crayon to form crucial relationships between concepts or representational spaces. The sketch portrays primary colors as indicators. Bold patches of orange and yellow fill in circles on the left. Green and blue linear strokes extend upward and out to the right and left of the central forms. Seemingly random shapes in the form of lozenges and arcs work their way across the page to provide interludes between the areas of color. A very quick sketch, the vibrant strokes zigzag tightly to fill in shapes or loosely form the linear extensions. The poché spaces are conveyed with straight and parallel lines contrasted by the sparsely nervous lines that cover a larger area. This diagonal movement indicates the way the squiggled lines, not lifting the crayon off the paper, ultimately create areas of potential form.

The pressure on the sketching tool varies across the page; sometimes light, at other points strong and forceful. Appearing as plan or elevation relationships, the sketch reflects conceptual intentions. When Miralles and Tagliabue wrote about this project they were also describing the ephemeral and exploratory nature of the sketch. ‘The main interest of this project is, maybe, not directly in it, but in the “themes” it contains; the suspension of the building, of graffiti becoming architecture, of the colors of a painting becoming places, of the suspended spirit of the users, of unexpected connection.…We like to think that this project could be a project for the “near future,” being a more subtle conception of architecture. Architecture of the future will be lighter, especially in its concept.’ The sketch helps to define the idea of the future project.