Labóh | MIRALLES, a tribute that remembers the architect in all his facets

Exhibition, Opening & Launch, Press Presentation - Fundació Enric Miralles

• The Fundació Enric Miralles, with the support of Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat of Catalonia, is promoting a tribute to Enric Miralles, whose death marked 20 years in 2020.

• Exhibitions and activities will show throughout 2021 his many facets as a creator: architect, designer, photographer and teacher, bringing his professional and human figure to the general public.

• The curators of the tribute, Benedetta Tagliabue and Joan Roig i Duran, have selected for the exhibitions, original and unpublished materials from the archives of the Fundació Enric Miralles.

Fundació Enric Miralles, with the support of the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat of Catalonia, is promoting a tribute to Enric Miralles, one of the most emblematic figures in contemporary Catalan architecture, whose death marking 20 years this past 2020.

MIRALLES is a program of exhibitions and activities that shows the public the legacy that the architect left, with works in Barcelona -a city where he lived and worked-, Catalonia and worldwide. The tribute addresses his different facets as a creator: architect, designer, photographer and teacher, offering a multifaceted and personal look at his career.

The activities of MIRALLES are curated by Benedetta Tagliabue (Miralles Tagliabue EMBT) and Joan Roig i Duran (Batlle i Roig), and organized by Fundació Enric Miralles with the support of the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat of Catalonia through their Departments of Presidency, Culture and Territory and Sustainability, in collaboration with the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC) and the Miralles Tagliabue EMBT architecture studio.

This tribute "not only wants to remember the human and professional figure of Enric Miralles, but also wants to keep the spirit of the visionary, of the experimentalist, alive, as a way of working and seeing the world. And to leave his legacy also for the future generations." Benedetta Tagliabue emphasizes.

03 Miralles General Maria Birules — Maria Birulés

The program extends to representative spaces of the city of Barcelona, starting with the Saló del Tinell, which is home to the exhibition about Miralles as architect, and also was chosen to host in 1956 the first retrospective of another illustrious architect of the city, Antoni Gaudí. The other venues for the activities, which are also emblematic, will be at the Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Disseny Hub of Barcelona City Council, the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) and the Fundació Enric Miralles.

Through these spaces a "Miralles circuit" has been designed that can be visited at various times of the year and that is accessible to all audiences. Thanks to the different formats: talks, debates, photography, videos, plans, drawings, models, notebooks, sketches, collages ... anyone, whether or not linked to the world of architecture, can get closer to the human figure life of one of the most international contemporary Catalan architects.

Miralles has an exceptionally prolific career: in just 26 years of profession, from 1974 to 2000, he received 62 awards, participated in 68 competitions and was a finalist in many others. In addition, he has carried out installations and executed different projects. Among all these aspects, a total of 225 works and projects are collected in different countries such as Holland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Scotland, Japan, Austria, Argentina, United States, Brazil, Greece, Finland, France, USA, England, Ireland, Switzerland, and Denmark.

He taught in Barcelona, Frankfurt, and at the most prestigious universities in the United States such as Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale. He is the most studied and imitated architect by students in the western and eastern world. The foundation that treasures his legacy receives more than 2,000 visits from all over the world each year.

The tribute prioritizes the documentation and materials that Miralles made in his lifetime, some of them unpublished, which will come out of the archive for the first time. But MIRALLES is also an act of affirmation of the heritage it has left in the history of architecture and in the academic world, extending its gaze to the imprint that the EMBT studio has been able to follow.

Curator Joan Roig i Duran explains that “a meticulous research effort has been made within the archives to find those documents and materials that can best explain Miralles to the general public. It is not a tribute made from a distance; it has been thought from the front line to make it accessible to everyone.”