This year marks 25 years since Enric Miralles died.
He died on July 3rd, 2000.
A remarkable architect, who could have enchanted us with many more remarkable buildings, if Fate had not shortened his life significantly.
But Art transgresses Death.
Maybe this is its main raison d'etre.
And architecture, for an architect like Enric Miralles, was an art, a difficult art, perhaps, but an art because assuming emotions, highly.
Emotions ?
Yes, emotions.
Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish film director, said that in the field of emotions we are all illiterates.
Was Enric Miralles "illiterate" too, in this sense ?
Perhaps less than most of us. But he was an architect in that crepuscular valley which Paul Klee talked about, the valley of men, those who know that they don't know, in between two mountains: the mountain of the animals, those who don't know that they don't know and the mountain of the gods, those who know that they know.
Enric Miralles knew that he didn't know... but this is exactly why he had an ardent desire to know, an ardent curiosity, about everything... and this is why he loved books.
Was he a deconstructivist ? Not really, although fragmentation does exist in his work... but his fragments do seem to reclaim themselves from an "inner center."
One of the most important architects at the end of the 20th century, Miralles invites us, continues to invite us, to reflection.
His architecture could be described as an existentialist architecture, sometimes melancholic, sometimes anxious, always full of meaning.
And maybe meaning is what we lack the most today.
MEANING.
Please send us your work, digitally, by December 21st 2025, on two posters size A1, oriented vertically, to info@icarch.us. We will publish all of them on our website and the best proposals will be exhibited in a travelling exhibition, in a van, in 2026, when Barcelona will be The World Capital of Architecture, and when the UIA 2026 World Congress of Architects will also take place in Barcelona. The competition is being carried out as a collaboration between ICARCH and the Fundació Enric Miralles. The jury members will be announced later. Please register by December 1st, 2025, by writing to info@icarch.us. If you have any questions please be kind and contact us.
Thank you,
I C A R C H
&
Fundació Enric Miralles - Barcelona
Cathedral ? Socialism ?
What do these words mean ?
Even more, what do they mean, together ?
We are told we live in “dark times”.
But maybe times were always “dark”.
In 1919 Walter Gropius wrote the Bauhaus Manifesto, which was published together with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger that represented the “cathedral of socialism”.
At that time Gropius had an almost mystical vision about architecture, if we consider that in that short manifesto he used the word “heavens” twice and the last word was “faith.”
Heavens ?
Faith ?
Was he out of his mind ?
His idealism was short lived though.
And the new Bauhaus buildings, which opened in 1925, were far from bringing together painting, sculpture and architecture.They were certainly far from being, together, the cathedral of socialism.
Nothing medieval or mystical about the new buildings.
On the occasion of the centennial of the Dessau buildings we invite you to imagine and propose, across the street from the main building, a structure, a pavilion, or even a smaller cathedral, reminding us of the beginning of the Bauhaus.
That Bauhaus that advocated the conjunction of all the arts in the name of spirit.
Can we do this at this time, our dark time ?
Is it too idealistic ?
But what if, stubborn, we refuse to forget what Gropius wrote in 1919 ? What If we refuse to ignore the pictorial representation of Lyonel Feininger ? Would it be impossible ?
We invite you to imagine a quintessential building that would express, as well as possible, the desiderata of the 1919 manifesto.
Imagine a building that would announce perhaps, and hopefully, what Gropius hoped for.
Even if our times do not seem disposed to do so.
Thank you,
I C A R C H
www.icarch.us
