The Miralles Projection

FOREWORD A Singular Understanding of Orthographic Projections

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Emilio Tuñón INTRODUCTION Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles

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THE MIRALLES PROJECTION: FROM PLAN FRAGMENTS TO CONTINUOUS SPACE I

Enric Miralles’ Education: Architecture School and Viaplana-Piñón

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II

Miralles/Pinós: Plan Fragments and Geometric Types

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III

Enric Miralles and Miralles/Tagliabue: the Plan View as Outline, the Model as Section

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IV

Miralles’ Freehand Drawing: Base Geometry

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UTRECHT TOWN HALL: A WORK PROCESS IN THE MIRALLES PROJECTION V

Geometry of Time: History and Competition Proposal

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VI

From History to Drawing: Evolution of Miralles/Tagliabue’s Designs

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VII

Drawing and Repetition: Presence of the Hand in the Plan View

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BLANK SPACES ON THE PAPER: ATMOSPHERIC TECTONICS VIII IX

Vertical Tectonics: Air Gaps

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Horizontal Tectonics: Border Encounters

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THE MIRALLES PROJECTION: A DEFINITION X

(1) Fragmentable Plan View + (n) Partial Plans/Models

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POSTSCRIPT Instrumentarium: Drawing Principles

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Benedetta Tagliabue

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Acknowledgements

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Image Credits

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Foreword

A Singular Understanding of Orthographic Projections Emilio Tuñón

Plan View, Fragment and Space

Many years have passed, yet I still remember some of the beautiful coursework by Javier Fernández Contreras, the author of this book and one of the best students at the Madrid School of Architecture at the time. He was not a student satisfied with merely referring to Miralles in his work. His intense intellectual curiosity prompted him to try to understand the underlying mechanisms in the complex production processes of contemporary architecture.

This intellectual restlessness —and his awareness of the opportunity— led Fernández Contreras to investigate, comprehend, and communicate Miralles’ unexplored design techniques. In 2013, I had the pleasure and honour as his former lecturer to chair the examination panel for his magnificent PhD thesis, The Miralles Projection: Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles, the result of an intense research under Professor José Manuel López-Peláez. This intelligent thesis has served in turn as the basis for the book that the reader is now holding.

“The Miralles Projection” strives to be an objective, rational method for explaining a way of crafting architecture in which the actual drawing is the place for the architect’s thinking. Fernández Contreras suggests that the intense relationship between representation and ideas in the work of Enric Miralles is the central theme at the crux of his work. That is why this book analyses the evolution of Miralles’ representation system from his time as a student at the Barcelona School of Architecture to his mature work, designed in conjunction with Carme Pinós in the 1980s and Benedetta Tagliabue in the 1990s.

Barcelona School, whom he always considered to be one of his masters and a personal friend. Miralles and Moneo shared, perhaps in different ways, a certain obsession with the plan view as a tool for catalysing and controlling the architectural production processes. However, it must be said that while Moneo has always been interested in architectural forms that forge links with modern and classical tradition, Miralles deployed a system of non-conventional references through his own somewhat codified graphic system, which required a certain degree of practice to be understood.

From the beginning, the author tackles the architect’s forms of representation and thinking in order to understand his work method. This method emerged from a permanent oscillation between ideas and their representation, striving to erase the boundaries between thinking and drawing. Miralles used to say that, “the ideas are in the things.” Fernández Contreras considers that in this attempt to blur the boundaries between thought and action, Miralles resorted fundamentally to planimetry as a tool. He finds that all of Miralles’ drawings are based on parallel projections of his imagined schemes, initially materialised in plan views. It is clarifying to learn that Miralles himself acknowledged that he and his team always began with plan views, not sections or perspectives. His obsession with resolving the design in plans brings to mind his intense relationship with Professor Rafael Moneo, his lecturer in Elements of Composition at the

According to Fernández Contreras, Miralles designed from “a singular understanding of orthographic projections.” He enjoyed working with plan fragments that were somewhat autonomous —“pieces” in his own terms— but also with formal strategies that would ensure a unitary condition for the complete result. The first projects designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós were drawn on large sheets of lightweight tracing paper. Spread out on long tables, the plans could be drafted from different positions, avoiding the default solution of lines drawn parallel to the rectangular frame of the paper. This freedom from geometric orientation catalysed their process of defining the different plan fragments independently.

Foreword

Twenty years after his death, it is encouraging to see that some of the best students at architecture schools take Enric Miralles’ drawings as a point of reference for their own projects. Whether they are proposing futuristic, tradition-based, objectual or social architecture, these young students seem to want to relate the geometries of their work and their designs to the drawings of this great architect.

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On the basis of this discovery, the author maintains that this representation system allowed Miralles to develop an architecture that could bring the fragmentation of

the partial elements together within a unitary concept of the project. Miralles worked with an architecture based on the differentiation of the pieces in the plan view and the ellipsis of their encounters in section, as well as a lack of compactness in construction and a penchant for unfinished work, which could also be recognised in its tectonic condition.

The thesis put forward by Fernández Contreras elucidates the representation method used by Miralles in the production of his architecture. His research will no doubt convince readers that the Miralles Projection clarifies some of the most important design mechanisms involved in his complex architecture, opening up new avenues for examination. The Miralles Projection is ­­in my opinion a foundational work, one in which each new researcher will contribute another aspect to the figure of this architect on the basis of a complementary explanation of his use of orthographic projections. The result will provide an interesting interpretation of an architect and a body of work that has already entered the history of architecture, with full honours.

Etcetera…

Although Luis M. Mansilla and I had previously coincided with Enric Miralles in Rafael Moneo’s office, our first formal meeting was in 1996 when we invited him to

In January 2000 we were honoured to interview him for an issue of El Croquis, published under the title “Notes on an Informal Conversation.” Unfortunately, that encounter must be read as an inconclusive dialogue, as we were only able to speak with him on one of the two days we had planned. The interview had to be cancelled due to the general malaise that suddenly engulfed the architect, the first symptoms of a terrible ailment that swept away a force of nature — Enric.

Twelve years later, Josep María Rovira invited us to present a book published by the Fundación Arquia in Barcelona, Enric Miralles 1972-2000, with texts by several authors including some by Rovira himself.

That afternoon, Luis M. Mansilla and I mentioned that when talking about Enric Miralles, we could not fail to stress his passion for reading, for thinking and rethinking his own

work, for the drift of time, for the countless ramifications that open up in every direction, for constant shifts, for the rejection of imitation, for highlighting intermediate stages, for the art of initiating ideas, for the path between inventing and representing things, for ruins and geology, for foundings and origins, for insinuation instead of imposition, for leaving doors open, for fragmentation and repetition, for doodles and line sketches, for the calligraphy that underlies plans, for words rather than phrases, for labyrinths and systems, for peripheral time, for the order in dance, for the exaltation of disorder, for the places between the roof and the floor, for still lifes, for the centre of continuity, for the liberation of movement, for the correspondence between drawing and text, for Chinese ideograms, for miracles, for the desire to reconcile the irreconcilable, for movements on the fringe, for constant transformations, for the silence trapped in geometry, for conversation as a form of knowledge, for time and space trapped in movement, for construction followed by destruction, for thinking in intervals, for infinite variations, for shifts as a technique, for our admired Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”, for life and architecture as unfinished work, for… etcetera.

On that fateful 22nd of February, Luis M. Mansilla died.

A few hours before leaving us, he had spoken about Enric Miralles in an enigmatic and, in the light of what happened, to some extent premonitory way, “In my last

30 years of work —that is, all of them— I can’t remember anything that has surprised me more than the work of Enric Miralles. What a delightful, joyful and perhaps even incredible coincidence... How is it possible that an architecture considered so personal, so impenetrable, could have impressed me so much? The only answer is by thinking that Enric’s work is the same as everyone else’s, or at least that his concerns are also our concerns.” Luis continued, “I suspect that space is actually not part of our everyday concerns, just time, which spills and escapes through our fingers when we try to catch it.”

Enric Miralles was interested more in time than in space: the time that escaped through his fingers. Through its exploration of the Miralles Projection, the beautiful book that the reader is now holding will allow us to once again enjoy the work of Miralles, and help us to understand his representation mechanisms and their connections to his thinking, as fragments of the complex heritage left to us by this magnificent architect, never possible to apprehend in its entirety.

Foreword

lecture at the Menéndez Pelayo International University in Santander. We talked about many things, and we struck up a conversation which continued in 1997, when he invited us to the Städelschule in Frankfurt to share some of the pedagogical interests that we had discussed the previous year. Throughout that course, Luis and I travelled to Frankfurt every week to lecture, and occasionally we had time to chat for a while with Enric over dinner, sharing a bottle of good French wine.

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Madrid, May 2019

Introduction

Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles

Curtis, for example, refers to Miralles/Pinós’ plans as “mental maps”, a particularly explicit expression to which he adds that they are, “hieroglyphs full of hidden ideas and meanings.”1 Luis Burillo, who lectured alongside Miralles at the ETSAB, recalls, “the relationship between project and drawing became almost an obsession for Miralles at the School.”2 And Josep Miàs, one of Miralles/ Tagliabue’s main assistants, defines Miralles’ attitude to architectural drawing, “as a system that can construct ideas, where everything can happen within the space of representation.”3

Nevertheless, the source of the clearest references to the issue is the voice of Miralles himself, found in numerous texts, lectures, and interviews. Miralles referred to drawing in a different way during each phase of his career, an evolving narrative that went hand in hand with the changes in the way he designed his architecture. This programme was perfectly enunciated in the introduction to his PhD thesis, defended in 1987: “In this work, we will see this thought as the echo of three actors: eye, penstroke, paper.”6

Orthographic Projections: From Viaplana-Piñón to Miralles/Tagliabue

His career has been well documented in numerous monographs and articles by professional critics and essayists in the architectural media. They all stress the unique importance of the relationship between drawing and thinking as a recurrent theme in the work of Enric Miralles, envisioning his drawings as the very place where his architectural thinking occurred. Critic William

Other critics have referred specifically to this issue, but it is the testimonies of Carme Pinós and Benedetta Tagliabue that have possibly shed most light on its transcendental importance in the work of both Miralles/ Pinós and Miralles/Tagliabue. Carme Pinós has defined her working method with Miralles in this way: “Once we discovered the essence of the project, it was Enric who mostly developed it; that was his great skill. [...] I think my best quality was being able to think of the project as a whole, from the outside, and Enric’s was his great drawing ability.”4 Benedetta Tagliabue has described Miralles’ drawings as the veritable driving force of their studio, which could organise their output: “The initial drawing usually came to us from Enric’s desk, but that didn’t mean that each one of us didn’t have to go through a similar process of redrawing parts (especially when we were enlarging the scale), always using the system of tracing one drawing onto another one.”5

N1. CURTIS, William. “Mental maps and social landscapes”.

El Croquis N. 49/50, 1991. p. 14.

ESPARZA, Verónica. DC Departament de Composició Arquitectònica UPC N. 17-18, 2009. p. 76.

N2. BURILLO, Luis. “Tres notas a los dibujos de Miralles/Pinós” El Croquis N. 30, 1987. p. 91.

N3. MIÁS, Josep. “Enric Miralles, para evitar equívocos”.

DPA Documents de Projectes d’arquitectura N. 17, 2001. p. 71.

N4. PINÓS, Carme. “Mirada retrospectiva”. Interview by

N5. TAGLIABUE, Benedetta.

“Instrumentarium: Drawing Principles”. See: Postcript. p. 174.

N6. MIRALLES, Enric. Cosas vistas a izquierda y derecha (sin gafas). PhD thesis, 1st version, 1987. COAC library: D-27317. p. 5.

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The impact upon architectural thinking of the use of representation systems in general, and orthographic projections in particular, remained barely explored in the theory of architecture until recent decades. Concerned about its shared path with the visual arts, architecture always paid more attention to the study of perspective and the way it dramatically conditions the understanding of space than to the consequences of the abstract use of orthographic projections —plan, section and elevation— for project thinking.

Introduction

From the outset, the work of Enric Miralles attracted the attention of architects and the specialist media alike.

While he was still studying at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) in the 1970s, he quickly stood out as a brilliant, unique assistant at the ViaplanaPiñón studio, widely recognised as one of the most experimental architecture practices in Spain at the time.

After completing his degree, he continued to work with Albert Viaplana and Helio Piñón and co-authored some of their major projects, including Barangé Square in Granollers. The 1980s marked the start and consolidation of his career as an independent architect. In 1983, in conjunction with Carme Pinós, his wife and professional partner, he set up the Miralles/Pinós firm, a practice that underwent a fast maturing process, culminating in their masterwork, the Igualada Cemetery. Finally, in the 1990s, after breaking up with Carme Pinós and following a period of individual practice, Miralles’ name became associated with Benedetta Tagliabue, his second wife and professional partner, with whom he founded the Miralles/ Tagliabue firm and designed, amongst other projects, the Scottish Parliament, one of their most famous works.

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Only in recent decades have authoritative critics such as Stan Allen and, more importantly, the seminal investigations of Robin Evans in The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries,7 looked at the extent to which N7. EVANS, Robin. The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. [MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995].

1. Enric Miralles drawing in the Miralles/Tagliabue studio on Passatge de la Pau. Barcelona, 1998

Beginning from a position inherited from his training at the Barcelona School of Architecture and his practice at the Viaplana-Piñón office, where he acquired a preference for precision in drafting and a graphic style based exclusively on lines of the same thickness, Miralles soon developed a method defined by a customised use of orthographic projections, connected to a fragmented conception of the architectural plan and space itself.

Breaking up the plan view into multiple fragments, Miralles conceived an architecture in which different fragments had distinct geometries, and developed their sections and spatial qualities with a degree of autonomy within the whole through separate plans and models.

Many of the projects he designed with Carme Pinós, individually or with Benedetta Tagliabue consisted of collections of heterogeneous pieces, heirs of the original plan fragments, which did not fit together according to classical principles of subordinate or hierarchical integration, but through tangential positions. This produced a lack of compactness in the overall scheme.

N8. ZAERA, Alejandro.

“A conversation with Enric Miralles”. El Croquis N. 72[II], 1995. p. 15.

Fragmentary, atmospheric, diffuse... the adjectives critics have lavished on this architecture illustrate its debt to his graphic method. Designing in this way, Miralles not only created a recognisable type of architecture but also a personal representation system that is inseparable from his built work. This system, identified in this book as “the Miralles Projection”, is considered to have redefined the use of orthographic projections in the last quarter of the 20th century.

detailed in independent plans and models, monitoring their relationship in the plan view but leaving gaps in the section like voids in models or blank spaces on the paper. This lays bare one of the most defining aspects of Miralles’ work: The tectonics of the aerial, the way he always thought of his architecture as a continuous, atmospheric space.

The relationship between thinking and representation is, therefore, a key issue for explaining this architecture.

To date, references in the available literature have not evolved beyond a collection of scattered opinions and have thus been unable to coalesce into a structured, coherent body of knowledge. Critiques have focused on the projects as finished results, but they have placed little emphasis on the study of the design technique used to conceive and implement them. This book explains both the origin and evolution of Miralles’ representation system, from his time as a student at the Barcelona School of Architecture, through the period with Carme Pinós, to the last projects he designed with Benedetta Tagliabue.

Using previously unpublished drawings by the architect, it shows how the evolution of Miralles’ representation fundamentally ran parallel to that of his architecture, illustrating their indissolubility and mutual interdependence.

The first chapter, The Miralles Projection: From Plan Fragments to Continuous Space, proposes a chronological study of this system’s evolution. It explains the use of orthographic projections, geometry and the idea of space in Miralles’ architecture, from his time as a student and collaborator at the Viaplana-Piñón studio, to his independent projects with Carme Pinós and Benedetta Tagliabue.

The second chapter, Utrecht Town Hall: A Work Process in the Miralles Projection, focuses on the design of this late Miralles/Tagliabue project, crucial for understanding the importance of representation (both in drawings and models) as the driving force of their studio. The EMBT archive in Barcelona contains roughly 500 original plans by Miralles for Utrecht. They illustrate his direct involvement in the production of hand drawings until the end of his career, enabling his entire oeuvre to be read seamlessly.

The third chapter, Blank Spaces on the Paper: Atmospheric Tectonics, discusses the consequences of this particular graphic method in his built work. From Miralles/Pinós to Miralles/Tagliabue, different plan fragments were

Introduction

designing from parallel (orthographic) projections has historically influenced architectural thinking. The work of Enric Miralles stands out in the context of this particular revision of the relationship between representation systems and architectural thinking. From the outset, Miralles strove to break away from the constraints of the projective box. “I always work from ground plans, never from elevations or three-dimensional configurations,”8 he stated in a famous interview published in 1995. This book delves into the essence of this sentence, taking it as a hypothesis to explore the relationship between the use of architectural representation and Miralles’ design technique.

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Next page. Enric Miralles and Marciá Codinachs. La Gran Casa.

Graduation Project, Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), 1978 Original plan size: 2,376 x 1,188 mm. 1:20

Early Teaching Experience: Sketches vs. Technical Drawings

Miralles’ peers remember his personal approach to teaching, with the powerful vision and style of an author right from the outset. Every year, Albert Viaplana asked the unit’s members to give a theoretical class on a topic of their own personal interest, and Miralles’ classes were eagerly awaited. One year, after returning from a summer trip to Edinburgh, instead of giving a descriptive presentation, he used the class to present his personal vision of the city,17 an approach which belies the influence of the 1960s Situationist precepts, to which Miralles returned years later when he began to lecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.18 By then he had built up an extraordinary, almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of architecture. These were years when attention began to broaden towards other, lesser-known architects, previously in the shadow of the great masters of the Modern Movement. Konstantin Melnikov, Rudolph Schindler and Sigurd Lewerentz gradually gained prominence thanks to monographic publications, and Miralles’ classes on them showed an unusual knowledge and intellectual depth for someone so young.19 N16. Ibid.

N19. GALLEGO, Op. cit.

N17. Ibid.

N20. BURILLO, Luis. “Tres notas a los dibujos de Miralles/ Pinós”. El Croquis N. 30, 1987. p. 91.

N18. Enric Miralles was the head of the Architecture Department at the Frankfurt Städelschule from 1990 to 2000.

N21. GALLEGO, Op. cit.

However, the most memorable aspect of Miralles in these early teaching years, the one for which he was most admired by colleagues and students, was undoubtedly his emphasis on drawing. He strove to transmit to the students his passion for what he considered the essential tool of architectural thinking. In his classes, there was a profound understanding that drawing is never a neutral tool for representation; that it has a crucial effect on the project thinking. Miralles explained the design process as an exercise that runs parallel to drawing, from the embryo of the idea in the first sketches, to its correct control and definition in the technical drawings. The explicitness of the following quotations from Luis Burillo and Moisés Gallego, fellow teachers and friends during those years, makes any further comment unnecessary:

“I usually didn’t teach with Enric, but we crossed paths on several occasions. He explained the geometric methods he used to improve his technical drawings— his personal methods. For example, he taught his students how to draw auxiliary side views from the floor plan, and by doing that, the students would discover that there were residual spaces that could be designed.

He did that in his own architecture. He searched for leftover spaces on the plan view, and brought them into the project through successive side views. In class, he paused to look at all the details related to precision in drawing. So of course, Enric’s students became highly skilled at drawing. His great disciple in that period was Eva Prats.”21 Moisés Gallego

“The relationship between project and drawing became almost an obsession for Miralles at the school. When he showed his students a project by Louis Kahn, for example, he would just show them the initial sketches or very basic drawings from the first solutions for the project. He explained, I think quite correctly, that the work of an architect of this calibre is unfathomable to a student. Photographs of something so unique, so alien and distant, built with strange materials and in such a strange way, and in short, so culturally different, only distracts the student from the principles that inspired its construction, and they can only capture an empty, superficial repertoire. On the other hand, the author’s most elementary sketches bring the architecture almost within reach; they may even resemble the student’s own drawings. There is very little distance. Good architecture is very easy to achieve: you almost need just a pencil and a piece of paper. Needless to say, his classes were tremendously successful.”20 Luis Burillo

PhD Thesis: “Annotate”, Graphic Thinking by the Grand Tour Travellers

N22. MIRALLES, Enric. “Cosas vistas a izquierda y derecha (sin gafas)”. PhD thesis. 1987.

- First version and appendix held in three volumes in the COAC Library. Reference: D-27316, D-27317, D-27318.

- Second version and appendix held in three volumes in the ETSAB Library. Reference: R-T-Miralles Reg. 24485, R-T-Miralles Reg. 24486, R-TMiralles Reg. 24487.

The Miralles Projection I Enric Miralles’ Education

In 1978, Albert Viaplana gathered a team of young lecturers to teach the 4th year design classes at the Barcelona School of Architecture. For some of them, this was their first opportunity to teach studio, in a collective experience that lasted for several years. Enric Miralles, Marciá Codinachs, and Moisés Gallego, all paradigms of precocity, had still not yet graduated when they began this academic work. A moving record of that young, enthusiastic group is a photograph of them all on the Aalto bar terrace in Barcelona, which became a wedding gift for Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós when they were married after their graduation.16

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Enric Miralles’ PhD thesis dissertation in 1987 probably marked the conclusion of the formative stage of his life.

By then, he already had several years of experience in a successful independent professional practice with Carme Pinós, although the thesis includes references, quotes and ideas that cover a broader period, stretching back to the start of his architectural studies. It proved to be the longest document that Miralles ever wrote, and an essential insight into his design method in subsequent years. It was first presented in November 1987 in two small volumes, the first one containing 31 pages of text and the second, 61 illustrations. The thesis, entitled Cosas Vistas a Izquierda y Derecha -Sin Gafas (“Things seen to the Right and the Left —without glasses”),22 looks at the relationship between annotation and thought in the notebooks of the Grand Tour travellers: William Adam and his sons Robert and James, John Flaxman, N23. MIRALLES, Enric. Cosas vistas a izquierda y derecha (sin gafas). PhD thesis, First version, 1987. COAC library: D-27317. p. 5.

-N24. Ibid., p. 4.

-N25. Ibid., p. 5.

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Friedrich Gilly and Karl F. Schinkel appear in succession in Miralles’ narrative. However, the thesis is more the construction of a personal reflection than an academic discourse as such. Miralles looked for a thought process that was intermingled with graphic expression. To develop his arguments, he introduced the concept of anotar (“annotate”), a very personal idea that Miralles regarded as an action in which the drawn line and the thought are generated simultaneously. “In this work, we will see this thought as the echo of three actors: eye, penstroke, paper,”23 he wrote in the introduction. This is not a continuous stroke or the execution of a preconceived drawing, but rather the description of spontaneous lines that record ideas as they appear. The very layout of the text conveys this idea of a record of spontaneity, with successive offsets between lines and the insertion of scratched erasures and symbols, a writing style that became a Miralles trademark and reflected his deep interest in authors like Stéphane Mallarmé and Georges Perec.

4. Albert Viaplana’s teaching unit on the Aalto bar terrace, Barcelona, 1978.

From left to right: Moisés Gallego, Joan Arias, Albert Viaplana, Luis Burillo, Josep María Gil, Alberto Noguerol, Eduard Bru, Arcadi Plá, J María Torres Nadal, Marciá Codinachs and Enric Miralles

IV. Enric Miralles’ Freehand Drawing Base Geometry

How did Enric Miralles develop these geometries in plan?

How was he able to draw plan views for such diverse briefs and scales, yet create such similar structures?

First of all, by hand. Miralles always drew by hand, from the beginning until the end, starting with small sketches and then moving on to technical drawings. It is important to note that even after the transition to CAD, he continued to define the detailed geometry of the projects in the form of extraordinarily beautiful technical plans as a prior step to computer-based drafting. The initial sketches were in intermediate formats, either A4 or A5, regardless of the size of the architecture. He adapted the scale of the representation to the format of the paper, hence the repetition of formal gestures in the plan views for projects that differed in scale, function, and location. From these initial lines, he drafted technical plans in larger formats, but maintained the underlying geometry of the original gestures.

Secondly, Miralles drew on tracing paper. He traced, and thus always worked “on something”. He moved to N1. See: N4. and N5. in the Introduction.

N2. The author was able to examine the drawing archives at the EMBT studio in Barcelona, thanks to the generous collaboration of B. Tagliabue.

N3. See chapters V-VII. N4. MIRALLES, Enric.

PRATS, Eva. “How to Lay Out a Croissant. Horizontal Equilibrium”. El Croquis N. 49/50, 1991. pp. 240-241.

this format while working with Viaplana-Piñón, and it accompanied him for the rest of his working life. In projects with pre-existing elements, he looked for traces of the location from an archaeological rather than a historicist perspective, using them as suggestions, incorporating them actively in the construction of the present. In projects for empty settings, bereft of information, Miralles imported organic figures or pictorial motifs in an incorporative working method which systematically avoided the blank sheet of paper.

Finally, Miralles drew in repetitions, a concept mentioned recurrently in his PhD thesis. This allowed him to blur the given conditions of the place in order to advance towards his own formal structures. Repetition made it easier for him to gradually distance himself from the specificities of each context, one drawing after another, until he took over the site of the operation. In this action, Miralles liked each iteration to be valuable in its own right; to be like the ‘annotations’ of his thesis. In his real design method, this meant working in series, illustrated here in the sequence of drawings and plans for Utrecht Town Hall.3 What is more relevant than each of these three separate techniques is the way in which Miralles combined them, as it reveals a complete work system. Enric Miralles drew by hand, on tracing paper and in series. This meant that properties of the original form were maintained from one sketch to another, but also that they became personalised in the course of the successive drawings, i.e. they were adapted to his freehand drawing style. In his first projects with Pinós, this presence of his hand in the architectural plan was less pronounced due to the geometric nature of the zigzags and triangles. However, from Igualada Cemetery onwards, particularly after writing the article “How to Lay Out A Croissant,”4 which defined the way to

gain precise control over complex organic figures, these manual kinetics became exaggerated, and paved the way to linear, ovoid and horseshoe geometries, many of them developed with Tagliabue.

The Miralles Projection I Enric Miralles’ Freehand Drawing

From Miralles/Pinós to Miralles/Tagliabue, the architecture of Enric Miralles evolved in the geometry of the plan view.

A succession of different geometric types —zigzags, triangles, linear, and ovoid figures— structured projects both large and small, public and private, architectural and territorial. These forms were Miralles’ types, central to the studio’s collective work. As the introductory quotations from Pinós and Tagliabue recall, the drawing, the precise definition of the geometry, was mostly done by Miralles himself.1 This was particularly true for the plan view drawing, as one can see in his original series of plans.2 Sections appear occasionally, in many cases linked to experiments with models.

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When viewed together, the projects reveal the keys to his graphic method. Placed side by side, as we have done in this book, they can be seen as gestures that are scaleless yet identical in form. This similarity cannot be detected by comparing the plan views on a uniform scale, but rather by treating them as gestures that have the same size; as drawings more than plans. In other words, the form of this architecture is intimately linked to the way it was drawn, which in turn shows that these projects were designed on the basis of Miralles’ original freehand lines and technical plans.

These similarities disappear when the plan views are contrasted with the sections, models or photographs of the actual buildings, i.e. when the third dimension is incorporated and the projects become real architecture.

As such, this is a procedure that permits continuity in the architect’s thinking through the plan view, but it does not lead to mimesis or self-imitation. The projects bear few resemblances to each other when seen in life-sized, three-dimensional realities. It is perfectly possible to imagine a self-confident Miralles drawing the same figure over and over again on the plan, yet never repeating the same building twice.

1

2

1-2. Enric Miralles drawing in the Miralles/Tagliabue studio on Passatge de la Pau. Barcelona, 1998 Next Page. Enric Miralles. Renovation of Utrecht Town Hall: Second floor December 1997. Original size reproduction. 1:200

Utrecht Town Hall

A Work Process in the Miralles Projection

A detailed commentary on the August plan should cover the following aspects:

The main entrance gained importance for future visitors entering from the square. What had initially been a canopy in the competition proposal was now a pavilion with a greater presence, housing two important staircases.

The one facing the front was an access to the public bicycle parking in the basement. More significant, however, is undoubtedly the one aligned with the double height gallery on the first floor, now the main entrance to the Municipal Council chamber. Relocating this official staircase outside the building’s structure underscored the institution’s democratic nature, and also made the public entrance stand out amongst the agglomeration of volumes around it, turning the first floor into the veritable piano nobile of the town hall.

Miralles/Tagliabue configured the new wing as a block with a long corridor and offices running off it to the left and right. On the first two floors, the houses on Ganzenmarkt contained offices on the right-hand side. On the top floors, only the roofs of these houses remain, forcing the block to be widened towards the square in a staggered manner in order to maintain this office layout on both sides. The corner staircase interconnects the various floors in this area. The successive geometric variations seek to give each of the building’s sections its own vertical specificity.

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Finally, the most notable change in the centre of the building was the corridor between the medieval houses. Its new curved geometry reduced the sense of longitudinality by preventing the circulation route from being visible in its entirety. The symmetry with its axis also disappeared, making the visitor’s initial route different from their way out. This was the state in which the plan for Utrecht Town Hall was presented in the August proposal, with the original geometric system based on party walls coexisting with another one composed of long lines defined by Miralles’ drawing style.

October 1997.

Autonomy and Relativity of the Parts within the Whole The evolution of the project in September 1997 was influenced by the preparation of the dossier to be presented to the Utrecht media in October.2 To understand this evolution, one must compare the state of the basement at the beginning and end of the month, since the changes at this stage of the project were due to its programmatic modifications and the connection with the upper square.

16 +10.50m - missing A. Main entrance B. Politicians’ entrance C. ICU entrance E. Bicycle entrance 1. Medieval hall 2. Wedding rooms 3. Party offices 4. Exhibition hall 5. ICU 7. Council chamber 8. Auxiliary council rooms 9. Civil servants’ offices 11. Technical rooms 12. Restaurant-café

Utrecht Town Hall I From History to Drawing

On an urban planning scale, the town hall volume was now a more homogeneous block. One can detect a slight difference between the informal, welcoming nature of its interior side, the area that became visible following the demolition of the registry; and the more formal, representative nature of the outer side, composed of the facades overlooking the canal and the neoclassical elevations. Perhaps the most critical point here is the contradiction between the continuity generated by the removal of the exhibition pavilion, which allowed the square to penetrate to the rear of the medieval houses, and the discontinuity imposed by the need to control pedestrian access to the building. A fence with a swing gate resolved this boundary at street level, with the curved lines of the square’s paving insinuating an urban fluidity which in fact did not exist.

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Renovation of Utrecht Town Hall. Miralles/Tagliabue. August 1997 14. Succession of plans 15. Graphic structure: Fragmentable Plan View + Partial Plans A. Main entrance pavilion / B. New wing 16. Enric Miralles: Partial plan of the new wing Ground, first, second, and third floors, superimposed - 1:200. - 20.50 x 28.50 cm

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By September, however, it was decided to house the Urban Information Centre (ICU) in this basement as well, closer to the public zones of the building, the exhibition hall and the main entrance. As a result, the lift had to descend to this floor and its orientation had to change, seeking a more direct relationship with the footprint of the registry building. This floor thus went from a linear distribution to a division into two, with the ICU on the left and the bicycle parking on the right.

This gave rise to a new situation on the square, as the two programmes needed separate entrances. Miralles’ first drawings in September focused on the relationship between these entrances and the street level. He redrew the plan view at a 1:400 scale with a soft pencil. He was not interested in a precise definition of any particular geometry, but rather in quick tests of several options for the inclusion of these two entrances and the way they would affect the square and the floors above. This is why in some sketches he drew basement, square and first floor simultaneously.

Undecided between creating a degree of symmetry and shifting the drawing off-centre towards the entrance, his final choice was a horseshoe geometry with two mutually confronting convex curves. The one on the left, the main entrance pavilion, was to include the staircase leading down to the ICU and the other one leading up to the first floor. The one on the right, the new wing, included a ramp that descended to the bicycle parking.

-N2. In October 1997, EMTB presented the Utrecht media with a dossier containing information about the town hall renovation project for publication and dissemination.

The final gesture summarises the solution designed for the access to the basement, and the boundary between the square and the rear of the medieval houses (Fig. 24).

Instead of the questionable metal fence that interrupted the continuity of the urban space in the August version, a perimeter moat now separated the two areas. This moat, dug below ground level, was also proposed as an auxiliary circulation zone for services, loading and unloading, and rubbish collection. It was a real boundary, nevertheless invisible from the square, a kind of ha-ha.

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This gesture was aligned with the two constructions inserted into the project between February and August 1997: the main entrance pavilion and the new wing.

While working on these drawings, separate tests were made for each part in the corresponding partial plans.

By September, there was also a greater definition of the shape, not only in the plans but also in the partial models. Another indication of the progress made on the project was the more detailed scale of the models and their fragmentation to match the same breakdown on the plan, permitting more detailed observations of their spatial aspects.

In the main entrance pavilion, the most important changes affected the two new staircases. The one leading down to the basement maintained a similar orientation, despite its new use as the ICU offices instead of bicycle parking.

The one leading up to the first floor was largely reshaped and now faced the square, instead of being aligned with the gallery leading to the council chamber. There were essentially two reasons for this decision: - The shifting of this gallery to the outer neoclassical facade, marked in grey in some of the drawings.

- The inclusion of the lift in the relationship between gallery and staircase.

Renovation of Utrecht Town Hall. Miralles/Tagliabue 17-18. August 1997 19-20. October 1997. P: Public bicycle parking I: ICU 21-24. Enric Miralles: Sketches of the connection between the square and the ICU with the public bicycle parking in the basement. - 1:400

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Utrecht Town Hall I From History to Drawing

The historical structure of the building is still recognisable in the August version of the plans for the basement.

The oldest underground section in the medieval houses overlooking the canal was left unused due to the technical difficulty of its renovation, while in the new area —the Ganzenmarkt houses and the registry block— technical facilities were to be installed along with public bicycle parking, a necessary infrastructure for central Utrecht.

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Huizen aan een piazza...

New stairs coming from the new entrance will provide direct access to it.

“It is difficult to explain the project to people who know the place better than me…

But I should remind you of some things to explain the future of the Town Hall…

As you know the building has gone into a kind of decay…

The routine is part of the building now.

It seems to have forgotten its treasures and origins…

1. rediscover the value of the interior rooms in the neoclassical building, primarily in the medieval hall, 2. go back to the idea of a municipal building as a conglomerate of different town houses, 3. keep the monumental quality on the bank of the canal and propitiate a much more open and friendly relationship between the municipal building and the new piazza at the back.

1. Rediscovery of the value of interior rooms. a. The monumental part of the building will be displayed on the ground floor…

The oldest interior walls are part of a new way of displaying the building…

Major walls and rooms are preserved…

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c. The second floor is going to be entirely dedicated to the main political representatives…

With that, the new building will have the main political activity concentrated in the neoclassical building…

2. The Town Hall as a conglomerate of different town houses.

When the city decided to accept the demolition of the brick building at the rear, it allowed the project to adopt the quality of a residential building.

The new wing...

The building runs parallel to Ganzenmarkt,

and has the scale of the houses on both sides of the street…

b. The new Council Hall will be the new room that has importance…

It is very similar to the Medieval Hall in dimensions…

Light will come from the roof and a new atmosphere will be created there…

33-36. Renovation of Utrecht Town Hall. Miralles/Tagliabue October 1997

A. Main entrance C. ICU entrance D. Ombudsman’s entrance E. Bicycle entrance 1. Medieval hall 2. Wedding rooms 3. Party offices 4. Exhibition hall 5. ICU 6. Ombudsman’s office 6. Ombudsman’s office 7. Council chamber 8. Auxiliary council rooms 9. Civil servants’ offices 10. Politicians’ offices 11. Technical rooms 12. Restaurant-café

I think this new order of the program is very important for the new building…

Most of the offices for civil servants are located in the new wing…

The correct dimensions of the rooms and a long perimeter allow natural light to enter all the working places…

The conservation of the building with the 1930s facade is the way to define Ganzenmarkt,

and to turn towards the new piazza…

The Restaurant-cafe then establishes a friendly connection between the Town Hall and the city...

In the construction of the new wing we reuse materials from the demolition…

in order to produce a new building with material quality...

A piazza for public use appears between the new wing and the neoclassical part.

In conclusion...

The neoclassical building becomes a kind of “monument”, … which is part of the street and piazzas.

When the door is open it is part of the public space of the city.”3 Enric Miralles. October 1997

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Utrecht Town Hall I From History to Drawing

Our proposal is underpinned by three ideas:

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Círculo de Lectores, Icaria, Mollet and Diagonal Mar: Architecture of the Liminal Space

The Círculo de Lectores head office in Madrid, begun in 1991, was the only interior design project built by Miralles in his entire career. He offset the compartmentalisation of an existing premises and the presence of intermediate columns by creating a landscape of objects that blurred the original fragmentation. As there was no need to establish a climatic separation, the objects do not touch each other. The space was built from the perimeter to the centre, leaving the interior empty. Miralles took inspiration from García Lorca’s drawings to explain how the path through this interior allows elements to relate to each other: “Going through things as they change... [...] Fingers that are fishes: that are leaves: that are tears: that are clouds: that are rain...”5 Once again, the architect’s poetic genius comes to the fore. Air becomes liquid in the first of the drawings that accompany these words. The columns at the entrance are no longer an obstacle, transforming the space into a fluid in which they merely guide the visitors’ movements.6 The next space is the exhibition room, structured by mobile panels that repeat this changing movement, while the meeting hall is at the end, where the space opens vertically through intermediate platforms to a ceiling of cloud-like skylights.

In Círculo de Lectores, the void becomes substantiated, its imprecise nature admitting different degrees of density.

From the entrance to the meeting room, from liquid to aerial, from fish to clouds, the design exhibits masterful control over the physicality of air in this architecture.

N5. MIRALLES, Enric. “Editorial Headquarters Building”. El Croquis N. 49/50, 1991. p.

242.

N6. “Así los pilares se pasean... mejor dicho, se deslizan como peces entre el público”.

Another project with this substantive presence of the liminal space is Parc dels Colors in Mollet del Vallés, begun in 1992. As discussed previously, the basis for the operation was a scene full of colours, resolved in the form of chromatic islands spilling across the usual earthen base found in this type of city park. However, Miralles did not use this earth as a neutral background.

Instead, he gave it density by turning the terrain into a series of delicate contour lines that are solidified in white. The topographic plan, instead of being an abstract document that reconstructs a piece of land using graphic conventions, is in this case a physical plan whose lines are alternately finishes, kerbs and long, flowing benches.

This device, consisting of firstly drawing continuous lines, and finally materialising them in differentiated sections, was a common Miralles design mechanism.

Miralles’ constructive solutions also highlight this atmospheric presence. On the floor plates, the parquetry is separated from the steel tubing underneath by flat bars inserted between them in order to let air flow through.

The careful attention to every detail and the broad catalogue of timber use in this case also show the architect’s determination to experiment with a material that he had previously only employed occasionally. This new interest in wood might be a corollary of a small piece of furniture, Silla Sentada (“Seated Chair”), that Miralles had designed with Pinós in 1988 for the Artespaña exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair.

Some of Miralles’ designs, particularly his landscaping and public space proposals, did not have to construct a climatic boundary between two environments. This was the case with the Pergolas on Avenida Icaria, the last project jointly drafted by Miralles/Pinós and finally built

by Miralles. Avenida Icaria seems to refer the observer back to the Viaplana-Piñón-era designs for hard squares, in the sense that the artificial objects —or sculptures— sit on a previously denaturalised, abstract surface, yet this initial impression could not be further from the project’s intentions. In the former case, each one is a unique, highly nuanced object with a personality of its own within the suite, whereas Icaria is a “detained procession,”7 in which all the components belong to the same formal and tectonic family, frozen in different positions and gestures.

Perhaps the quality that best illustrates the relationship between the pergolas is their shadows: the place where their arms touch each other in an uninterrupted way, a beautiful plane of constantly changing shadows, full of chiaroscuros, that reminds the viewer of the project’s processional component. In this displacement, only the abstract view of the supports in the plan view allows one to see individuals, while the physical reality of its steel and timber construction projects the sense of a perforated mass, a single arabesque of shadows.

MIRALLES, Enric. “Memoria Círculo de Lectores”. GMU. VII Premios de Urbanismo, Arquitectura y Obra Pública.

[GMU, Madrid, 1993]. p.147.

N7. MIRALLES, Enric. See: CORTÉS, Gustavo. Les Voyages d’Enric Miralles. [Polygone Onze, France-Spain, Original version in Spanish, 60’].

Blank Spaces on the Paper I Horizontal Tectonics

Although the following projects share themes such as the lack of a climatic boundary between inside and outside, the relations between their constituent parts are quite different. Enric Miralles’ interior and landscape design proposals, not obliged to interrupt the continuity between interior and exterior with provisions for thermal conditioning, hint at an enjoyment of the opportunity to explore the conditions of the liminal space in architecture.

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Although the islands are separated, the contour lines reconnect them. These lines do not run through the pavements and the patches of colour, but instead tie them together, generating variable equidistances that structure the park’s circulation routes. In Mollet, the ground has an unusual density. In a non-explicit way, it marks the routes and the places to stop and look at the scenery or sit down, and in doing so, it creates a dynamic balance.

In addition, these lines blur the principles of perspective perception by generating sinuous geometries. The liminal zone thus gains density, thanks to this topographic base onto which vegetation and patches of colour are laid, creating a multiplicity of landscape scales that coexist in the same place.

The final project in this series, Diagonal Mar Park in Barcelona, begun by Miralles and Tagliabue in 1997, also displays this kind of topographical density. Although it contains different types of elements and objects, such as ceramic pots and metal doodles, Diagonal Mar is a continuum, a tapestry with different textures and reliefs.

11 10. Círculo de Lectores head office. Enric Miralles. 1990-91 11. Park in Mollet del Vallès. Enric Miralles. 1992-2000

This pond gives the park a simultaneous visual continuity and physical discontinuity, since it is a space that cannot be crossed yet its reflections bring the urban context back into the centre of the landscape. It clearly shows how much the architects were concerned with the presence of the water, but not with the surrounding buildings. Metal fountains emerge in the form of wire sculptures, their sprinklers breaking up the reflections and hence the image of these buildings, and the breaks in the waterfalls create fragmentary compositions of the reflected vegetation in a more bucolic approach. In order to make all these nuances visible, the architects paid great attention not only to the central pond but also to the points from which it would be seen. Every area with a perspective view has been carefully designed, especially the edge or contact zone between land and water. Everything in Diagonal Mar park condenses into this boundary: the circulation paths with their bends, presenting the pond and the city

successively; and the vegetation, which grows in the same way as it would in a marsh, from its bed out to the land. All of these features generate a vegetated edge of variable width that is perceptible from within and without, along the itinerary routes and also from the hills that structure the park’s perimeter. The views from these hills also reveal the nature of the artifice, the successive filters that create this edge, where different layers of landscape can be read simultaneously: vegetation, water, vapour, scribbles, the city... It could be said that the material in this project is not only water, but also its nuances, reflections and vaporous character, and that the articulation of all these nuances is resolved in this friction zone between earth and pond.

In all the aforementioned examples, in-between spaces acquire density, becoming architectural materials used in the projects: the simultaneously aerial and liquid nature in Círculo, the intertwined shadows in Icaria, the topographic lines in Mollet and the nuances of the water in Diagonal Mar. These projects work with the substantive presence of liminal spaces to create different scales of density: material densities in the reconstruction and stratification of the physical qualities of a place; contextual densities in the sense that the entire treated area is involved in the design; and social densities in the creation of intermediate spaces that encourage new types of social interaction.

Blank Spaces on the Paper I Horizontal Tectonics

It is also a park in the more direct sense: hierarchies of paths, green areas... and water, which plays a vital role here. This is precisely what makes it stand out, as it is the only project by Miralles/Tagliabue in which water is perhaps the most important material, in this case a large central pond that articulates the composition, an anticipation of the Mediterranean Sea at the end of Avenida Diagonal.

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In these projects, one can appreciate an architectural idea that is not focused so much on indoors or outdoors as on the enjoyment of situations in which it is not forced to resolve this dialectic. The creative process shows how different parts are detailed through successive partial plans and models, controlling their relationship in the fragmentable plan view while obviating the liminal spaces in section. In this sense, there is no difference in the design technique employed to generate Círculo, Icaria, Mollet and Diagonal Mar, since in all cases, the objects and interventions used to construct architecture and landscape are not subject to the stress of having to insert a climate control membrane. The material execution followed the same sequence: from the plan view, the foundations, to the three-dimensional construction of the pieces, with air in between them. This aerial character prevailed in projects which did not have to deal with the vicissitudes of the climate, where the separation of interior and exterior was not necessary. Here, the shadows and the density of the air and its liquid or aerial presence all appear, nuances with which the architects adjectivise the relationship between different elements, experimenting with atmospheric tectonics and expressing the different densities of the liminal space.

12. Pergolas on Avenida Icaria. Miralles/Pinós. 1990 / E. Miralles. 1990-92

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Acknowledgements

- The Polytechnic University of Madrid, for supporting this research work between 2009 and 2012 under its Research Staff in Training Assistance programme.

- HEAD-Genève, for supporting this book with the translation of part of the original text into English.

- The Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB), for facilitating access to the original plans and the digitised copy of the graduation project of Enric Miralles and Marciá Codinachs.

- The EMBT Miralles/Tagliabue studio, especially Mireia Fornells, for guiding me through the access and consultation of the archives of Miralles’ original drawings on repeated occasions.

- The City Council of Utrecht, for providing access to all areas of the building.

- Het Utrechts Archief, for facilitating the consultation of the historical archives of the Utrecht Town Hall building.

--- José Manuel López-Peláez, supervisor of the PhD thesis that was the basis of this book, for his dedicated teaching, correction and suggestions over the years, and above all for his great friendship.

- Benedetta Tagliabue, former partner of Enric Miralles, for her continuous explanations in person or by telephone over these years, for the many occasions on which she has facilitated my direct access to the Miralles drawing archive and the EMBT studio library, and especially for her friendship and enthusiasm for this project.

- Pilar Miralles, Enric Miralles’ sister, for telling me about the most personal and domestic Miralles, about his study and work techniques during his teenage and university years.

- Dingting Chen, Juan Fernández and Colm mac Aoidh, for their final corrections, fundamental for clarifying the text.

- To the members of the examination jury who heard the thesis dissertation on 20 December 2013 at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM): Emilio Tuñón, Federico Soriano, Gennaro Postiglione, Moisés Gallego and Ricardo Lampreave. Their advice, both at the time and later on, was very useful for the transformation of the PhD thesis into this book.

- Enrique Granell and Moisés Gallego, former classmates and personal friends of Enric Miralles, for providing me with important information about the architect’s first years of training, teaching and professional practice.

- Eva Prats, Ricardo Flores and Elena Rocchi, important collaborators at different stages of Miralles’ career, whose explanations have been fundamental in understanding the organisation and work systems of the Miralles/Pinós and Miralles/Tagliabue studios.

- To my parents, from whom I learned to see geometry and architecture in the rural landscapes of Granada, Spain.

- Robert Brufau, Enric Miralles’ consultant on structural design and calculation, for explaining significant aspects of the vision and understanding of Miralles’ structures.

Javier Fernández Contreras, 2019

- Elías Torres and Josep Llinás, former colleagues of Enric Miralles, for sharing with me their critical vision of the project methods and the constructed results of this architecture.

- Josep Quetglas, architecture critic, for providing me with valuable insights, contacts and access to important documentation for this research.

- Gabriel Ruiz-Cabrero, architect, for his explanations of the studio he organised with Enric Miralles at Columbia University in 1989, important for understanding Miralles’ approach to teaching at that time.

- Esteban Miret, blacksmith for the Igualada Cemetery and other major Miralles projects, for telling me about the more artisanal Miralles, concerned with stretching the possibilities of the material to the maximum.

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful for the inestimable assistance provided by:

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