Enric and Agustí

It is possible that there are people who do not know who the architect Enric Miralles Moya was, but if I tell them that he was the author of projects such as the Gas Natural building, the Diagonal Mar Park or the Santa Caterina Market, in Barcelona, ​​​​surely most will recognize it or have even been in one of them.

Enric Miralles, despite dying very young at 45, was a prolific author who worked throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In his early days, he did so with the architect Carme Pinós, who was also his first wife, with whom he designed the Igualada cemetery, their most well-known and praised joint work.

At this time, despite his youth, he participated in some projects for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, such as the archery pavilions of the Vall d’Hebron or the central pergolas of Avinguda Icària, in the Olympic Village. The plasticity of his works is clearly recognizable and different from that of other architects of his time. There are even those who wanted to see Miralles as the new Gaudí of Catalan architecture.

Works such as the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, or the famous Sports Pavilion in Huesca belong to a tumultuous later period, already alone, marked by the collapse of the roof of the latter building, in the middle of the morning, when there were only a few months left to inaugurate the work. The collapse of the roof in Huesca was a before and after in Miralles’ career. The search for those responsible for that cursed event brought to light the figure of the architect who always designed and calculated the structures of all his buildings, Agustí Obiol Sánchez, a person unknown to the general public, but with enormous prestige within the profession.

Time eventually proved that the building fell due to poor execution: they had put the reinforcements that anchored the weight of the roof to the foundations upside down, and they ended up giving way.

In their twinned search for weightlessness, the misfortune of Huesca distanced Enric and Agustí forever

But the damage was already done. More than a year and a half of trial and the political and economic pressures that arose from it ended up sinking Agustí, Enric’s prestigious structuralist, into a deep depression, which took him a year to overcome. Life is hard, he wrote years later.

Agustí was a prodigious student, they say. He never dropped from the honor roll in his degree, and in his fifth and final year of studies he was already teaching undergraduate structural engineering, which immediately attracted the interest of professors and architecture professionals. The architect Robert Brufau Niubó, a little older than him, immediately saw in Obiol an essential support for the design and calculation of structures, and a partner for life.

The relationship between Enric Miralles and Agustí Obiol emerged in the first works as that of two people predestined to meet: one found in the other what he was missing and both believed that the other was the best. A mixture of admiration, respect and fascination, with the difference that Enric was the one who came out on stage, while Agustí held the stage behind the scenes. Robert Brufau, Agustí’s partner, explains that Enric used to call by phone to find out if Agustí was nervous, if he was walking quickly up and down the office and if he smoked a lot. If the answer was affirmative, he would stop by Agustí’s office to invent and solve the structure of the building. He needed it like this, tense and alert. A hypnotic and absorbing relationship that brought out the best in both of them.

The creative designs of Enric and Agustí were an exercise in balance where nothing rested where it was supposed to rest. A spatial dislocation and a redefinition of the classic elements –pillar, beam and covering– that, from small movements, achieved a magical effect of lightness. The pergola of the Town Hall square in Parets del Vallès was later sophisticated in the solution of the one on Avinguda Icària and added a degree of complexity in the covering of the Mercat de Santa Caterina.

In their twinned search for weightlessness, the misfortune of Huesca distanced Enric and Agustí forever. When Miralles died seven years later, Obiol would repeat: life is hard.

These days are commemorating one year since the death of Agustí Obiol. On October 23, the Barcelona School of Architecture held an event to remember him, attended by a representative number of his colleagues from the profession and university.

His partner Robert Brufau closed the event with an emotional talk entitled precisely as this article is titled: Enric and Agustí. He detailed their architectural designs and their personal relationship, where one was the alter ego of the other. And a resounding ovation closed his last words: Enric was Agustí.

Life is beautiful.