City of the dead

While art museums vie for the attention of tourists and locals by mounting high-profile, must-see exhibitions, there is another kind of cultural destination that attracts a smaller, and more discerning, audience. Anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion near Plaça d’Espanya will know that one usually shares the modernist, steel and glass building with only a handful of other architecture devotees on any given day. A similarly contemplative experience of communing with an icon of modern architecture has been discovered by the cognoscenti, and that is the ‘new’ cemetery at Igualada, completed in 1994.

The cemetery is a bit of a hike from Barcelona and best reached by car, unless you fancy a 30-minute walk through an industrial estate from the Igualada train station. The rewards, however, are great for those who make the 65-kilometre trek to this town of 40,000 inhabitants in the comarca of Anoia, just beyond the Penedès wine region.

Barcelona residents will be most familiar with the work of Enric Miralles because of his eye-catching Mercat de Santa Caterina with its multi-coloured sweeping roofline—a project completed by EMBT, the architectural firm he founded in 1993 alongside his second wife, Italian architect Benedetta Tagliabue. The couple led numerous projects, both at home and abroad, including the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh.

Enric Miralles died tragically young at the age of 45 in the summer of 2000 and didn’t live to see some of his most famous works completed. Tagliabue continues to run EMBT, which still carries both sets of their initials.

In collaboration with his first wife, Carme Pinós, Miralles created many innovative structures around Catalunya, including the jutting canopies of the Passeig Marítim de la Nova Icària in Vila Olímpica, and the Archery Pavilion for the 1992 Olympic Games. The Igualada Cemetery is their combined crowning achievement.

The couple separated during the Igualada project, but both parties can be credited with the success of the poetic cemetery, which is now a destination for serious architecture aficionados, but remains tranquil due to its remote location. Pinós has continued her career as a renowned architect, whose Barcelona firm is active internationally and whose local work includes the reconfigured Sitges waterfront and the stunning new Escola Massana behind La Boqueria, as well as the square that surrounds it.

The architects managed to reinvent the concept of the cemetery as an earthwork rather than a construction

Pinós and Miralles won the competition to create a new cemetery for the town of Igualada in 1984, when its old cemetery was filled to capacity. In a complex project that took almost 10 years to complete, the architects managed to reinvent the concept of the cemetery as an earthwork rather than a construction. Its lyrical success comes from their incorporating the existing topography of the rolling hillsides into the shapes of the structures that they placed upon and within the earth of the construction site. 

The experience of entering and passing through the cemetery is a singularly moving one. The architects have taken some of the crudest construction materials of their era—poured concrete, stone-filled gabion walls and rusting steel—to take the visitor on a figurative pathway that connects the living and the dead, the past and the present. Inspired by the shapes and materials of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, Miralles and Pinós sunk the tombs into a natural slope of earth, leading the visitor from an entryway, marked by cross-like shapes in rusting steel, down the path of a symbolic river of life. The route towards the burial area is lined by perforated sloping walls, some leaning in and some leaning outwards, in order to catch the sun and the play of shadows from a central grove of trees and to maximise their visual effect as they dance on the cold concrete surfaces.

Railway ties are imbedded in a hodgepodge pattern in the concrete floor that brings to mind floating logs in a river bed as it descends towards a round open plaza surrounded by tombs. The final resting places of the inhabitants are on two levels, which one discovers on a circuitous route from the sunken pathway to a grass-covered knoll above it. The circular route inevitably brings the visitor into a place of contemplation about the cycle of life and death.

One senses the solitude and serenity of the surrounding landscape in the choices made by Pinós and Miralles. The natural materials of the surrounding area are reflected in the earth tones and the surfaces of the wood, the stones and the aging concrete itself.

An unused autopsy laboratory and an unfinished chapel add to the haunting nature of the site. While the spaces are abandoned, they are physically complete and evocative of other spiritual structures, open for interpretation by each visitor who brings his or her experience along to the enigmatic site.

For me, the most beautiful feature of the architectural composition is the way in which it dissolves the line between culture and nature, in a similar way to Gaudí’s famous Park Güell colonnades: are those archways made of mud, or are they architecture? As one architectural writer said of the cemetery, “What sort of cultural landscape is it... that takes up sides with nature against the monumentalist enterprise of culture, especially when it was supposed to offer visitors an intimation of immortality?...[It is] one that redefines the terms, such that nature is no longer understood as the unproblematic opposite of culture, death no longer the mere antithesis of life.” (Joel D. Robinson, April 2005, ‘Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century’, a paper presented to UNESCO.)

The cemetery ages like the surrounding landscape and, as such, has a life-and-death cycle of its own. In a fitting full-circle moment, Enric Miralles was buried in the Igualada Cemetery after his death.

Biography of Enric Miralles (1955-2000)

Spanish designer and architect Enric Miralles was born in Barcelona in 1955. After training at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), he collaborated with Albert Viaplana and Helio Piñón and became a visiting Fulbright professor at Columbia University. In 1985, he began his independent career with his partner Carme Pinós, creating some of his most poetic works, including the Igualada Cemetery.

In 1993, Miralles founded EMBT with his second wife, Benedetta Tagliabue. Together they produced what many consider his lifetime achievement: the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh.

During his career, Miralles taught as a professor at internationally acclaimed schools, such as ETSAB, the Städleschule of Frankfurt am Main and Harvard University, and was welcomed as a member of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. Among other accolades, he received the 1995 National Architecture Prize, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the ‘Golden Lion’ at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Sadly, his prolific career was cut short at its peak, when he died of a brain tumour in July 2000.

Beyond his completed projects, the original architectural language that he developed throughout his career lives on in the work of his partners and disciples, many of whom have gone on to create their own award-winning firms. The prolific architect was known for designing freely formed buildings using heavy materials, derived from a profound sense of place that respects the tradition and history of the building’s location. The design process, from the overall concept to the minute details, was executed primarily through hand drawings and models, painstakingly crafted and re-crafted with every new design development.

To continue his legacy, the Enric Miralles Foundation was established in 2012 by Tagliabue, offering a space in Barcelona for students and professionals to experiment and get inspiration from the works of the late architect.

Other works by Miralles

Santa Caterina Market

Originally the site of a 13th-century convent, the neoclassical market was built in the mid-19th century after the convent burnt down, and was renovated by EMBT between 1997 and 2005. The project breathed new life into a then-forgotten corner of the Ciutat Vella and was part of a multi-use redevelopment. The market’s theatrical roof is the single most important element: an undulating carpet of colour. Its glazed ceramic surface is a modern take on Gaudí’s trademark trencadís tiling and takes its palette from the myriad hues of the fruit and vegetable market stalls.

Gas Natural Headquarters

Close to the seafront, this glass-clad complex offers a stark contrast between the cosmopolitan heart of Barcelona and the industrial history of Barceloneta. Designed by Miralles just before his death and completed in 2005, the complex is striking for its variety of volumes, with the main 20-storey tower connected to a lower block with a five-storey skybridge and a horizontal cantilever that looms out over the surrounding Plaça del Gas.

Lungomare Bench

A piece of street furniture designed to look like the ocean waves and sand dunes cast in concrete, the Lungomare bench was first discussed by Miralles, Tagliabue and design firm Escofet in 1997. The bench can be found along the seafront in Barcelona, most notably in the Diagonal Mar Park, where it provides a harmonious transition between the sea and the beach.

Diagonal Mar Park

Diagonal Mar Park, designed by Miralles in 1995, was built to show Barcelona’s desire to be at the forefront of innovative and sustainable architecture, and marked the start of the urban transformation of the northern shore of the city. Starting at the sea, the 14-hectare space spreads inland along a tree-like maze of branching paths that lead through seven distinct recreational zones, all linked by water.

Palafolls Public Library

The library in Palafolls, a small town 65 kilometres north of Barcelona, was built to imitate a huge 700 m2 classroom filled with natural light. The asymmetry of the dividing walls create hidden gardens and intimate spaces for reading, which merge the internal environment with its natural surroundings. Designed by Miralles in 1997, it was completed in 2007 by EMBT.