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