(These are the last words of Luis M. Mansilla, which he spoke during the presentation of a book on the architect Enric Miralles)
Barcelona February 21, 2012
..."In the last thirty years of my professional career -that means all of it- I do not remember seeing anything more striking than the work of Enric Miralles. What a delicious and happy coincidence...How is it possible to feel the most shaken by an architecture that has been considered to be the most personal and inscrutable?
The only answer is to think that Enric’s work is the same as everyone else’s. Or at least that his preoccupations are the same as ours.
As Josep Plá used to say, "every artist plagiarizes us". Plá was a guy able to say that a person "spoke with capital letters" or to define someone as "the type of person who seemed smaller in the close distance than from afar".
Nevertheless, and this is the interesting part, Enric has plagiarized us "before" we had the feeling in which we recognize ourselves.
I am starting to think that space is not a significant part of our preoccupations in life. Just time, that spills and slips between our fingers when we try to catch it."
