MADRID – Oriol Bohigas, the Spanish architect and urban planner who helped turn Barcelona, his city, into one of the Mediterranean’s premier tourist destinations, died on November 30 at his home there. He was 95 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son Josep Buhigas, who added that his father had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years.
Mr. Bohigas, who works for the Barcelona city government, was one of the masterminds of the city’s reform in preparation for the 1992 Olympics, in particular the transformation of the waterfront which has become an abandoned industrial district.
In partnership with two other architects, Mr. Bohigas designed a new yachting port, which hosted the Olympic sailing competitions, as well as a public park and a village to house the athletes, known as Vila Olimpica. The city rehabilitated nearly three miles of waterfront into beaches, and the area became a popular residential neighborhood once the games were over.
Berry Aragon, the regional leader of Catalonia, praised Mr Bohigas on Twitter, calling him “the great transformer of Barcelona”.
The impact of the Summer Olympics on Barcelona was a model for London and other cities that subsequently hosted the event, while Mr. Bohigas and his partners used their success as a springboard to add buildings and help redesign other parts of Barcelona, including its run-down Raval neighborhood. Some of their notable projects repaired unused infrastructure, such as the army barracks that became the new campus of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, which opened in 2000.
Mr. Bohigas “was fundamental not only to Barcelona’s transformation but to our understanding of cities,” Martha Thorne, dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design in Madrid, said via email. “His ideas of urban acupuncture – small actions over time that can be understood as part of a whole, including new squares and small green spaces – were adopted by residents and had a positive impact on neighborhoods.”
Although Mr. Bohigas kept his focus on Barcelona, he also contributed to the other major international event in Spain in 1992: Expo ’92 in Seville, where he and his partners built one of the pavilions. The pavilion was left deserted for decades afterward, but reopened this year as the new home for the regional archives.
He and his partners also took on projects in Germany, France and Italy, as well as Latin America. These included a collection of apartments in Berlin’s Kochstrasse, a hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and urban planning for new neighborhoods in the cities of Aix-en-Provence in France and Salerno in Italy.
Oriol Bohigas Guardiola was born on December 20, 1925 in Barcelona. His father, Perry Bohegas, worked in the city of Barcelona and briefly ran the city’s theater school. His mother, Maria Guardiola, was a homemaker.
Mr. Bohigas enrolled at the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1943, just as General Francisco Franco was consolidating his dictatorship after winning the Spanish Civil War. Mr. Bohigas was eventually appointed director of the School of Architecture in 1977, shortly after Franco’s death. He considered it part of his life’s mission to liberate architecture and urban planning from the conservative rigidity of Franco’s dictatorship, and to return Barcelona to the kind of innovative thinking associated with the major cultural movements that reshaped the city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
He recalls in a 2010 interview, “I remember spending my entire architecture studies, which I finished in 1951, just listening to people talk about classical architecture and defending ultra-conservatives, in every aspect. We learned nothing about contemporary architecture. Yeah, I guess It was my generation who made efforts to restore the modernity that was lost in the first phase of Franco.”
In 1951, Mr. Bohigas joined forces with two other architects, Josep Martorell and David Mackay, to found a company that took its name from their initials: MBM. The company gained fame in 1974 with an award-winning project to build a school, called Thau, without classrooms and with as few walls as possible.
His last significant project was the construction of the Barcelona Design Museum, which opened in 2014. But like MBM’s previous project to expand the Barcelona flagship store of Spanish retailer El Corte Ingles, the Design Museum did not satisfy everyone. An article in the New York Times described the building as a “zinc-clad structure with front and rear stapling” and noted that it was “not quite celebrated for its exterior,” adding, “Some used to call it a ‘stapler.'”
Mr. Bohigas was proud that he had never joined a political party, but adopted leftist ideas and held various positions in Barcelona city government, in urban planning in the 1980s, and then as the official in charge of Barcelona’s Ministry of Culture in the early 1990s. When the city hosted the Olympic Games. He also supported the Catalan separatist movement that began to gain momentum a decade ago.
His involvement in Barcelona’s cultural life extended far beyond the city hall. He was the founder of the publishing house Edicions 62. In the 1980s, he was the president of the Joan Miró Foundation, which was set up by the painter after him and has a museum in Barcelona that displays his work. In 2011, Mr. Bohigas stepped down as president of Ateneo Barcelonés, one of the city’s most influential cultural associations, after eight years.
In addition to his son Josep, Mr. Bohigas is survived by his wife Isabel Arnau, from whom he was separated; four other children from their marriage, Gloria, Maria, Eulalia and Bear; Nine grandchildren, one great-granddaughter, and his companion, Beth Gali.
In recent years, Mr. Bohigas has been critical of many aspects of Barcelona’s development, including the Broadway-style expansion of the city street, a project known as Diagonal Mar. He also lamented the rise in real estate speculation in Barcelona and defended the right of squatters. To live in abandoned buildings.
He said in 2010, as Spain was mired in a banking crisis caused by bad mortgages, “Obviously, a society with many empty homes and many people without a home is a sick society with a problem in terms of sharing its public assets.” and private.”