Ten years ago, in February 2012, a heart attack ended at dawn in a hotel in Barcelona with Luis Moreno Mansilla, 52, and split the Mansilla Tuñón office in half, perhaps the most relevant then in the young Spanish architectural scene. Last week, Emilio Tuñón received the 2022 National Architecture Award from the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (Mitma), ending a difficult decade, which has been one of mourning for him, of losing some of the great projects from from the time of the fat cows and the reconversion of his office.
"I remember Luis a lot," says Tuñón from Madrid, as soon as the telephone conversation begins. I remember every day. And naturally, I would have liked to be able to share this award with him.”
How has Tuñón changed in the absence of Mansilla? How has he maintained the coherence recognized by the National Award jury in his arguments? “Coherence –answers Tuñón– consists of being who you are and doing what you think you should do, caring less about the trends of the moment. Luis and I chose a line of work, which has to do with what we learned together with Rafael Moneo: to maintain a commitment in the city between memory and contemporaneity”.
These last ten years have brought a professional change for Tuñón. He has gone from signing large-scale works such as the Musac in Castellón, the Auditorium in León or the Center for Contemporary Art in Castilla y León, to projecting others on a smaller scale. “I have spent these years working a lot, in other types of works. The boom years led us to big contests. Then there was a break, and some of those won projects fell by the wayside. I dont complain. It has almost been professional luck to reorient towards that smaller, tighter, more artisanal scale, which represents works such as those erected in Cáceres for the gallery owner Helga Alvear”.
Among the pieces that fell by the wayside, there were very important ones, such as the International Convention Center of the City of Madrid, which had to be on a first-name basis with the four towers of Chamartín. Or the City of the Environment in Soria or the Sanfermines Center in Pamplona, all of them victims of a change of era in which iconic buildings and sometimes very high budgets ceased to be appreciated. "Perhaps the loss that I regretted the most, among all these, was that of Pamplona, because that project responded to a type of location that we have faced other times, halfway between a river and a historical context."
But not all were losses in these years. The Museum of the Royal Collections, at the foot of the Almudena, in Madrid, finally has an inauguration date in June 2023, twenty-three years after Mansilla Tuñón began working on this monumental project in 1999, which completes the base of the Palace Real. "The work spent many years in structure, but now the exhibition assembly is being finalized, which will surely be completed by April, so it can be opened before the summer."
Despite the culmination of a long process that this opening will entail, Tuñón now has his eye on other types of constructions. “Today the studio is somewhat smaller, and I have increased my dedication to teaching, in which I have been teaching for 35 years. We have really enjoyed doing smaller scale works in Cáceres, very attentive to detail, working in the city not with grand gestures, but with a very respectful and calm attitude”.
“Right now – he continues – what I most want is social housing, a typology that I have explored little, and which is not always given the importance it has. It is a very fertile land. Right now great things are being done in this field. In the Balearic Islands, let's say. Or in Catalonia, with, for example, the work of Peris/Toral in Cornellà, which is magnificent. I think the future is going that way, not because of a digital reinvention of housing, but because of an intelligent reuse of conventional resources”.
Emilio Tuñón is now still working on construction sites in Extremadura. He also does it in Maastricht, where he rehabilitates an old factory and converts it into housing. That's what he wants. Because, in his opinion, “architecture that is indisputably necessary can have more register. And, also, because the party is over, just as the show is over. I am referring to the party that was also lived in Spain in times when money was abundant and that led to a type of architecture that was sometimes excessive. I don't regret that change of era. Now we have the opportunity to recover the domestic scale and a public work that benefits the maximum number of people”.
