Talking about the library of the architect Benedetta Tagliabue is talking about the bookshelves created by Enric Miralles, who died twenty-three years ago today. Light, they are made with white tubes nailed to the walls of the house on Mercaders street that they bought in 1993 –then dilapidated– and were rehabilitated while they rediscovered it: frescoes on the walls, tiles, hydraulic floors. Immediately the books formed part of the structure as a border between the spaces. They rise up to the rafters, twenty feet high. They form passageways and recesses. Miralles dreamed of getting lost in a maze of books.
A narrow staircase leads to a small cubicle with very low ceilings. It is "the secret room", where the idea was to put large cushions for reading -piled volumes next to a feather duster waiting to be placed somewhere- and from which you can access the upper part of the main shelf, which houses titles from the Renaissance and Baroque, Michelangelo, Bernini. Below are Giacometti, Mondrian, Rothko, Matta-Clark, Mackintosh, magazines and press clippings that mention EMBT Architects, photography books, travel books, the Bernat Metge that they bought in Via Laietana, a collection of Catalan painters: Vayreda, Rusiñol "We really like Fortuny," says Tagliabue. Everything in an order that is difficult for him to respect and allows him to know where everything is by theme, "when you want to discover something, you walk among them and it appears".
They were not collectors, but he has some copies from the 16th century, from when he lived in Venice and frequented antique dealers. There is an area dedicated to British authors; they loved Scotland, they won the project to make Parliament in Edinburgh. They fell in love with Stevenson, especially her: "He seems like a genius to me, he has a way of being super-intelligent, like Proust, but looking at others." Proust changed his life, "because he makes you see things that were previously invisible, he opens up the possibility of more subtle sensibilities." There is also Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle, William Blake, “Henric's great love”. And various awards, such as the Ciutat de Barcelona.
At the entrance, next to the door, there is a custom-made shelf for the volumes of Espasa Calpe. Miralles was fascinated by encyclopedias as a source of knowledge. On his unstable table are Mao Tse-tung's Red Book that a friend gave Tagliabue, and another, also Chinese, with precious illustrations, a gift from his father. On it is a pumpkin drawn identical to the one she bought in 2002. The saleswoman told her, laughing, that this meant that she would come back often. And yes, the Shanghai World Expo was the first of several projects in the Asian country. He travels a lot and the plane is his favorite place to read, "maximum relaxation", because it disconnects. She always carries a book in her bag. Now, Mirabilis: five intuitions (more to come) that have revolutionized our idea of the universe, from her astrophysicist friend Ersilia Vaudo. She does not give many because they do not have to reach the recipient, "they only open up to you on some occasions." She worries that she has lost the habit of going to bookstores, which she considers wonderful places: “Books and digital devices have a similar way of providing information, but the sensations they transmit are very different; the book remains”.
The idea of happiness for Miralles was the awareness of the passage of time. The same one that remains in the philosophy collection that his son Domènec sometimes loots, and in his daughter Caterina's room, and in the titles of Quaderns Crema and Acantilado of his friend Vallcorba, in the antechamber that overlooks the interior garden, and in the essays, classical Greece, Russian literature, the I Ching, "which teaches you to use books as an oracle," says Tagliabue. More bookshelves in the bedroom: a Korean one bought in New York, anthropology and meditation titles, many by Tibetan masters. She does tai chi. She wants to reach a level of self-knowledge "useful to be happier and to make others happy, to lead a slightly more relaxed life and perhaps a slightly more relaxed death."
He has always intuited that he was born to learn how to die, which is the most important thing: “It depends on how you live, you come to death one way or another; and as I see that I am not very prepared, I insist "
