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Goodbye to Miguel Milá

Designing is seeing life through a magnifying glass. Goodbye to Miguel Milá.

Miguel Milá (Barcelona, ​​1931), a pioneer of design in our country, and author of emblematic pieces such as the TMC and TMM lamps or the Cesta lamp, died last August at the age of 93, in Bilbao. With more than seven decades dedicated to the profession, Milá was an icon of Spanish design and its modernity.

He has been posthumously honoured with the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona, Milá was the first winner of the National Design Award (1987) and Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2016), or Compasso d’Oro Internazionale in 2008, Milá was born into a family of the upper bourgeoisie of Barcelona related to artistic circles: his brother Leopoldo was also a well-known representative of industrial design in our country and his uncle Pedro Milá Camps was the one who commissioned Antoni Gaudí to build the famous Casa Milá, known as La Pedrera.

Miguel Milà next to one of his lamps. Image courtesy of Santa & Cole.

His works are characterized by showing rigorous functionality, always guided by the same idea «design that is not useful, tires and, in addition, ends up being ugly». His work made a virtue of its initial context, marked by scarcity, going through different stages that went from his work as an interior designer to his achievements as an editor and his participation in different companies.

Miguel Milá, set of pieces in exhibition at the Fernán Gómez Theater. Cultural Center of the Villa.

In 1960, Milá was one of the founders of the industrial design section of the Foment de les Arts Decoratives (Adi-Fad) together with names such as André Ricard, Antonio de Moragas, Oriol Bohigas or Rafael Marquina. His career has been associated since the 1980s with the firm Santa & Cole, which still keeps the lamps in its catalogue.

The Museu del Disseny de Barcelona houses the Miguel Milá Collection, which contains more than 2,000 documents (plans, photographic material, models and sketches) for many of the interior design and product design projects carried out by Milá throughout his life.

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