Santa & Cole, Ediciones de diseño S.A.

Alfonso Milá, one of the most outstanding figures of the Catalan architecture, died in Barcelona on 26 May last. From the outset Milá, always in collaboration with Federico Correa, marked a way of executing architecture and design, inspired by the teachings of the Modern Movement, architects such as Josep Maria Jujol, Francesc Ràfols and José Antonio Coderch – with whom he collaborated for several years –, and by the architecture of northern Italy. His work is an interpretation of the architectural legacy of the main Catalan masters and he contributed in an exceptional manner to the recent history of Catalan architecture.

The Correa-Milá style is distinguished by its peculiar form of intervention with the creation of a variety of summer houses in Cadaqués, the seaside town in the province of Gerona, with built-in furniture integrated into the architecture, and is a style which is still applicable. The author of some of the most emblematic buildings and premises of Barcelona, such as the Tortillería Flash-Flash, an icon of the 70s and a meeting place for the “Gauche Divine”, and the joint author of projects as widely recognized as the Olympic Ring of Barcelona, the restaurant in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid or the remodelling of the office of the mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, for Alfonso Milá another sphere of great importance was industrial design applied to furniture and lighting. All the elements that he designed together with Federico Correa are conceived for the interior design projects that they carried out over their intense career. Milá indicated that this was the field of design in which they had encountered the greatest difficulties: "the creation process is something so slow that you almost forget yourself, it becomes eternal. Architecture has a fixed date but not design. Even when both disciplines coincide, as occurred with everything we did for the Olympic Ring, the part which presents the most difficulties is the production of the objects". This led them to propose to the industrial designer Miguel Milá, Alfonso's brother, the establishment of a partnership with them to take care of the furniture and lighting object creation process. With him they produced, among others, the Diana lamp for the office of the mayor of Barcelona Pasqual Maragall, published by Santa & Cole.

Alfonso Milá represented, together with his friend and professional colleague, Federico Correa, and for more than 50 years, the friendly face and the human warmth of architecture and design. They devised their projects to accommodate memories, tastes, colours, images, feelings, emotions.

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