Emili Donato: Plans Are Made

Emili Donato has always said that what counts is the work itself; whether it be buildings, paintings, photographs, or drawings, he is less interested in who made it, or with what technique, or if it was done in a particular style—and even less so if it belongs to one trend or another.

With Emili Donato: Plans Are Made, for the first time, all of Donato’s creative activity spanning his long career is shown together in an exhaustive and complete way. The exhibition presents graphic documents, models, and all kinds of autographic and original material from his studio, his home, or from various archives. Most of the photographs used to document his works are also by the architect himself.

This material clearly demonstrates his capacity for work, not so much from a quantitative point of view—where he also excels—but more in terms of his patient observation, as revealed by his paintings, drawings, and photographs. It also shows his immense ability to surprise and, at the same time, reject found solutions and start again without hesitation. His body of work encompasses his role as an architect determined to build and not to theorize, as a planner of the urban and peri-urban environment, and as a scholar and disseminator of everything that has led him to evolve in a coherent way, without betraying himself.

The exhibition spaces are intended to be dense, full of documentation and information about the process, and sometimes the results of his work. It is like entering Donato’s world, where all ideas and thoughts are possible.

In the summer of 1959, Emili Donato landed in Ibiza at the request of his father, who had just finished his classes as a teacher at the capital’s high school. His father said, “Boy, here on this lost island in the Mediterranean, apartments and houses are starting to get built, why don’t you come? [...] there are few architects, and it seems that there is work.” Donato, still an architecture student, rented a small place at street level and hung a sign: “Es fan plànos” (“Plans are made”).

Since then, Donato has not stopped designing projects in the city or in the mountains. He has dreamed of greater Barcelona and its future connected to the Vallès; he has drawn profiles of the Poblenou waterfront and the Collserola mountain range; he has built new hof to replace the cheap houses on the outskirts; he has recovered vernacular architecture with his vaulted houses; he has brought together professionals from various disciplines to produce new hospitals of a future country without autarky; and he has even returned to its origins with its primitive architecture, made with clay, with the uninhibited shapes of its constructions referencing both the classical world and that of the clear and sharp architectures of Mesoamerica or the Far East.

Today, Donato still dreams of shaping industrial cities of high-rises on the edges of roads, still redraws and paints new paintings that are never finished, and continues to travel to Venice, where he photographs the reflections of its canals and atmospheres again and again. Emili continues to dream... Must this be his last “thought,” or is he still hiding something else from us?

Monumentalizing the Periphery and Modernizing Public Facilities

During the first years of democracy in Spain, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a program of renovation and reconstruction of public institutions and the facilities that represent them was launched. In this context of excitement and hope in new institutions, Emili Donato received the trust of architects Josep Benedito, Joan Ràfols, and Francesc Pernas to build, among other things, the first schools, social housing, and healthcare centers; to develop, in short, the “new democratic facilities.”

Public facilities best show Donato’s ability to configure new building models for the new society that emerged after the ostracism of the dictatorship was lifted. These new facilities—schools, kindergartens, healthcare centers, hospitals, nursing homes, town halls, and cemeteries—would always be public and promoted by the new democratic administrations.

“Dignify the center and monumentalize the periphery” was the motto that marked an era at the hands of architect and urban planner Oriol Bohigas in Barcelona and, by extension, in the city’s metropolitan area and the rest of the Catalan territory.

Donato has been a master when it comes to amplifying project programs, as his friend Carles Martí reminded him. However, this way of inserting oneself into the place or the landscape has not been easy. The marginal areas of the periphery that had sometimes been described as green areas or public facilities, where the “non-city” presented itself without any sign of identity or anything that integrated it into the urban community, were the remaining places to rebuild. The new facilities had to express a presence that dignified the institutions they represented while constituting a new, desired point of civic coexistence for the new society.

The nursery and primary school in La Teixonera neighborhood in Horta (1978–1983), the Residence for the elderly in the same neighborhood (1988–1993), and the primary healthcare center (CAP) in the Sant Ildefons neighborhood in Cornellà (1987–1992) each acquired a monumental character that defined their presence in the city and makes them recognizable landmarks in the landscape near and far. They became specialized spaces that, in most cases, also functioned as new neighborhood community centers. The school playground and the entry area to the nursing home emerged as neighborhood squares where people feel a sense of belonging.

Drawings and models are the tools that Donato continuously uses to check the relevance of a proposed solution. His sketches may seem erratic, as we can see in the IES de l'Arboç, but in the end, they always look for that central place illuminated from above in a spectacular, almost cathedral-like way. Donato insists on the use of clay, with its different formats and natural colors, as the most economical, durable, and well-aged material to solve most of his work. Clay wasn’t exclusively used, however, and later in his career the surface of his projects becomes more pictorial, more abstract.

From Single-Family Homes to Collective Housing

First in his projects in Ibiza and then in Calafat, Donato rediscovered his taste for architecture rooted in the land, with raw workmanship and without artifice, close to those constructions promoted by Bernard Rudofsky or the Catalan Artists and Technicians Group for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture (GATCPAC). Those in Calafat would be prototypes of second homes for the non-wealthy classes who were beginning to enjoy their holidays and weekends. All were executed with austere and raw materials. The cable-stayed concrete vaults resonate with popular architecture. The floors are organized without many obstacles, but it is probably the outdoor spaces, both in the roofs and the surrounding platforms, that most characterizes these constructions.

At Casa Martín (1972–1974) and Casa Ribera (1977–1980), the guiding principles have evolved. In the first, steeply sloping roofs “hide” a scattered floor plan, with almost autonomous rooms that clearly contrast with the landscape outside. In the house built in Vallromanes, the solution is radically different. A wall as tensioned surface has multiple compositional variations. The house, with its linked rooms of inhabited spaces and open spaces, stands out due to its noticeable plastic workmanship. A side of Donato who works with the mass of the material, with its relief, and with its light as virtues of design and construction strongly emerges.

In this same period, his first experiences in the field of collective housing define what becomes his persistent attitude when it comes to inventing neighborhood communities and projects, even when no one has yet trusted him. The first residential communities he worked on were in the upper part of the city of Barcelona, where the tram hardly reached. Always transgressive, he modified the position of a room inside or altered a civic and formal façade (such as those found in the streets of the Eixample) reversing it and converting it into a practical and popular façade similar to those of the interior of the block. In the Sarrià neighborhood, where Donato has carried out more than one development, his effort aimed to incorporate the project easily, but with character, into the assigned plot. Once again, the color and texture of the ceramic wall became the protagonist.

A leap in scale takes place in the Catalan city of Montblanc in 1975, where, also in a daring way, he aimed to reproduce a section of a new neighborhood on the outskirts of the municipality. In comparison to the linear block, the semi-open block on pilotis successfully integrates with the topography of the streets and the medieval city.

In Igualada, his low-density housing plan (1981–1984) responds to the abusive proliferation of the rowhouse as a “universal” solution to the compact housing block of the early years of the democracy. The configuration of Donato’s proposal offers a protected but, at the same time, symbolically urban public space. Thus, the private gardens will be on the outside and access will be on the inside.

In the Canaletes neighborhood of Cerdanyola, the solution once again focuses on “reinforcing the urban character as a backdrop for a long road axis that runs along the project as its backbone,” as Emili Donato writes in the project description.

New Territories in Evolution and the Expansion of the City

Emili Donato has always been interested in imagining the city and the expanding territory that surrounds it in a way that configures it as a global phenomenon, more than a type of planning that excessively regulates and defines urban planning for architects. In his professional practice, however, he has also proposed city segments as a response to regenerate obsolete fabrics or growing sectors.

Over the years, much of his work has focused on two areas in and around Barcelona. The first is the city’s expansion toward Vallès, where he works on the city territory, well connected by roads and tunnels or the extension of the metropolitan railway. Later, under the euphoria of unlimited growth, that conurbation would decongest the city to the north with the construction of a new tertiary directional center and urban nodes defined by Donato as a possible solution to the macrocephaly of the city of Barcelona. The project for the Carretera de les Aigües (1981–1982), on the southern slope of the Collserola mountain range, still captivates today thanks to the architect’s suggestive ability to imagine an elevated promenade equipped with public buildings.

The second area is the Poblenou waterfront. In the competition held in 1971 by the Architects’ Association of Catalonia and the neighborhood associations, Donato entered his counterplan of the Ribera. His proposal, made in collaboration with Uwe Geest, Joan Clavera, J. Dols, and Jordi Borja, included building a marine platform dedicated to leisure and urban facilities, revitalizing the Besòs park as proposed by Cerdà, and proposed new superblocks, as had already been foreseen in the Macià Plan. The latest intervention by Donato and his team on the waterfront—now in a more daring way—offers a solution for the waterfront with the inertia of post-Olympic works. Large linear blocks zigzag against tall buildings and large expanses of greenery that lie beyond the scope of the competition, as if to give a new urban identity to the intervention.

The plan to replace the neighborhood of “cheap houses” between Santa Coloma de Gramenet and Barcelona in the Baró de Viver neighborhood (1983–1987) is probably the urban project that most makes its architecture a reality. Fundamentally, it proposed to recover the residential fabric to give rise to a new and more egalitarian city. The socialist hof of Red Vienna, or the Casa Bloc, not far from there, could have been good precedents for Donato.

Donato has also worked outside the region, with proposals for the ports of Yokohama, Marseille (with the La Joliette district), Aarhus, and Mallorca. A non-binding consultation in Bilbao in 1993, on the island of Zorrotzaurre, once again reveals an architect full of optimism to conceive a linear city by linking the old town of the city with the mouth of the estuary and the port. He has also worked in France, with projects for Nîmes and the Nouvelles cités of the Paris conurbation with the Melun-Sénart project.

His design of six agrarian villages in Algeria (1976–1977) also demonstrates Donato’s commitment to a new postcolonial society, as well as his eagerness to build his drawings. Fortunately, we have the sketches and plans from that trip, and the certainty that the trace of the projected works is still present.

Emili Donato: A Biography

Emili Donato was born in Figueres, Catalonia, in 1934 to a family from Reus. His father, Emili Donato Prunera, a philosophy professor and writer, and his mother, Magda Folch, a painter, moved to Barcelona in 1940. After graduating from the Lycée Français in Barcelona in 1952, he began his painting studies at the School of Fine Arts, but dropped out in 1954, after exhibiting oil paintings and drawings at the Cercle Maillol. In 1957, he entered the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) and obtained his degree in 1961, graduating first in his class. During this time, he organized and participated in the Torres Clavé Seminars, which brought together university students from Barcelona and Madrid around three topics that were emergent at the time: social housing, urban planning, and agrarian reform. In those years, he read with pleasure texts from the Poseidón publishing house that he shared with his fellow students.

Between 1959 and 1961, Donato traveled to Geneva, Ulm, and Paris for internships and study trips. He lived in Paris for six months on a scholarship from the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (Scientific and Technical Center for Building), where he took a course on industrialized construction. He opened his own studio in Ibiza in 1961, and two years later moved it to Barcelona, where he has lived and worked ever since. In those early years, alternating between the island and the city, he worked with architects Raimon Torres, Antonio Miró, and Xavier Boix. From 1965 to 1969, he was a studio professor at the ETSAB, from which he was expelled for political reasons. In 1964, along with other specialists, he cofounded the Centre for Hospital Technical Studies (CETH), through which he would develop an extensive series of studies and projects in the field of hospital architecture until 1971. These were years of political engagement and participation in various congresses and urban planning competitions, but few and limited architectural projects. However, some of these projects were soon published, such as the houses in the Calafat residential development in L'Ametlla de Mar, Tarragona.

Between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s, he often worked with Uwe Geest, an architect and painter born in Hamburg. From 1967 to 1972, he actively collaborated with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC) as head of the Culture Commission (1967–1969), member of the Governing Board (1969–1971), and director of the magazine Quaderns (1969–1972). From this platform, he vindicated and studied the neighborhoods of the periphery mistreated by the Franco regime, and, at the same time, promoted the activities and work of the Catalan Artists and Technicians Group for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture (GATCPAC), as well as the work of Josep Lluís Sert. Donato obtained his doctorate in 1972. Between 1973 and 1975, he developed, designed, and built the cooperative neighborhood of Les Arcades, in collaboration with the city council of the Catalan city of Montblanc, which would become his first work on an urban scale.

In 1976, Donato led a professional team—along with Carles Martí, Jaume Rosell, and Alfons Soldevila among others—that carried out projects awarded by competition for six agrarian villages in Algeria. Between 1976 and 1980, after fourteen years without a passport, he undertook a series of trips to southern and central Europe, which allowed him to reconnect with classical and contemporary architecture. At that time, he abandoned politics for good and rediscovered painting and drawing, which he had put aside since 1961. He also became friends with the 2C group, with ties to La Tendenza, and attended the first International Seminar on Contemporary Architecture (SIAC) in 1976. He maintained a close friendship with José Antonio Coderch from 1978 until his death in 1984. In 1988, Donato developed and curated the tributes to Coderch in Catalonia.

Since the advent of democracy in Catalonia and in Spain, together with local governments and the Generalitat, his work consisted mainly of projects for public facilities, social housing, and constructions that responded to the new situation in the country.

From 1981 until the end of his professional activity, his partner and main collaborator was the architect Miguel Jiménez Eroles. Other important partners, such as Ramón Martí, Roser Escudé, Joan Meca, Julio Pueyo, Willy Müller, Armando Oyarzun, and Enrique del Pozo, have been crucial in the development of the work of Emili Donato’s studio. Donato explains that, without the driving force of these and multiple other collaborators over the years, the scope of the studio’s production would not have been possible.

In 1986, he became a tenured professor at the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), where he spearheaded the Thesis Project course. From 1994 to 1997, he was president of the juries evaluating thesis projects.

After winning an international competition organized by the city of Nîmes in 1986, he rekindled his relationship with French architecture. He was invited as a participant in several competitions in France: Nîmes (1986), Melun-Sénart (1987), Toulon and Nantes (both 1989), MIQCP, Paris (1990), Toulouse (1991), Marseille (1996), and others.

From the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s, Donato participated in numerous public competitions and won many commissions. In 2000, he—together with the RDIT—won the project and construction of the Anoia Regional Hospital in Igualada, a research building on the UPC Campus in Castelldefels. This project resulted in a change in the structure of his studio, which was subsequently known as Emili Donato i Arquitectes Associats SL.

Throughout his career, Donato has juried numerous competitions, participated at many conferences on Catalan and Spanish architecture, and presented his own work in various capitals of Europe and Latin America.

His work has been published in specialized architecture magazines in Europe, Japan, and Latin America, as well as in Spain. He is the author of several articles in Spanish and European press, including the magazines Ciutat i Territori, Quaderns d'Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Arquitectura (of the Architects’ Association of Madrid), Hinterland, Lotus, and Zodiac, among others. He has written about Catalan architecture—with a particular emphasis on Coderch and Sert—as well as about urban planning in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona.

In 2002, Poiesis and Ediciones del Serbal published the book Dibujos de arquitectura: Emili Donato, a bilingual edition (in Spanish and French) of a selection of Donato’s architectural drawings. Two monographs about Donato’s work have been published by the Archivos de Arquitectura, España Siglo XX collection of the Architects Association of Almería: one on the Nursing Home in Horta (published in 2011) and the other on CAP in Cornellà (published in 2024).

A monographic exhibition of Donato’s work won the First International Prize at the VI International Architecture Biennial of Buenos Aires in 1995; the exhibition subsequently toured to Madrid, Toulouse, and Bilbao. Anthological exhibitions of his architecture and urban planning work have been organized by La Salle School of Architecture in Barcelona (2004), and the Barcelona School of Architecture, UPC (2023). Monographic shows include an exhibition of his architectural drawings at the ETSAB (1994–1995), an exhibition of his photography at the COAC delegation in Vic (2008), and an exhibition on his drawings and paintings in Vic (2019).

In his later years, he has combined his professional practice with his production of personal pictorial work, which is ongoing.

Donato has tended to stay out of the usual professional circles. And so has his work.

Exhibition Credits

Emili Donato: es fan plànols
April 10–June 1, 2025

Organizer: Centre Obert d’Arquitectura
Production: Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya
Curators: Jordi Roig and Miguel Jiménez
Exhibition design: Mireia Marés
Management: Centre Obert d’Arquitectura: Gemma Ferré and Inés de Rivera; general management: Moisés Puente and Olga Egea; management and coordination: Gemma Molas and Àngels Isabel Florea
Press: COAC Press department: Clara Llensa, Marta Milà, Ariadna Salvia, and Ainoa Aguilera
Graphic design: Quim Pintó
Translation and copyediting: Marta Rojals
Framing: Acutangle
Models: Estudi Emili Donato
Photography: Jordi Bernadó, Toni Vidal, Emili Donato, and Andreu Donato
Photographic reproduction: EGM
Installation and Lightning: Lotema
Millwork: Verdaina
Painting: Ango
Graphic production: Area de Imagen
Transportation: Feltrero División de Arte
Insurance: Allianz Seguros
Acknowledgements: Emili Donato, Teresa Valldeoriola, M. José Masnou, Josep, M. Soto, Francesc Pernas, Guim Costa, and Sandra Bestraten