Ignasi de Solà-Morales, undated. © Rosa Feliu.
March 12, 2026, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Ignasi de Solà-Morales, a pivotal figure whose intellectual trajectory mirrored Barcelona’s own transformation into a global architectural capital. I came to know, study with, and work with Ignasi at a critical juncture in his thinking. In 1996, he presided over the XIX UIA World Congress in Barcelona, an event that marks another significant anniversary as the city prepares to host the congress once again this summer. The theme of the congress thirty years ago, “Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities,” reflected the exigencies of the era and Ignasi’s critical project to explore the contemporary metropolis, urban life, and culture at the end of the millennium—a time when the profession struggled to define and confront the challenges of rapidly changing urban conditions and virtual spaces. These endeavors formed the radical pedagogical basis for the Metropolis Master and Graduate Program in Architecture and Urban Culture, where I served as a faculty member, head of studies, and later co-director. At this key moment, I wish to reflect upon his enduring ideas, many of which have been assimilated into mainstream thought about the urban realm.
Ignasi was born into a distinguished lineage of civic-minded architects. His grandfather, Joan Rubió i Bellver, was a disciple of Antoni Gaudí. His father, Manuel de Solà-Morales i de Rosselló, served as dean of the architecture school, chair of the Architects’ Association, and municipal architect. A respected urbanist, his older brother Manuel first opened Barcelona to the sea, with a combination of infrastructure, roadways, and public space that transformed the former wooden pier—or Moll de la Fusta—on the former industrial port. Pau and Clara, two of Ignasi’s children, continue the family tradition in practice and pedagogy.
Ignasi’s choice of academic formation reveals a desire for a transdisciplinary approach that would characterize the formulation of his criticism and the conceptualization of the Metropolis Master. Educated as an architect at Barcelona’s architecture school (ETSAB), where he became a professor, he also pursued a degree in philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His doctoral thesis, a study of his grandfather's oeuvre and of Gaudí's inner circle including the idiosyncratic work of Josep Maria Jujol, offers a germination of what he would later call weak architecture, a fringe approach outside of traditional architectural parameters.
In a career defined by the intertwining of practice, critique, historical research, and curation, Ignasi was a prolific institution builder. He headed the archive of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), founded the Institute of Humanities, and was instrumental in the creation of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe. Furthermore, he helped conceptualize the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), where the Metropolis program would find its identity.
As a practitioner, he transformed degraded heritage buildings into community centers in Barcelona’s medieval center, but he is most acknowledged for the recreation of two iconic buildings. Ignasi conducted the archival research on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s and Lilly Reich’s German Pavilion, which had long ago been dismantled following the 1929 International Exposition. With the team of Fernando Ramos and Christian Cirici, they made the critical decision to alter key constructive elements of the canonical structure to ensure its longevity, arguing that the design may have seemed to be immutable, but it was not. He was working on the city’s opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, even before it was completely devastated in a fire in 1994. To reconstruct it, his team delved deeply into comparative typological studies of theaters around the world. Ignasi theorized the limits of imitation and replication as an act of contemporary reinterpretation.
As an essayist and critic operating across various themes and registers, Ignasi maintained an international trajectory through several intellectual networks. His writing was complex, nuanced, and frequently speculative, bridging architectural theory with currents in philosophy. Yet, his outlook remained rooted in the traditions of Spanish and Catalan architecture, which he wrote about frequently. He considered these traditions to be peripheral to, or outside of, mainstream trends.
His early intellectual development was deeply influenced by the Italian theorist Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School. As his interest shifted toward the metropolis and urban culture, the work of Frankfurt School philosopher Walter Benjamin became a primary source. Specifically, Benjamin’s research on media, photography, and the nineteenth-century rise of Paris as capital of modernity provided guideposts. For de Solà-Morales, the origins of the metropolis served as a rubric to analyze shifts in perception, representation, production, and culture. Similar to the “angel of history” described in Benjamin’s analysis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, de Solà-Morales moved toward the future while maintaining a critical gaze on the past.1
In the final phase of his career, the contemporary city became a central focus, driven by tectonic shifts in global order and a search for new architectural methodologies. By the 1990s, globalization and the emergence of the internet had dissolved traditional understandings of urban form, municipal borders, and contemporary life. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the end of the Cold War, ushering in an era of neoliberal expansion and the rise of China as a global power. Simultaneously, the “new economy” emerged from the growth of the information technology sector.
Within this context, cities were reimagined not merely as physical spaces, but as fluid networks where temporal dynamics became as significant as spatial ones. The multiplicity of conditions generated by globalization, late capitalism, and virtual space destabilized established architectural thought, revealing the exhaustion of modernist and postmodernist models.
The reconstruction of Barcelona before and after the 1992 Olympic Games, following Oriol Bohigas’s Barcelona Model and planning by Joan Busquets, was formulated as a series of hybrid urban projects. These initiatives combined infrastructure, architecture, and public space across varying scales. This redevelopment occurred within the context of what was described as the “second modernization” of Europe, alongside François Mitterrand’s Grands Projects in Paris and the reunification of Berlin. The Catalan case offered a localized resistance to what Rem Koolhaas termed the homogenization of the “Generic City” through a commitment to community life, although the Dutch architect would later characterize some of the Olympic era projects as “junkspace.”2
In the post-Olympic city, many architects, including Ignasi and Josep Lluís Mateo, worked across multiple fields of operation, including professional practice, research, publications, and exhibitions. This period was further distinguished by the high quality of Spanish architectural journals, such as Quaderns, Arquitectura Viva, and El Croquis. The global dissemination and recognition of Spanish architecture led to the expansion of professionals abroad through commissions and invitations. De Solà-Morales began teaching at Princeton, Columbia, Turin, and Cambridge. While his work was initially grounded in the urban transformation of his native city, his theory ultimately transitioned beyond local application to establish a significant international trajectory.
In 1987, likely referencing Rafael Moneo’s National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain, Ignasi proposed an alternative to the prevailing architectural impasse. As an architectural milestone, the building incorporated Roman excavations and contemporary construction that referenced the materiality of ancient structures in its use of brick. This suggested a new form of architecture that was archaeological, momentary, and resistant to market demands. This “weak architecture” drew upon the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s concept of “weak thought,” a reading of Heidegger and Nietzsche.3 With the decline of classical ideals, modern notions of durability, and the stability of the Vitruvian tradition, de Solà-Morales also looked beyond the established phenomenological concept of genius loci, or the “spirit of place.” Moneo’s design served as a manifesto on how history could imbricate contemporary architecture through the coalescence of different temporalities of the site. Weak architecture was fragmentary and capable of reflecting the plurality, complexity, and temporal discontinuity of its urban condition and contemporary culture itself. To articulate this different form of monumentality, he invoked post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of the “fold” and the “event.”4
Ignasi introduced the work of Deleuze to architecture through his participation in the decade-long series of meetings that he founded alongside Peter Eisenman and Arata Isozaki. The “Any Conferences” were held yearly in a different city from 1991 to 2000.5 Essays from each gathering were subsequently published as edited volumes by MIT Press. Deleuze’s work, often in collaboration with Felix Guattari, became the philosophy for architects of the digital age and late capitalism. In a shift from linguistic and semiotic theories, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism in the 1980s and Deleuzian materialism in the 1990s, marked a move away from the desire to read a building like a text to conceiving buildings as a flow of energy, matter, and movement.
Ignasi mapped out an enigmatic cartography by reflecting on Deleuzian concepts suggestive to architecture to describe nonlinear, networked conditions such as the fold, rhizome, liquid architecture, or the body without organs, which referred to an open unscripted space free from function. Buildings might be understood as nodes in a network, a mapping of forces. Many architects chose to literally apply the fold and smooth and striated space to digital architecture.6 But for Ignasi, these concepts were a vehicle for a critical research agenda and tools of analysis on contemporary city, art, architecture, and urban culture.7
Catalogue cover. UIA XIX World Congress of Architects, Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities (Barcelona: Actar, 1996). The exhibition was held in the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. Courtesy of Suzanne Strum.
In 1996, the title exhibit of the UIA Congress at the CCCB curated by Ignasi with Xavier Costa made evident that the city is no longer a single organism but a series of overlapping realities. The curators acknowledged that the appearance of new urban phenomena was being better articulated by other disciplines. Architects needed a new way of addressing urban conditions characterized by instability and impermanence. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the exhibition was organized by five concepts—Mutations, Flows, Habitations, Containers, and Terrain Vague.8 An evocative manifesto, the design introduced each of the plateaus with works by the artists Joan Fontcuberta, Antoni Muntadas, and Sylvia Kolwbalski. The biological metaphor, mutations, described the sudden and vertiginous urban change, unrelated to traditional urban form, that was happening in many parts of the world. Flows reflected on the movement of capital, people, and information, the fluctuation of time and liquidity. With habitations, Ignasi queried where innovation and exploration could be found in modern housing beyond the traditional nuclear family and looked for alternatives in dwellings for immigrants and informal communities. Containers, the massive semipublic and semiprivate generic buildings such as shopping malls and stadiums, could often be found outside of historic urban fabric. Terrain vague celebrated the poetics of urban voids emptied of productivity.9
A territorial indication of strangeness, terrain vague—the absent, nonproductive, and empty spaces of immanent possibility and resistance—is perhaps Ignasi’s most lasting and evolving concept. In his essay on the theme, he began by musing upon the work of a number of contemporary photographers who found uncanny beauty in parts of the city voided of activity, outside of economic return and the normal flow of city life. This could be seen in images by the Barcelona photographer Manolo Laguillo, who captured the city’s former industrial zone, Poblenou—then a wasteland—or photographs of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz before it became a shiny new corporate center. The etymology was chosen from the French vague, meaning vacant, unoccupied, and available to be reimagined, fluctuating and indeterminate. With terrain vague, absence was equated with freedom and discontinuity with difference.10
“Terrain vague,” Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme, no. 212 (1996), with a front image by Jordi Bernardo, Lleida Panorama project.
Radical Pedagogies and Global Networks
The Metropolis Master pedagogical project was born out of confluence of these intellectual activities as a challenge to prevailing discourse. The program found a home in the newly inaugurated CCCB, a key piece in the urban regeneration of the degraded working-class immigrant neighborhood of the Raval, where briefly it coalesced with Ignasi’s brother’s Laboratory of Urbanism. Both felt it was essential to bring students to the center of the city at a time of transition. Headed by philosopher Josep Ramoneda, the CCCB is a unique institution, a lively multifaceted platform for diverse urban groups, activities, and debate. An asset for the program, it served as a refuge outside of the traditional academic environment of the lingering modernist orthodoxy at the ETSAB.
The Metropolis pedagogical experiment was designed to dismantle disciplinary hierarchies and expand the definition of architectural practice. It benefited from Ignasi’s extensive networks to ensure the program remained fluid; the curriculum was reinvented annually based on the contributions of visiting faculty. As a forum for debate, several key figures were introduced to the Barcelona context for the first time. The curriculum featured intensive sessions with scholars such as economist Saskia Sassen (global cities), urban theorist Edward Soja (postmodern geographies), sociologist Richard Sennett (social life in cities), and anthropologist Marc Augé (non-places).11 This is just to mention a few of the invited faculty; the list is too long to include here. This intellectual diversity was visually articulated in the program’s pamphlets, designed by Carmen Vives, and featuring the striking urban photography of Jordi Bernadó.
Program material from the 1997 edition of the Metropolis Postgraduate Program. Graphic design by the late Carmen Vives with photography by Jordi Bernadó. Courtesy of Suzanne Strum.
Program material from the 1998 edition of the Metropolis Postgraduate Program. Graphic design by the late Carmen Vives with photography by Jordi Bernadó. Courtesy of Suzanne Strum.
Program material from the 2000 edition of the Metropolis Postgraduate Program. Graphic design by the late Carmen Vives with photography by Jordi Bernadó. Courtesy of Suzanne Strum.
Program material from the 2001 edition of the Metropolis Postgraduate Program. Graphic design by the late Carmen Vives with photography by Jordi Bernadó. Courtesy of Suzanne Strum.
Beatriz Colomina, who was invited several times and whose doctoral advisor was Ignasi, in her collaborative research project with her students at Princeton defined radical pedagogies as experiments that questioned, redefined, and shook the foundations of architectural education and practice. Derived from the Latin radix (root), these approaches challenge mainstream thinking, operating on the fringes of institutions to create lasting impact.12 Metropolis may have acted as a feeder of students to doctoral programs, but it primarily functioned as a space for architects, geographers, historians, and artists, among other disciplines, to define their own agendas outside of traditional professional and academic constraints. In its first incarnation, before Ignasi’s death, the core faculty included art historian and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona Miquel Molins, the architects Xavier Costa, Ernest Ferré, and myself, the curator Martí Peran, and geographer Francesc Muñoz, the latter of whom was one of the first students and who developed the concept of “urbanalization” or “banalscapes,” to describe transformations in the city and its metropolitan suburbanization.13 Ultimately, the program benefited from the global attractiveness of Barcelona to draw together figures who sought new forms of research and paths of practice. Ignasi’s students carried forward the freedom that this open structure allowed at a time of increasing constraints and the banality of managerial oversight in academia.
Cover of a compilation of essays and projects by invited faculty and students of the Metropolis Postgraduate Program. Image by Jordi Bernadó, from Metrópolis: ciudades, redes, paisajes (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004). Published three years after Ignasi de Solà-Morales's death, the book was organized and edited by Xavier Costa and Suzanne Strum.
Postscript: From Spectacle to “Becoming”
The 1996 UIA Congress was an overwhelming success, perhaps too much so and is remembered as a spectacle, for the massive influx of last-minute registrations that saw 14,000 young attendees spilling into the plazas and filling the Sant Jordi Palace, a venue better suited to rock concerts. In a sense, it ushered in the cult of the star architect and foretold a shift in the way that architecture would be consumed. Architectural theory with its continual contestation and interrogation would soon be eclipsed by new core tendencies such as operative criticism, laboratory research, and curation. In any case, we can now recognize from a distance that the rapid urban expansion around the world, explored by Ignasi, contributed to the current global climate crisis.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2026, and Barcelona finds itself at a different crossroads. The upcoming congress, “Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition,” serves as a direct response to the legacy of the past thirty years. At a time of ecological catastrophe, the theme moves beyond human-centric design toward “more-than-human” coexistence. This shift marks a profound evolution: from the architect as a creator of icons to the architect as an agent of planetary survival.
