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Dear Benedetta,

Thank you for your kind e-mail of September 5. I apologize for taking so long to reply. Merrill and I were on holiday at the beach with our two youngest grandchildren-totally exhausting and wonderful fun.

I am so pleased that you are okay with me writing about your home in Barcelona. Merrill and I often talk with fond memories about our visit with you and Enric there many years ago. Whenever someone asks me what my favorite architecture is, I always say your home. I remember it as a place no one else could have possibly designed, a magical place filled with joy, warmth, wonder, and generosity of spirit.

After receiving your e-mail, I began to think that my piece for the publication might be in the form of a letter from me to you requesting photos and input while describing my at once vivid and faded memory of that evening.

Although memory does fade, this fading also has a way of clarifying moments of meaning. What I know I learned from our visit to your home is that an authentic architecture, the source of sustained fascination and enduring pleasure, is born of an intensely personal understanding and love for the making of space and things, that authenticity in architecture not only is rare but also is almost never celebrated as such, and that its most distinguishing characteristic is an alluring inscrutability of meaning, an endless provocation that defines the soul of great architecture and is what I most love about your home.

I remember thinking during our visit that Enric’s and your architectural magic emerges from your questioning of its origins in which you blur the distinctions between old and new, hard and soft, smooth and rough, deep and shallow, big and small, dark and light, happenstance and the intended. At your home I found this blurring so spatially, materially, and technically perplexing that I quickly abandoned any burden of rationalization and simply enjoyed your skill and artistry.

I just couldn’t figure out how you were able to bleed metal into wood, make an enormous desk seem as light as a feather, or get into a bed seemingly made for giants. I remember a chair that had so much charisma and personality of form and materials that I just wanted to sit on the floor and talk to it all night about its experience, what it had seen and felt, and what ideas it had about the future of sitting.

I remember your dining table and chairs that were the perfect size and height for both Enric and Elias (seemingly impossible but true), and laughing at how many times we had all shared dinner with Rafael when he insisted we guess the height of the table and chairs, and how this spurned lengthy debates over the rationale of minutia of differences between each person’s opinion while knowing that, without a tape measure, there was no way to determine who was right. Of course, our conversation wasn’t about rightness; it was about the art of the argument.

I will never forget Enric’s extraordinary knife collection. I have to admit that at first it was a bit disarming. But when I saw the endearing enthusiasm on his face as he described the beauty of each object, it made me realize that they embodied so much of what is at the heart and soul of your architecture. In the knives, there is the uncompromised presence of a utility that is both beneficial and horrific. You knew intuitively that their form, materiality, and size had everything to do with this utility, but what I think Enric saw was not that simple. They were all made with a kind of precise imperfection that could only be achieved by the human hand, a distinct quality that imbued each with a sense of time, place, and strength of character. As we passed them around, the form, materiality, and weight melted into a balanced fit for all our varied hands. Of course Enric would love knives.

It was nighttime when we were there. There was no natural light. I have no memory of any light sources, but both Merrill and I do remember having a distinct feeling of being suspended in space. We have talked about this over the years and think that this feeling had something to do with a complete aura of incompleteness in the space and finishes. It wasn’t a dynamic tension. It was more a reassuring feeling that things in a state of flux are lighter and more buoyant-finished but not final-a feeling that let you imagine positive futures.

Everything in your home was really big or really small, really heavy or really light, really textured or really smooth. Contrast and contradiction were everywhere. Spatial generosity was pervasive, but then there were so many curious little exploratory diggings on the walls and weird precious objects everywhere that we couldn’t help but pick up. There were odd surfaces and pieces of things only somewhat familiar. The furniture was too big until you realized it came apart or moved or could be reconfigured to fit or even transformed for another use. I remember thinking there was no paint-only natural materials. But still there was the perception of a place filled with color and textural richness. I don’t remember any windows, any dark holes, but wasn’t there a kind of vertical garden off the dining area?

Perhaps you and Enric were born with an ability to design and make everything the wrong size out of the wrong material for the wrong use such that when a human shows up, suddenly everything is right for everybody, no matter their sizes or shapes. Or perhaps you had endless debates to decide the exact dimensions of things that would create a resonance between their relational differences in order to warp scale perception. My guess is both.

For years I thought the secret to the beauty of your home was the fact it is scratched out of and molded into a preexisting structure with all its inherent richness of age and memory inscribed for you to react against. But after visiting other projects of yours in newer or less defined contexts; I realize that you have often created the perception of ancient contextual incongruities. In turn these demand new form, material, and technical responses that are necessarily transformative. This becomes a kind of architectural exquisite corpse where good things of difference become experiential security blankets with puzzling origins-a paradoxical blur at once demanding, critical, and offering a comforting familiarity to human nature.

So Bill Saunders was asking about what is now at the core of architecture. I would say that architects have always been at the core of architecture and always will be, if they are willing to bare their soul for it, as you and Enric have. Where there is no soul, there is no architecture.

I think the big question today is, “Can the architect continue to bring th is kind of inscrutable but necessary humanity to our discipline?” I think so, but in a world in which so many have access to so much and so much is doable, what are the positive sources for authenticity in architecture that allow the architect with big, clumsy hands to create delicate lines of inspiring form? Or, while embracing all the realities of today’s world, architects can just see things through their own eyes and make something at once radical and humane. It seems to me that this is where the discourse in architecture should now be focused.

I hope you remain enthusiastic about my writing about your home. Do you think we need pictures?

Much love,
Mack (Merrill too)