Designing for modernity

In 1950, he began to work as an interior designer in the office of the architects Federico Correa and Alfonso Milá, his brother. One year later, he left the Faculty of Architecture, fed up with maths. This is how failure in his studies led him to his own professional journey. His years at the faculty had introduced him to an entire generation of Barcelona architects who subscribed to the doctrine of the Modern Movement, which would feed his perspective on what was needed and what was superfluous in the spaces he had to decorate.

The architects Federico Correa and Alfonso Milá, like their mentor José Antonio Coderch, kept an approach that modulated the vernacular by choosing clearly functional solutions dictated by specific needs. All of this fit perfectly with Milá’s spirit: not to mess with whatever works, and to (re)invent what does not exist or does not work properly. However, at that time, the job of choosing furniture that met these criteria could be thankless, because everything available ‘was very tacky’. So, a new more active phase was needed, which in the middle term ended up introducing interior design to Spain.