Coac exhibition pays tribute to architect Bosch Aymerich

The ar­chi­tec­tural es­tab­lish­ment never for­gave Josep Maria Bosch Aymerich for his work in sales. It was not con­sid­ered ap­pro­pri­ate that an ar­chi­tect should make such a good liv­ing. Recog­ni­tion passed him by and he had to wait until 2013 until the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment awarded him the Sant Jordi Cross, but even then for his work as a busi­ness­man, not as an ar­chi­tect.

Yet a new gen­er­a­tion of crit­ics are re­con­sid­er­ing his work and his more than 500 pro­jects, many of them vi­sion­ary, which in­cluded the cor­po­rate build­ings, tourist re­sorts, ports, air­ports and mo­tor­ways he built in more than 15 coun­tries, which apart from Spain in­clude Saudi Ara­bia, Ecuador, Al­ge­ria and Dubai. And that is with­out in­clud­ing the 5,000 dwellings he de­signed.

Bosch Aymerich did not seem to mind and he con­tin­ued work­ing into old age, in­clud­ing set­ting up a pri­vate foun­da­tion to over­see his legacy. A new ex­hi­bi­tion that runs until De­cem­ber 7 in the Coac ar­chi­tects’ as­so­ci­a­tion in Barcelona now pays trib­ute to that legacy. Cu­ra­tor, Roger Subirà, says re­search is still re­quired on the work of the pro­lific but largely ig­nored ar­chi­tect. “His is a func­tional ar­chi­tec­ture of ex­tremely high qual­ity,” he says. Some ex­am­ples in Barcelona are the In­sti­tut d’Es­tudis Nord-amer­i­cans on Via Au­gusta, the L’Aliança clinic, or the HQ of the Hoechst chem­i­cal com­pany on Trav­es­sera de Gràcia.