Miguel Milá watches us sitting from the comfortable Chester sofa in his house between two portraits of women. In an oval frame with gold molding, his mother painted in oil by Félix Mestres at the beginning of the 20th century. On the other side, the mother of his wife captured with acrylic strokes at the beginning of the 21st century by the painter Lucas Milá, his son.
His vision as a designer today instills in us the tranquility of objects that last. And we as spectators and users contemplate in amazement the lamps and furniture imagined by him more than half a century ago, today with full validity and modernity. What’s more, enjoying his great golden age.
A pioneer in the development of design in our country, the portrait of Miguel Milá (Barcelona, ??1931) in his home incorporates the perspective of his extensive family saga, an aristocratic bourgeoisie intertwined with the cultural and artistic world. (Gaudi’s commission for the famous Casa Milá, better known as La Pedrera, is due to his uncle Pedro Milá Camps). It was his great-grandmother who had three houses built in the 19th century for her three daughters (one of them the designer’s grandmother) on a large estate with gardens in Esplugues de Llobregat, a municipality adjacent to Barcelona. It is on this family farm where Miguel Milá has spent a good part of his life and developed his professional career as a designer.
In a legacy of neoclassical and modernist interiors, his time at the University of Architecture of Barcelona occurred in the fifties, where a functionalism of Bauhaus heritage and great desires for modernity prevailed. There he met one of his main references, the architect José Antonio Coderch. Together with the architects Alfonso Milá (his brother) and Federico Correa, who marked the beginning of his career as a designer.
After putting his architecture career on hold, Miguel Milá began to painstakingly devise a new universe of objects, betting on the beauty that emanates from simplicity and a shrewd functional approach. In 1961, his TMC lamp – today converted into a cult piece and a long-seller – was awarded the ADI-FAD Gold Delta, an association recently created in Barcelona to promote this new discipline of nascent industrial design. The FAD appreciated its multifunctional innovation and ingenuity: by stretching the plug cord itself, the lamp is turned on and off (thus unifying two elements), and it can also be operated while sitting. Its height-adjustable and rotating screen provides both downward reading light and general upward light. Shortly after, another of his star luminaries, the Basket, won a new award. In 1987 Miguel Milá won the National Design Award, in its first edition. And in 2008, the Compasso D’Oro from the Italian ADI that recognized his career on the international scene.
Now the Madrid Design Festival pays tribute to him, dedicating the largest retrospective to his work, as one of the central exhibitions of the festival. Curated by his son and also an industrial designer, Gonzalo Milá, and by Claudia Oliva, it is titled Miguel Milá, (Pre) Industrial Designer. The adjective wants to indicate the moment and pioneering role that he played in the introduction of the discipline of design in our country. Although also, a conviction throughout his long career that artisanal and industrial processes are equally valid and not exclusive in the development of a design.
Milá was a pioneer in his vision of craftsmanship, so demanded today. The curators of the exhibition explain their close collaboration with small industries and semi-artisanal workshops that still worked manually. He “he adopted a unique approach by revaluing existing artisanal traditions, fusing them with the Mediterranean culture and way of life, interpreted from modernity.” For his part, Miguel Milá states: “My defense of craftsmanship and the artisanal process has no other purpose than to defend the desire that man has to participate in the processes of things.”
The search for simplicity has been the driving force of his professional career. Also the economy of resources and the rejection of ostentation and waste. “Designing is seeing life with a magnifying glass,” summarizes Miguel Milá. With this magnification device, on each object that can be recreated, he begins a meticulous analysis, although he also gives free rein to intuition. And he applies his triad: function, ingenuity and technology to reach the refined and beautiful form.
In his austere vision of design, however, the comfort factor is never missing, perhaps his main bourgeois family heritage. This is what happens in all the lamps, currently published by Santa
“A design professional – says Milá – must maintain a rational posture from an absolutely humanistic background. Intuition must be enriched by cultivating it and then solving problems in the most rational way possible because then the solutions will be spontaneous and human.”
The Miguel Milá exhibition. (Pre)industrial designer brings together more than 200 pieces, prototypes, plans and original drawings. The curators of the exhibition point out that not only are the largest number of pieces on display, but “it is accompanied by a very personal voice about who Miguel Milá is, to weave the journey of his life and work.” It can be seen until March 31, 2024, at Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa, Plaza de Colón, 4, within the framework of the Madrid Design Festival.