Miguel Milá

Spanish · Born 1931

Miguel Milá (Barcelona, 1931 – Bilbao, 2024) was one of the founders of modern Spanish design, and one of the few of his generation who was not an architect. He was born into a Catalan family with deep ties to the arts: his uncle Pedro Milá y Camps commissioned Gaudí's Casa Milá, known as La Pedrera. In the late 1950s he began working on interiors in the studio of his brother Alfonso Milá and Federico Correa and, finding almost nothing he could buy to furnish them, started designing his own lamps and furniture.

To produce them he co-founded Tramo with the architects F. Ribas Barangé and E. Pérez Ullibarri. The name, short for Trabajos Molestos ("annoying jobs"), was a joke about the tasks given to the youngest brother. Tramo made the first versions of the TMC (1959) and the TMM (1961), both still in production. Milá later opened his own studio, designing lamps such as Cesta and the M68 and door handles for FSB, and was one of the founders of ADI-FAD. He died in Bilbao in August 2024, aged 93.

Milá called himself "a pre-industrial designer". He worked more like a craftsman than an engineer: making models and prototypes, keeping control of each stage of the process, and correcting mistakes by hand before anything went into production. He preferred noble materials, such as the wood, parchment, and glass of his lamps, because they let him test and adjust as he went.

What he looked for was simplicity: economy of means, no ostentation, and no waste. Rather than reinvent familiar objects, he updated them with honesty, as he did with the Mediterranean lantern behind Cesta or the sliding shade of the TMM. That is why so many of his pieces are still in production more than sixty years after he drew them.

He set out this outlook in his 2019 book Lo esencial. El diseño y otras cosas de la vida. His work earned the National Design Award in 1987, the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1993, and the Compasso d'Oro in 2008, and the Disseny Hub Barcelona has devoted a major retrospective to him, Miguel Milá. Diseñador (pre)industrial.