British architect David Mackay joined Josep Martorell and Oriol Bohigas in 1959. Those were the years in which their architecture office, which incorporated Mackay as a partner in 1962, exploded. In which every project, regardless of the program and scale, is a tribute to public space. A tribute to a way of making city that will culminate with Vila Olímpica, which Mackay lived in the same way that Le Corbusier lived Porte Molitor or Sáenz de Oiza lived Torres Blancas: architects who literally took ownership of their work. David Mackay was the office man. The piece that kept it moving, a well-oiled machine that someone compared with Krupp. The liaison with international culture. The one who wrote about Catalan architecture in his native English. Good-natured, ironic, a reference for his peers, Mackay was a discreet presence for MBM. A structural one.

When preparing a monograph on MBM, Oriol Bohigas told me, about a drawing we had selected, that it was his work 'but there was probably the hand of David. There is always the hand of David.'




Public trajectories of each of the MBM members belong to each of them. The work of the office, however, is choral: to the point that in many pictures, it is almost impossible to distinguish the outlines of the three partners.

Thank you, David. 

                                                                                      Jaume Prat, architect


News on the media 

'Mor David Mackay', Ara, 13 November 2014
'El arquitecto silencio', El País, 13 November 2014
'La segona M d'MBM', La Vanguardia, 13 November 2014
'El 'seny' del arquitecto olímpico', El Mundo, 13 November 2014