David Mackay, who has died aged 80, was a partner in the Barcelona architecture practice MBM (Martorell, Bohigas & Mackay), which designed the athletes’ village and harbour for Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic Games and gained an international reputation for repairing and shaping cities.
The career of the architect at the heart of the urban regeneration of Barcelona started in the 1960s, when he took a stand against the neglect and speculation that ravaged the city under Franco’s dictatorship. It blossomed in the 80s, when the Socialist party that ran the city council responded to pressure from below to create more public space and convert post-industrial wastelands to housing and social use.
The youngest of three brothers, Mackay spent his childhood in a series of boarding schools in England, Ireland and Scotland. His parents, Sonia and Fred, lived in India and Ghana (then the Gold Coast), where his father was a colonial administrator. Mackay’s peripatetic early life made him feel he was from nowhere in particular. He would say that he contained some of all those countries and a large measure of Catalonia, where he lived for more than 50 years.
After qualifying at North London Polytechnic in 1958, he moved to Barcelona with Roser Jarque, his Catalan wife, whom he had met when both were studying in London and married in 1957. In 1959 he started working with Josep Martorell and Oriol Bohigas, becoming a partner in 1962. The two architects, both eight years older than Mackay, were dedicated to introducing to Catalonia the ideas of the earlier modern movement – or rather, bringing them back: there had been a brief flowering of rationalist, social architecture between 1931 and 1936 under the Second Republic and before the civil war.
In a city famed for its exotic Art Nouveau buildings, MBM followed a less glamorous path. The architects responded on social and ethical grounds to the uncontrolled speculative building boom of the 60s that destroyed much of Barcelona. Hostile to what Bohigas called the “personalised exhibitionism” of many famous architects, they fought for proper respect for, as Mackay defined it, a building’s “given environment”. The 60s saw the building of many of their housing projects, such as the huge block on the otherwise bleak Meridiana Avenue, the main entry to Barcelona from the north. Mackay told me in 1998: “Architects have given up too easily their role in the architecture of cities, of the public space. It has been left to planning ... Most public space is addressed by engineers, trying to get a car somewhere as quickly as possible.”
MBM emphasised the social role of architecture: not just flashy buildings plonked anywhere, but the design of parks, such as the practice’s magnificent Creueta del Coll in the 80s, libraries, schools and housing, which created space for pedestrians. In more than 500 highly varied projects, the majority in Barcelona, the architects did not insist on leaving their own stamp, but sought to respond to the social requirements of each commission. Mackay argued: “We’re against urban planning, as it’s known. There’s a space between urban planning and architecture, which is urban design.”
MBM combated the then common zoning that has left many city centres empty at night, devoid of residents. They wanted a city where people could shop, live and work in any of its zones. Modern architecture, they believed, could be used to affirm creatively the identity of a city.
Though never a member of any political party, Mackay took part in the 60s and 70s movement against the Franco dictatorship, dodging the riot police on demonstrations and helping activists to contact the foreign press. With his children packed into his Seat 600, he would on occasion interfere with police charges, making out he was lost or did not understand their instructions. In 1976 he was one of the founders of Amnesty International in Spain, an organisation that has frequently reproved the Spanish government for torture by its police forces.
In the 80s MBM had the chance to design a whole neighbourhood. Mackay said: “After observing the collapse of other cities due to town planning, there was the chance to put into practice the need to consider the city as a series of projects, as though it were a building. To design it.”
MBM was commissioned in 1984 to oversee the construction of the Olympic village. The most ambitious and complicated part of the Olympic building programme, the project involved rapidly creating a new seafront neighbourhood to replace abandoned factories and railways.
The Olympic village is not without its critics. It was supposed to offer cheap housing after the Games, but the Socialists’ acceptance of market forces meant that the area became coveted and expensive. Yet it failed to attract businesses to its ground floors, making it a ghostly place, a residential ghetto – something that MBM sought to remedy in subsequent projects elsewhere. Mackay was an enthusiastic fan of the village, however, and had lived there with his family since the Olympics.
In the past 20 years, MBM undertook various large urban regeneration projects, especially in locations by the sea, among them Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Hastings, in Kent, Bexhill, in East Sussex, and Plymouth. Mackay wrote the report A Vision for Plymouth, and from 2003 to 2007 chaired the city’s design panel. At times he expressed frustration with the British system, as public-private finance initiatives meant MBM lost control of its projects.
Mackay published several well-received books, among them Modern Architecture in Barcelona (1985) and the autobiographical A Life in Cities (2009) and On Life and Architecture (2013). A kindly, reserved man, he had the gift of jargon-free writing and speaking. He flourished in recent years, giving several talks in the UK.
He is survived by Roser, their four daughters and two sons, 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
• David John Mackay, architect and city designer, born 25 December 1933; died 12 November 2014
