Jaume Collboni presents Barcelona's Gold Medal to the family of Miguel Milá

Mayor Jaume Collboni presented the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona to the family of the industrial designer Miguel Milá Sagnier (Barcelona 1931 - Bilbao 2024) on Monday. The award, which was approved by the municipal government in a government commission on 13 July, comes in recognition of his professional career as a pioneer in this field and for having contributed to the international projection of Barcelona and the country. Miguel Milá died on 13 August.

The Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, has announced that next year the DHUB will host a retrospective exhibition on the work of Miguel Milá, to be commissioned by his son Gonzalo. Collboni highlighted the universal legacy of ‘pioneering designs that decades later are still valid’, as well as ‘the importance of defending the quality of public space’ and his ‘minimalist humanism’ because design has to be ‘at the service of people and their needs’. For all these reasons, Collboni stressed that the city of Barcelona will always be grateful to him, added that Miguel Milá will always be an ‘inescapable point of reference in contemporary culture’, and thanked all the political groups for their unanimous support in awarding him the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona.

Miguel Milá has played a fundamental role in the contemporary history of Catalan and Spanish design, also as a member of a generation of design pioneers that began in the 1950s, to the point that he has dedicated his entire life to creating objects for everyday life that have become true classics.

He has been linked to EINA since its foundation, and has had a role as a lecturer, teacher of Furniture Design and Projects and professor of the postgraduate course in interiors until the early 2000s, among other collaborations. In 1987, Miquel Milá was named a Friend of EINA for his involvement in the early days of the school. Since then, he has been awarded the ADI-FAD Golden Delta Award six times, the first time in 1961 for the TMC light. Other awards include the National Design Award (1987), the Cross of Saint George (1993), the CUENCA National Culture Award (2010), and posthumously, the Gold Medal of the City of Barcelona (2024).