Sometimes, architecture presents itself as an object of responsibility—an exercise in recognizing authorship, aiming to define and delimit it. We feel an urgent need to know who its author was, to credit whoever was capable of such inventions. Just as often, however, architecture does not claim any author; hence the terms anonymous architecture or "architecture without architects"—that is, a merely vernacular architecture. In the case of Carme Pinós, what is built inevitably speaks of who built it. Her architecture offers a glimpse of the energy that emanates from her persona: a vibrant, direct, tense architecture, swept by a continuous, dominating agitation. Within it, elements are in constant motion in a completely ungrounded way, rather than by their own virtue.
That unexplored territory Carme Pinós traversed so enthusiastically alongside Enric Miralles in the distant 1980s remains her domain, her terrain, her homeland today. An architecture without limits, aspiring to become geography, expanding without borders. Linear schemes, discontinuously traced profiles, an almost fragmentary language. All of this is encompassed within a way of making that marks and delimits the landscape, almost attempting to capture the air, while providing the work with references that speak of its people. The architectures of Carme Pinós are, above all, hallmarks of her persona; they have nothing to do with the anonymous architecture mentioned at the beginning of these lines. The drama of her architecture is that, ultimately, the presumed universality with which she wishes to endow it—this anonymous condition—is never realized; instead, as previously mentioned, it is taken as an expression of her passionate persona.
