Fundacio Joan Miro

The Fundacio Joan Miro was designed by the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert, a close friend of the painter Joan Miro, and opened in 1975 on Montjuic hill in Barcelona as a museum and study center built specifically to house Miro's own donated collection of his paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Sert organized the building around a sequence of white-walled, top-lit galleries connected by ramps and terraces, using a restrained modern architectural vocabulary he had already developed designing artists' studios and museum spaces earlier in his career, including for Miro's own studio in Mallorca. Deep roof monitors and skylights admit filtered natural light into the galleries, a lighting strategy Sert considered essential to displaying Miro's brightly colored work without artificial illumination, while the building's white stucco walls and terracotta-tiled roofs draw on traditional Mediterranean building forms. Miro himself was closely involved in planning the foundation, intending it as a gift to the city of Barcelona and a center for the study of contemporary art rather than simply a repository for his own work. The building today functions as both a museum and an active exhibition and research center.