I first met David Mackay at the time that he and his firm MBM designed the Homage to Barcelona exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1985. Barcelona’s mayor, Pasqual Maragall, took up an idea from London in order to raise the city’s profile and help its bid to stage the Olympics in 1992; the exhibition was running in London when it was announced that Barcelona had been awarded the Games. At the Hayward we had been ignorant of Barcelona as a city of architects and designers and had sent our own architect, Piers Gough, on a scouting mission. To Piers’s credit he came back and said the exhibition could only have a Barcelona designer. Mackay took the lead and the exhibition was a kind of return to his own country. He remained essentially English despite his complete immersion in the culture of his adopted Catalonia.
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