Portada

Ricardo Bofill Leví, one of Spain’s great contemporary architects, is and will be remembered for his gigantic—and often controversial—housing projects in the 1970s and 1980s. During a career spanning more than six decades, he left his mark all over the world, from his native Catalonia to China via Russia, the United States, India, and North Africa.

Born in Barcelona in 1939, Bofill was a successful businessman, entrepreneur, talent scout and team leader. He was the ideal figure who knew exactly how to talk to clients and politicians. He learned these practical social skills, no doubt, from his father, an architect and builder who worked with figures such as José Luis Sert and Antonio Bonet. Therefore, Bofill ‘had the advantage of being able to start designing very young‘, as he recalled in an interview in 2020. Indeed, when he was only 19 and still a student in Geneva – expelled from the University of Barcelona for his links with the Communist Party of Catalonia – he began his first project: a family house in Ibiza.

In 1963, he returned to Barcelona and founded the renowned Taller de Arquitectura (later renamed Taller de Arquitectura Ricardo Bofill). There, in addition to designing sophisticated apartment buildings, he began work on the design of an entire neighbourhood, the Barrio Gaudí in Reus (1968). The project was an alternative to the ubiquitous ‘Corbusian‘ blocks, which Bofill described as ‘living cemeteries‘, and took the form of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of 2,000 dwellings.

These were accessed via multiple courtyards, walkways and footbridges and were striking for their touch of Barragán-style colour. Also inspired by the greats such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, Archigram and the Japanese Metabolists, the Barrio Gaudí was completed in 1968 and was the precursor to a series of similar projects in Spain, including Kafka’s Castle (Sant Pere de Ribes, 1968) and the Red Wall (Calpe, 1973).

Meanwhile, the Taller employed not only architects – including the brilliant Manuel Núñez Yanowsky – but also psychiatrists, philosophers, mathematicians and poets.

«I felt architecture should open up to other disciplines», Bofill explained.

This more modern and advanced thinking was revolutionary for Franco’s Spain then. The city’s mayor stopped the 1970 housing complex Ciudad en el Espacio (1970), a modular system based on a combination of cubic volumes that Taller designed for the Moratalaz neighbourhood of Madrid. At that exact moment, and according to Bofill, he understood that he could no longer work in Spain

One of his best-known projects, Walden 7 (1970-75), a piece of Ciudad en el Espacio moved to the suburbs of Barcelona, was only finished – he says – because he did it all himself: ‘I was the architect, the developer and the contractor‘. Inspired in part by the Maghrebi kasbahs, this building stacks a mathematical combination of 30-square-metre modules on 14 floors to counteract the vagaries of the real estate market: ‘The idea was to be able to join several modules horizontally and vertically according to different needs‘.

In 1971, faced with growing hostility in Spain, Bofill accepted a new challenge in France. Looking for references in the genius loci, he initially experimented with French Gothic – the Petite Cathédrale (1971), not yet built – before opting for his characteristic classicism. When asked to construct large-scale residential complexes on a social housing budget, he opted for industrial prefabricated concrete construction, a French speciality of the time. “For me, prefabrication entailed this kind of modern classicism. When you make a piece that has to be repeated 500 times, it has to be characteristic and very well designed. In the context of a country known for its formal landscaped gardens, we developed a system of classical geometry”. Gone were the compact casbahs that made way for grandiloquent squares and axes inspired by the mathematician John Forbes Nash.

Of the Taller’s many French housing projects, Les Espaces d’Abraxas is best known (Noisy-le-Grand, 1978-83). This thousand-eyed panopticon has enjoyed a successful screen career as a representative of dystopia. We must not conclude without forgetting Les Arcades du Lac (1982) or Les Halles of Paris (1975).