Ricardo Bofill  

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Ricardo Bofill Leví (5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022) was a Spanish architect who developed a leading international architectural and urban design practice. He is known for such buildings as Xanadu (1971), La Muralla Roja (1973) and Walden 7 (1975). His work has been described as part Gaudí, part Archigram and Bofill's opus is cited as significant in European postmodern architecture.

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Taller de Arquitectura

In 1963, Ricardo Bofill and a group of close friends created Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (Ricardo Bofill Architecture Workshop), initially hosted in his father's construction business with offices on Plaça de Catalunya in the center of Barcelona. Building on Catalan traditions of craftsmanship, he enlisted architects and engineers but also writers and artists into a multidisciplinary effort, which later branched into urban design and urban planning. The team experimented on original methodologies based on three-dimensional modular geometries, such as those of the Gaudi District in Reus (1964-1970), El Castillo de Kafka in Sant Pere de Ribes above Sitges (1965-1968), Xanadu (1966-1971), and La Muralla Roja (1968-1973) in Calp. The same thinking was developed on a larger scale with the project La Ciudad en el Espacio ("The City in Space"), whose construction started in the Moratalaz area of Madrid in 1970 but was abruptly stopped by Francoist mayor Carlos Arias Navarro. It was instead realized with the construction of Walden 7 in Sant Just Desvern near Barcelona (1970-1975). These projects were recognized as exemplars of critical regionalism and can be viewed as a reaction against both architectural modernism and the Francoist dictatorship in Spain.

In a context of tense political situation in Spain, Bofill started exploring opportunities abroad in the 1970s. He started a second team in Paris, and gradually introduced symbolic elements into the Taller's designs that echo French traditions of classical architecture. A seminal concept of the period was the 1971 project of La Petite Cathédrale ("the small cathedral"), actually intended as a large-scale development in Cergy-Pontoise but which remained unbuilt. Another major development was a competition-winning concept for Les Halles in Paris in 1975, whose construction subsequently started but was reversed in 1978 by the newly elected mayor Jacques Chirac. Other projects did come to fruition in the Villes nouvelles around Paris which offered a favorable environment for large-scale experimentation, including Les Espaces d'Abraxas in Marne-la-Vallée and Les Arcades du Lac in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. This phase culminated in the expansive Antigone new district of Montpellier in Southern France, for which Bofill presented the initial master plan in 1978. It is associated with both large-scale industrialization in precast concrete and classical forms and geometries in contemporary architecture, which Bofill called "modern classicism". As a consequence, Bofill opus is often cited as that one of the most representative and signififant postmodern architects to have lived and created in Europe.

From the mid-1980s on, he increasingly shifted to glass and steel for the materials used in his projects, while still using a classical vocabulary of columns and pediments. Representative projects of that period include the 77 West Wacker Drive office tower in Chicago, the extension of Barcelona Airport ahead of the 1992 Summer Olympics, and the National Theater of Catalonia, also in Barcelona.

In 2000, Bofill re-centralized the activities of the Taller at its head office near Barcelona. His designs in more recent years gradually shed his classical decorative vocabulary of the 1980s and 1990s, while retaining a highly formal sense of geometry. Representative buildings of this more recent period include the W Barcelona Hotel on the Barcelona seafront and the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco.

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Selected works

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Urban design

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Buildings

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Books

  • Ricardo Bofill, Hacia una Formalización de la Ciudad en el Espacio, Barcelona: Blume Editorial, 1968
  • Ricardo Bofill, L’Architecture d’un Homme, Paris: Arthaud, 1978
  • Ricardo Bofill and Jean-Louis André, Espaces d’une vie, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989 (Translated into Spanish as Espacio y Vida, 1990, and in Italian as Spazi di una vita, 1996)
  • Ricardo Bofill and Nicolas Véron, L’Architecture des villes, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995
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Films

  • Circles, 1968. Color, 35 mm, 17 minutes. Directed by Ricardo Bofill and Carles Durán. Actors: Serena Vergano, Salvador Clotas. Phography: Juan Amorós. Presented at Festival de Tours, France, 1968
  • Schizo, 1970. Color, 35 mm, 60 minutes. Directed by Ricardo Bofill, Carles Durán and Manolo Núñez Yanosvski. Actors: Serena Vergano, Modesto Bertrán. Phography: Juan Amorós. Choreography: Antonio Miralles. Presented at 48 Mostra Cinematografica Internazionale di Venezia, Sala Volpi, 1991.


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See also


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