Ricardo Bofill Leví (Catalan:[riˈkaɾðubuˈfiʎləˈβi]; 5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022) was a Spanish architect from
Barcelona,
Spain. He founded
Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura in 1963 and developed it into a leading international architectural and urban design practice. According to architectural historian Andrew Ayers, his creations rank "among the most impressive buildings of the 20th century."[1]
Bofill went to school at the
Escola Virtèlia [
ca] from 1942,[4] the Catholic Escuela Andersen in Barcelona from 1949, then at the
Lycée français de Barcelone in the 1950s.[5]: 249 He spent much of his youth traveling, first with his family and later on his own, and developed a passion for
vernacular architecture.[6] In 1957 he enrolled at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona [
ca], where he engaged in student activism with the unauthorized
Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, and was soon arrested in a demonstration and expelled from the university and from Spain. He moved to Switzerland and enrolled at the Haute École d'art et de design Genève [
fr] in 1958, which he left in 1960 to return to Spain. His first architecture design was a summer home in Ibiza, completed in 1960.[7] In 1961-1962 he went into Spanish
military service for nine months.[5]: 250 He was again arrested and briefly incarcerated on political grounds in Barcelona in 1964.[5]: 252
In 1963, 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 [
ca] in
Reus (1964-1970), El Castillo de Kafka in
Sant Pere de Ribes above
Sitges (1964-1968), Xanadu (1966-1971), and La Muralla Roja (1968-1973) in
Calp.[8] 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.[9] 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.
Bofill then started working in France, and gradually introduced symbolic elements into the Taller's designs that echo French traditions of
classical architecture. In 1971, he was invited by
Bernard Hirsch [
fr], a key planner of the
Cergy-Pontoise urban project, to develop a design concept analogous to that of the Barrio Gaudí in Reus.[5]: 111 This morphed into a project named La Petite Cathédrale ("the small cathedral")[10] but actually intended as a large-scale development, which was approved in 1973 but canceled in 1974.[5]: 255–256 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.[11] Other projects did come to fruition in the villes nouvelles [
fr] 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.[12] 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.[13][14]
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.
Antigone district in
Montpellier, developed from 1979 with many buildings also designed by Bofill and his Taller
Master plan for the redevelopment of the
Kirchberg district in
Luxembourg City (1998), including the creation of the urban square Place de l'Europe and the twin towers of La Porte designed by the Taller
Ricardo Bofill, Hacia una Formalización de la Ciudad en el Espacio, Barcelona: Blume Editorial, 1968
Ricardo Bofill,, L’Architecture d’un Homme (with François Hébert-Stevens), 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)
Circles, 1966. 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, 1969-1970. 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.
Recognition
In a noted study of France's evolving social structures and landscapes published in 2021,[20] political scientist
Jérôme Fourquet and journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely wrote that "the monumental projects designed by Spanish architect Ricardo-Bofill in Noisy-le-Grand (
Les Espaces d'Abraxas), in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (
Les Arcades du Lac) and in Montpellier (the
Antigone neighborhood) are basically the architectural signature of the 1980s" in the country.[21]
Bofill and his Taller de Arquitectura were featured in three exhibitions of the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York City: "Transformations in Modern Architecture" (1979), "Ricardo Bofill and Leon Krier: Architecture, Urbanism, and History" (1985), and "Architecture & Design Drawings: Rotation 3" (2006).[22] They were also featured at the
Venice Biennale in 1980, 1982, and 1992.
Several architects who worked with Bofill went on to create significant architecture firms of their own, notably
Manuel Núñez Yanowsky [
es] in 1978,
Nabil Gholam in 1994, and
Philippe Chiambaretta [
fr] in 2000.
Bjarke Ingels has acknowledged the seminal influence of Bofill's early work such as La Fábrica and Walden 7 on his own vision of what creativity could achieve in architecture.[24]
^
abcdefRicardo Bofill; François Hébert-Stevens (1978). L'Architecture d'un Homme. Paris: Arthaud.
^Sofia Borges (2013). Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura: Towards a Human Vernacular. Berlin.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link)
^Serena Vergano, ed. (2009). Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura: Architecture in the era of local culture and international experience. RBTA. p. 30.