Son of the architect and builder Ricardo Bofill Benessat and the Venetian Maria Levi, Ricardo Bofill Levi was born in Barcelona in 1939, where he began his studies of architecture, although he earned his degree from the Geneva School of Architecture in 1962. In 1963, he founded the Taller d’Arquitectura (RBTA), a team formed by architects, engineers, sociologists and writers – including the English architect Peter Hodgkinson (starting in 1966) and the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Carniaux (starting in 1976) – who rounded out the Taller’s international contingent. Today, the Taller is a studio with offices in Paris (1978), New York (1979), and Barcelona, where the headquarters it has occupied since the 1970s, La Fàbrica, an old cement factory renovated by the Taller, is perhaps the first model intervention in Spanish industrial heritage.

A child prodigy, who was unruly and imaginative, he had an immense capacity for finding new ways to spark the interest of critics and politicians, while stirring the pot with his work and turning his inventions into a commercial brand. The first phase in his career, through 1975, which had a certain hippie quality yet was framed by the gauche divine, centred on experiments with residential buildings that are theorized in his book: Towards a Formalization of the City in Space (1968). The projects and complexes for the Gaudí District in Reus, La Manzanera in Calp, Walden 7 in Sant Just Desvern, and The City in Space in Moratalaz represent an urban alternative to the neighbourhoods formed by seried residential blocks typical of the International Style, instead combining private domestic uses with the shared uses of leisure in a single structure. These volumetric configurations, the result of modular combinations, achieved a visibility in the foreign media that was unprecedented for Spanish architecture up to that time. They were not as well-received at home, with the exception of Òscar Tusquets, due to the impact of their striking colours, innovative textures, and monumental scale. It is not surprising that Ricardo Bofill became one of the first “starchitects”. In 1973, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Cross) from the Government of Catalonia.

The three projects that formed the winning competition entry for Les Halles de Paris (1973-1975) confirmed a definitive linguistic turn towards a prefabricated and didactic classicism, both for their Beaux Arts semantics and syntax in plan, and for their new urban principles in which squares and streets played the role of shaping neighbourhoods. This was the beginning of a second prolific professional phase, with its epicentre in France, and which continued through the year 2000. The text “Les Espaces d’Abraxas: the Palace, the Theatre, the Arch” (1981) accounts for this new industrially produced iconographic repertoire that ended up colonizing large stretches of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (the Arcades, the Viaduct, the Palaces), Marne-la-Vallée (the Palace, the Theatre and the Arch), and Cergy-Pontoise (the Columns) on the outskirts of Paris and in Montpellier, in what has been called “the people’s Versailles”. Comparable projects were also built outside France, with neighbourhoods in The Hague, Stockholm, Baghdad, Beijing, and agricultural towns in Algeria. RBTA will be remembered, among other things, for its kaleidoscopic imagery associated with social housing. The MoMA sanctified this movement with the exhibition Architecture, Urbanism and History (1985) on Bofill and Leon Krier. It received honours in the US (1985) and in France (1988 and 1995).

Before the turn of the new millennium, RBTA had achieved the status of an internationally prestigious firm. Two new professional fronts proved especially fertile: the design of green spaces, in a defence of sustainability; and large facilities and corporate headquarters catering to the world of high tech. The Turia River Gardens (València 1981), the Riouxa Park (Vigo 1991), the Manzanares Park (Madrid 2003), the plan for the Moscow Agglomeration (2012), and the proposal for the Noble Qur’an Oasis in Saudi Arabia (2014) all show this commitment to contact with a domesticated nature, sometimes designed using imposing geometric shapes inspired by the Baroque. On the other front, in which a simplified classicism and high technology come together, the Madrid Congress Centre (1993), the National Theatre of Catalonia (1997), the T1 (1991) and T2 (2010) airport terminals in Barcelona, and the Qingdao Airport (2013), as well as the West Wacker Drive skyscrapers in Chicago (1992), the Casablanca Twin Centre (1998) and the Hotel Vela in Barcelona (2009) show this process of abandoning historicist gestures to embrace the technological future. For his constant commitment to the discipline and to geometric precision, it is impossible to deny Bofill’s stature as one of the masters. Bofill died in Barcelona in 2022. The Polytechnic University of Catalonia had awarded him an honorary doctorate the previous year.

Biography by Andrés Martínez-Medina and Justo Oliva Meyer

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