Ricardo Bofill

Ricardo Bofill Leví (; 5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022) was a Spanish architect from Catalonia. 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."

Early life and education

Born in late 1939, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Ricardo Bofill grew up in a well-to-do family with deep Catalan and Barcelonese roots. His grandfather (1860-1938) had been involved in prominent local institutions such as the Institute for Catalan Studies, the , and the . His father Emilio Bofill (1907-2000) was an architect, builder, and developer who studied at ', Catalonia's oldest professional architecture school. Ricardo Bofill would later describe him as "republican, liberal, progressive, austere and logical." Ricardo's mother, Maria Levi (1909-1991), was an Italian of Jewish descent born in Venice, who became a prominent sponsor of Catalan literature and culture in post-war Barcelona.

Bofill went to school at the from 1942, the Catholic in Barcelona from 1949, then at the Lycée français de Barcelone in the 1950s. He spent much of his youth traveling, first with his family and later on his own, and developed a passion for vernacular architecture. In 1957 he enrolled at the ', 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 ' in 1958, which he left in 1960 to return to Spain. His first architecture design was a summer home in Ibiza, completed in 1960. In 1961-1962 he went into Spanish military service for nine months. He was again arrested and briefly incarcerated on political grounds in Barcelona in 1964.

''Taller de Arquitectura''

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 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. 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.

Bofill then started working in France, and gradually introduced symbolic elements into the ''Tallers designs that echo French traditions of classical architecture. In 1971, he was invited by , a key planner of the Cergy-Pontoise urban project, to develop a design concept analogous to that of the in Reus. This morphed into a project named ''La Petite Cathédrale'' ("the small cathedral") but actually intended as a large-scale development, which was approved in 1973 but canceled in 1974. 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 ' 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, 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.

Personal life and death

Bofill met Italian actress Serena Vergano in 1962;; their son Ricardo Emilio Bofill was born in 1965. Bofill and French visual artist Annabelle d'Huart had another son, Pablo Bofill, born in 1980. Both sons eventually worked with their father at Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, and are co-leading the firm as of January 2022. From the 1990s, Bofill lived in Barcelona together with Catalan designer Marta de Vilallonga. In October 2021, he was named in the Pandora Papers.

He died from complications linked to COVID-19 in Barcelona on , at the age of 82.

Selected works

Urban design

* Large-scale master plans for Boston Central Artery (1987), Kobe waterfront (1991), Nansha District in Guangdong (1992), Barcelona Diagonal Mar (1992), Paseo de la Castellana extension in Madrid (1996/1999), Trinity Riverfront in Dallas (2013), Greater Moscow (2013)
* 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''
* Urban neighborhoods in Reus (', 1970), Marne-la-Vallée ('' Les Espaces d'Abraxas'', 1982), Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (''Les Arcades du Lac'', 1982), Cergy-Pontoise (''Le Belvédère Saint-Christophe'', 1985), Stockholm ( På Söder Crescent, 1992), The Hague (', 2004)
* Mohammed VI Polytechnic University campus in Ben Guerir, Morocco (2011/2016)

Buildings

* La Fábrica, headquarters of Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura and residence for Bofill and his family (1975)
* Early housing complexes in Spain based on geometrical pattern combinations: ''El Castillo de Kafka'' (1968), '' Xanadu'' (1971), '' La Muralla Roja'' (1973), '' Walden 7'' (1975)
* Les Échelles du Baroque apartment building in Paris (1985)
* 77 West Wacker Drive