Ricardo Bofill Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Ricardo Bofill (1939-2022) was a Spanish architect from Barcelona and the founder of the Taller de Arquitectura, a multidisciplinary team of architects, writers, philosophers and engineers. In the 1960s and 1970s the Taller built utopian housing such as Walden 7, Xanadú and La Muralla Roja, and turned a disused cement factory into Bofill’s own studio and home, La Fábrica. In the 1980s he became known for monumental social housing in France and later for airports, towers and hotels around the world.

Barcelona and the Taller de Arquitectura

Bofill was born in Barcelona in 1939, the son of an architect and builder. He studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture until he was expelled in 1957 for political activity against the Franco regime, and completed his studies in Geneva. In 1963 he founded the Taller de Arquitectura with a group that included his sister Anna Bofill, the poet José Agustín Goytisolo and the architects Peter Hodgkinson and Manuel Núñez Yanowsky.

Utopian housing in Spain

The Taller’s early works explored new ways of living together. The apartment building on Carrer de Johann Sebastian Bach in Barcelona (1965), the Barrio Gaudí in Reus, Xanadú (1971) and La Muralla Roja (1973) in Calp, with its labyrinth of pink and blue stairs and courtyards, and Walden 7 in Sant Just Desvern (1975) all treated housing as a three-dimensional city of terraces, bridges and shared spaces.

La Fábrica

In 1973 Bofill bought a ruined cement factory next to the site of Walden 7 and spent years transforming it into the Taller’s studio and his home. Completed in 1975 and continually altered afterwards, La Fábrica keeps the factory’s concrete silos and chambers, now covered with plants and opened with tall arched windows. It remains the office of Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.

Classicism in France and global work

From the late 1970s the Taller built large social housing complexes in the new towns around Paris, such as Les Espaces d’Abraxas in Noisy-le-Grand (1982), and the Antigone district in Montpellier, in a monumental prefabricated classicism. Later works include the Barcelona Airport Terminal 1 (2009), the W Barcelona hotel (2009) and buildings in the United States, Asia and the Middle East. Bofill died in Barcelona in January 2022.