(Barcelona) “Star architect”, very renowned – but sometimes criticized – in France, the Spaniard Ricardo Bofill, who died Friday at the age of 82 from complications linked to COVID-19, signed hundreds of achievements in the world with an obsession to put man at the center of space.
Posted at 9:57 a.m.
“Architecture is man’s victory over the irrational”, he liked to say, driven by the obsession to create a different architectural “language” organizing space around man.
Over the course of his career, Bofill entered the very exclusive club of “star architects” to which Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel belong.
” The “star system” caught me in France in 1974. At that time, architects were beginning to be important, to have a preponderant role in society and that forged a great reputation for me, ”he said in an interview published in May 2020 by the Spanish daily ABC.
Anti-Franco
Born on December 5, 1939 in Barcelona to a Catalan architect father and a Venetian mother, Ricardo Bofill Levi entered the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1957, from which he was expelled for anti-Franco activism, before continue his studies in Geneva.
Back in his hometown, in a Spain still under the thumb of the dictator Francisco Franco, he joined with other young intellectuals (architects, engineers, writers, filmmakers, sociologists and philosophers) a group called the “Divine Left and in 1963 created his architectural studio, the Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.
This workshop, installed in an old cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona and with branches in Paris, Montpellier, New York, Tokyo, Chicago or Beijing, has signed more than 1000 projects all over the world.
Whole neighborhoods in France
PHOTO LIONEL BONAVENTURE, FRANCE PRESS AGENCY
Ricardo Bofill has signed large social housing complexes, such as the Abraxas spaces in Noisy-le-Grand, in the suburbs of Paris, where several scenes of Brazil by Terry Gilliam.
We owe in particular to the workshop of Ricardo Bofill the airport of Barcelona, the National Theater of Catalonia, the Palace of Congresses in Madrid or the skyscrapers Donnelley and Dearborn in Chicago.
In France, where he is particularly appreciated, Bofill has signed large social housing complexes, such as the Espaces d’Abraxas in Noisy-le-Grand, in the suburbs of Paris, where several scenes of Brazil, cult science fiction film by Terry Gilliam (1985), or the Antigone district in Montpellier.
With the ambition to create urban utopias “in highly monumental classical language on a scale never seen before”, writes Douglas Murphy in the book Ricardo Bofill: Visions of Architecture.
But on the ground, degraded and criticized by some residents, the Espaces d’Abraxas were almost demolished.
“Destroying them would be a lack of culture,” said Ricardo Bofill in an interview with the French daily Le Monde in 2014. While acknowledging that he had “failed to change the city”.
Done doctor honoris causa by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia last September, Bofill then underlined that “faced with the dormitory town model”, he had made “the bet to create neighborhoods with mixed functions, but always defending urban continuity, the street and the place” as a place of social life.
At a time when, in the United States in particular, city centers were disappearing to make way for cars and shopping malls.
Tuareg villages
Obsessed with the organization of space, Ricardo Bofill was inspired in particular by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance or even French architects of the 17th century.and and XVIIIand centuries François Mansart and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
But also Tuareg villages where this self-proclaimed “nomad” went to seek ideas at the start of his career.
“I think I know how to do two things: […] design cities […] and try to invent different architectural languages and never repeat them,” he pointed out last June during a conference in Barcelona.
A rejection of repetition that made him love Antonio Gaudí, a Catalan like him, whom he described as “the greatest genius in history” who “never repeated two elements or forms”.
Rewarded by numerous international architectural prizes, Ricardo Bofill was an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters.