Ricardo Bofill

Ricardo Bofill built things that looked as though they had arrived from a different century, or possibly a different planet. Born in Barcelona in 1939, he founded the Taller de Arquitectura in 1963 and spent the next six decades working across forty countries. He was not a modernist in any orthodox sense, and he was never quite a postmodernist either. He operated in the gaps between those categories, and the work is more interesting for it.

The projects that made his name are well represented here. La Muralla Roja (1973, Calpe) is a fortress of pink and mauve rendered in the geometry of a North African kasbah: social housing as theatrical scenography. Walden 7 (1975, Sant Just Desvern) stacks 450 apartments around five aqua-tiled courtyards in a terracotta tower that Bofill conceived as a genuinely utopian community. Les Espaces d'Abraxas (1982, Marne-la-Vallée) applies monumental postmodern classicism to subsidised housing for Parisian commuters. The conviction running through all three is the same: that ordinary people were owed architectural ambition.

This 2025 edition from gestalten updates an earlier monograph with new photography by Salva López, whose images read the buildings with patience, catching light on La Muralla Roja's facades at moments when the saturation tips from surreal into almost natural. Douglas Murphy, whose architectural writing tends to the structural and the sceptical, contributes text, as does Nacho Alegre, the Apartamento co-founder who approaches buildings more like a magazine editor than a critic. Bofill's own words are included too. Sketches and floor plans sit alongside the photography, making the book function as a working archive as well as a portrait.

Pablo Bofill, who now runs the Taller, co-edited the volume. The result is a monograph with some stake in the official narrative, which a reader should bear in mind. The project record, however, is substantial enough to stand without hagiography.