<\/p>\n
Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect behind some of the world’s most impressive buildings, died on Friday in a hospital in Barcelona. He was 82 years old.<\/p>\n
His son Pablo said the cause was Covid-19.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Among Mr. Bovell’s best works were public housing projects, most of which were built in France in the 1980s, with classic over-sized elements, which were both derided as comic and praised by critics as the long-awaited middle ground among the historical. and modernity.<\/p>\n
He began his career with a series of small projects in Spain that followed engineering rules at times to mind-boggling extremes. Designed in 1968 and completed in 1973, La Muralla Roja, in the port city of Calpe, reimagined the North African kasbah as a vivid floral set of walls and stairs as if arranged by M.C. Escher.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Another housing project from the same period, Walden 7, outside Barcelona, \u200b\u200bconsists of 22 towers grouped around five courtyards, their exteriors painted in earthen ocher and their courtyard facades dark aqua.<\/p>\n
But what prompted Mr. Bofill was more than just an aesthetic exploration. His son Pablo said in an interview that his goal was to “prove that for a modest cost you can build social housing where every floor is different, where people don’t have to walk endless corridors, and where different population groups can be part of a single community.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
By the 1980s, Mr. Bovell had begun to use historical details as superficial decoration – a hallmark of the style that became known as postmodernism. And for a good part of that decade, it served him well.<\/p>\n
In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a display of his work, including color photographs of a number of residential projects in and around Paris. The first building built, Les Arcades du Lac, was a giant copy of a 17th-century French garden, with apartment blocks standing for hedges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Another, known as Les Espaces d’Abraxas, reinvented and repurposed classic elements into disturbing, otherworldly combinations; It features vast pillars made not of stone but of reflective glass. This project has often been described as a kind of “Versailles for the people”. But its contrasting juxtaposition made it look miserable\u2014and it served as the perfect backdrop for Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, “Brazil,” and the latest “Hunger Games.”<\/p>\n
Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New York Times at the time, wrote in 1985 that it was Mr. Bovell’s gift “to be able to unite the French instinct towards antiquarianism, which has lie dormant since the days when the Beaux-Arts ruled French architecture, with the most inclinations A modernity in the country towards populism.<\/p>\n
Mr. Goldberger visited four Bofill projects that he called “collectively, the most important body of architectural work to have been constructed in Paris in a generation.” He was particularly interested in The Scales of the Baroque, a 300-unit development in the doomed 14th arrondissement, classically detailed and arranged around tightly composed public spaces. He described it as as important to Paris as the Center Pompidou.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But the impact of the project has proven to be limited. Postmodernism was short-lived, and Mr. Bofill returned to doing more traditional work.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs postmodernism became accepted and popular in the United States and around the world, it also became a style,\u201d Bofill told Vladimir Belogolovsky in a 2016 interview with ArchDaily. \u201cAnd as time went on, it became ridiculous and even cliched. I’m no longer interested in that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ricardo Bofill Levi was born into a prominent Catalan family in Barcelona on December 5, 1939, months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. His father, Emilio Bofill, was an architect and developer. His mother was Maria Levi of Venice who became a patron of the arts in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
Ricardo developed an interest in architecture when his father took him to visit work sites. But when he thought of a career in architecture, he was immediately inspired and frustrated. Growing up under dictator Francisco Franco, he explained in a 1989 essay, \u201cYou dream of freedom and great travels. I left as fast as I could.\u201d<\/p>\n
It happened after he became a student – and student activist – at the Escola T\u00e8cnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona. During an anti-Franco demonstration in 1958, he was arrested and expelled from school.<\/p>\n
He moved to Geneva to continue his architectural education. While there, he told Mr. Belogolovsky: \u201cMy true passion ignited when I discovered the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. I am attached to organic architecture, buildings that integrate with nature.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1960, he designed a summer home for a relative on the island of Ibiza, a modest stucco building that looks close to nature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
He founded his company, Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, in Barcelona in 1963. In 1975, the company\u2014and Mr. Bofill\u2014moved to La F\u00e1brica, a 32,000-square-foot former cement plant outside Barcelona, \u200b\u200bwhich he spent decades turning into a habitable ruin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Five years ago he had proposed a housing project for Madrid called City in the Space, an infinitely expandable structure with turrets, turrets, and, in some designs, a crazy quilt of colorful patterns.<\/p>\n
According to Pablo Bofill, the project was led by the Mayor of Madrid, Franco’s ally, to tell Mr. Bofill he would never build in Spain again. Mr. Bovell decided to start a new life in Paris, where he won the commission to replace the markets called Les Halles. His scheme was already under construction when the mayor of that city, Jacques Chirac, kicked him out of the project.<\/p>\n
However, by 1985 his innovative public residence had made Mr. Beauville a star in the French architectural scene. But over the years projects outside Paris have become a symbol of violence and filth, and there has been a movement to demolish Les Espaces d’Abraxas. But the population repelled the wrecking ball.<\/p>\n
In a 2014 interview with Le Monde, Mr. Bovell said: “My experience in France has been partly successful and partly unsuccessful.” He said that he succeeded in introducing new styles and new construction methods. But he added, “It failed because when you’re young, you’re so utopian, you think you’re going to change the city, and in the end nothing happens.”<\/p>\n
Along with his son Pablo and another son, Ricardo Emilio, who together run the Bofill studio, among the survivors are four grandchildren and Bofill’s longtime partner, industrial designer Marta de Villalunga. Pablo Bofill said Mr. Bofill had never married, but had three former long-term partners.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Bofill has completed three buildings in the United States: the Shepherd Column School of Music at Rice University in Houston and two office buildings in Chicago. His firm’s work has also included offices for Shiseido in Tokyo, academic buildings for the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco and the W Hotel in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
In an unexpected twist, Mr. Bofill’s old buildings have found new fans in the 21st century. “Westworld,” an HBO science fiction series, was filmed in part in La F\u00e1brica, and “Squid Game,” Korean television’s juggernaut, featuring sets that look very similar to La Muralla Roja.<\/p>\n
Bofill’s buildings and others have become familiar Instagram backdrops\u2014or, in the words of Manuel Clavel Rojo, a Spanish architect and educator, “his buildings became popular icons towards the end of his career.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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