mono.kultur 36: “Ricardo Bofill”

It is enough to say that Ricardo Bofill is one of Europe’s most famous and prolific architects of the last century. To add any more is to inevitably leave out too much. We like our public figures in snow-globes: apprehensible in their totality, their lives reduced to a byline. This is impossible to do with Bofill. Since the late 1960s, his profile has resembled a dish made from a family recipe: its indefinable singularity is instantly recognisable – at play is always a determined, brazen gall, a commitment to context, an intrepid formal imagination, and a deep penchant for the psychological and surreal – but the exact ingredients, and their ratio, are in constant evolution.
The plainest reason why Bofill’s career is hard to summarise is because he’s done so much: more than 1000 projects designed, over 300 of them built. In his portfolio are furniture designs, city plans, and everything in between. Stylistically, the range is just as wide. There’s social, utopian housing; Spanish coastal vernacular; modular metabolism; Postmodernism; Neo-classicism; and let’s call it ‘business district internationalism’.