According to Spain's "Pioneer", "National" and other media reports, on January 14, local time, architect and urban planner Ricardo Bofill died in Barcelona at the age of 82. Known as one of the most radical architectural visionaries of the 20th century, Ricardo Pofi has more than 1,000 projects in 40 countries around the world, the most famous of which are Walden 7, the Summer Palace, the Red Wall Residence, and other projects that demonstrate his revolutionary approach to urban and architectural design. His studio RBTA wrote in a statement that Pofi's work "is connected to context, has a rich stylistic expression, and embodies a strong spirit of innovation and adventure." ”
Ricardo Pofi in the RBTA studio Credit: gestalten
Born in 1939, Pofi is the son of a construction developer in Barcelona, the son of an italian whose mother is very assertive Italian. As a young man, Pofi was a radical Marxist and anti-Franco dictatorship, so much so that in 1958 he was arrested in a protest march, then forced to drop out of the Barcelona School of Architecture, to Switzerland, and finally completed his architecture studies at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. In 1963, Pofi returned to Barcelona and began his local practice on the basis of a family business. He gathered a group of elites of different professions – architects, engineers, philosophers, writers, sociologists and filmmakers, to set up his own studio, Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), in Barcelona, which for a time had a high reputation.
△ Members of RBTA in various identities in the early days of RBTA
In the practice of his career, Bofi is both prolific and more varied. From developed countries in Europe and the United States to developing countries in Asia and Africa, his works have spread all over the world; from airports, theaters, campuses, corporate headquarters, luxury brand stores, wine cellars to community sports facilities, libraries and ordinary houses as gateways to metropolises; architectural types and standards are all-encompassing; from modern vernacular to contemporary high technology, from postmodern to minimalist... There is no fixed style, only the principle of perseverance that changes from person to person, time to place.
Important works
Walden 7
Aerial view of Walden 7 RBTA
In 1970, Pofi Design completed the most important work of his career, and even one of the most experimental works of contemporary architecture in Spain, built in the residential area of Walden 7 on the outskirts of Barcelona.
Walden's name first came from the Work of the American Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. Beginning in the spring of 1845, Thoreau built a wooden house by Walden Lake in his hometown of Concord, a book that chronicles a series of insights from the author's self-cultivation and self-feeding life for more than two years, like an American personal version of Xanadu. In 1948, the famous American behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner (B.F. Skinner) published works borrowed the name "Walden" and named this utopian concept science fiction novel Taoyuan Ercun. In this book, the author, as a psychologist with the first perspective, visits the communist community that his friends have created based on human behavior, the same philosopher, and four other young people. The community, named "Taoyuan Ercun", creates a perfectly equal but isolated social atmosphere through a rigorous and scientific behavioral management model. In the end, the philosopher chose to leave, while the psychologist chose to stay after a series of psychological struggles. The story is based on Skinner's dissatisfaction with the American political system at the time and the continuation of the utopian trend that originated in the 19th century, while also expressing the author's confidence that scientific research such as behavior can improve society.
Boffy's work, named Walden 7, was influenced by the ideas of these two books, especially the second one. Finally completed in 1975, the project is a collection of 446 apartments. The apartments are spread over 18 special-shaped towers with a maximum of 16 floors and a rooftop garden and swimming pool. The towers are connected to each other like a man-made concrete forest, with 7 atriums enclosing the middle of the body. The atrium is not covered, like an exaggerated deep patio, pointing straight to the sky. Due to the complex way the apartments are constructed, the unfamiliar will feel that the whole building is a vertical maze.
Towering atrium Photo: Yang Tianzhou
La Fabrica, the headquarters of the RBTA studio
La Fabrica appearance RBTA
Next to Walden 7 sits La Fabrica, the headquarters of the RBTA studio. Formerly an abandoned cement factory consisting of 30 cement silos and rooms for large industrial machines, Pofi decided to renovate the former industrial park in 1973, which took two years to complete.
The transformed La Fabrica is a mixed-use mix of work, assembly and living that looks like a sacred manor – huge cement buildings towering into the sky and covered in layers of plants. Lush vegetation around the building and roof make the original cold concrete structure more human. In the interior space, Pofi has largely preserved its original structure, while adding elements of traditional Catalan architecture, such as slender arched windows, transforming the huge cylindrical silos into sun-filled offices.
La Fabrica Indoor RBTA
Red-walled dwellings
The left is the red wall, and the right is the summer house RBTA
Red Wall House, RBTA, 1963
Compared with the more than two decades of Bofi's architectural practice based in France, and the contemporary architectural creation that returned to Spain after 2000, Walden 7, Red Wall and Summer Palace are classics that can more purely reflect Pofi's regional complex and surrealist design methods.
Especially in the last red-walled houses, Pofi's construction ideas are more mature. He set multiple metaphors in the form of the entire building. Among them, the architectural plan reflects the classical Greek cross, the solid external shape and the spatial experience of the staircase, platform, and bridge interspersed with the inner courtyard, referring to the North Fortress, which is usually built on the rocky cliffs on the Mediterranean side, and the use of precise geometry and strong color design techniques highlights the typical constructivist practice. This somewhat bizarre combination of prototypes and reconstructed design methods, coupled with the constant change of natural light, makes an everyday residential building give birth to the energy that can dialogue with the mountains and seas, and then become the dream home that Pofi intends to present.
Red Wall House Credit: gestalten
Parisian settlement
Paris settlement (Les Espaces d'Abraxas) RBTA
Pofi's architectural language underwent a radical change in the 1980s, from an early utopian experiment to a combination of modernism and classicism, drawing heavily on the Renaissance and Baroque styles, especially in the residential projects he designed around Paris during this period.
The Les Espaces d'Abraxas complex is a residential project designed by Pofi on the outskirts of Paris, consisting of 3 individual buildings, namely "Le Palacio", "Le Thé tre" and "L'Arc". "Le Palacio" is an 18-storey, high-density apartment with a total of 441 units; "Le Thé tre" is a semi-circular apartment with a total of 130 units; "L'Arc" is located in the middle of the two, looking like an arch that stands alone in the center, with only 9 floors with a total of 20 units. The project is intended to be a monumental and symbolic building in the location of the new residential area, so Pofi adopts many Baroque design techniques to bring a strong sense of ceremony to the building.
Red-walled homes, Parisian settlements... These works, completed by Bofi in the 1960s and 1980s, often appeared in later games, film and television creations, which is not unrelated to his avant-garde nature. In 2020, In an interview with the media about the future of architecture, Bofi noted that "at certain times in history, especially moments of change, architecture has always been ahead of the society in which she lives." "From an artistic point of view, architecture is the art of constructing space, one of the most important things in history. But now it's evolved into a withering plastic art, a character that needs to be retrieved. Looking back at the Renaissance, architects and painters of the time were ahead of their time, creating works that were ahead of their time. But today, on the contrary, the progress and development of social, political and economic conditions precede architecture, which lags behind. Architecture's ability to conceive of the future is fading, "and it's a shame for me. Because one of the functions of this profession is to design over the years, such work is done for the next 300 years. Design needs to be able to meet the future, and design needs to have a future subject. ”
(This article is based on comprehensive reports such as Youfang Space, Global Knowledge Lei Feng WeChat public account andarchdaily website)