Video: How Ricardo Bofill's retro buildings won the hearts of today's youth
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The mysterious pink building that now and then appears in the Instagram feed and in the clips of popular performers, gloomy cyclopean buildings with a touch of classics, against which the battles of the Hunger Games trilogy unfold - all these are the creations of an architect who dreamed of "healing cities" and determined the vector of architecture development for decades to come. What Ricardo Bofill built in the 70s has taken on new life in our time …
Ricardo Bofill was born in 1939 in the family of an architect, and since childhood he did not see himself in any other profession. According to him, professional dynasties are not so rare for Catalonia! By the way, his son also chose this path for himself. Bofill's mother, Maria Levy, instilled in him the rules of secular etiquette and the ability to conduct business negotiations. Bofill spent his early years in the circles of the Catalan cultural elite, absorbing, like a sponge, ideas, thoughts and concepts. Bofill studied architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In those years, he was fascinated by the organic direction in architecture - the fusion of a building with nature, comfort, coziness, tactile materials and ingenuity of form. He felt himself to be the successor of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto and learned well that the building should not only be functional and compositionally verified, but also reflect the spirit of the place, be harmoniously inscribed in the environment. Bofill was fascinated by ancient European cities, the spirit of the times, the dust of centuries - and the ideas of Le Corbusier, who proposed to simply demolish all historical buildings and fill the world with rational, geometrized, devoid of color and decor, architecture, of course, comfortable, but impersonal, were horrified. However, Le Corbusier is rather an exception. Bofill did not like to criticize and compete. "I am friends with everyone!" - he says in an interview. And not only with architects, but also with mathematicians, sociologists, cultural scientists, physicists … An interdisciplinary approach is what Bofill sees as a prospect for the development of architecture.
Ricardo Bofill realized his first project almost as a teenager - he was barely seventeen! It was a small house in Ibiza with thick curved walls and small windows like loopholes, both modernist and medieval. In all his projects, he strives to combine historicism and modernity. Bofill is called a postmodernist and even a pioneer of architectural postmodernism, but he himself rarely describes his work with this word, preferring "historicism" or "neoclassicism".
In 1962, Bofill went on a "free float" and organized his own architectural bureau. Six years later, he erected the "Kafka Castle" (a reference to the absurdist novel of the writer) in the town of Sant Pere de Ribes near his beloved Barcelona. And he woke up famous. A gloomy building of purple cubes rises on a hill. It overlooks Sitges Bay. Critics were quite surprised when they learned that this is not a museum complex or the abode of a mad millionaire, but … a residential complex. Ninety inhabited capsule-cubes, as if chaotically piled on top of each other. This was the beginning of a series of socially significant projects. Bofill is not interested in private villas, but in apartment buildings and entire neighborhoods.
The most famous residential complex in Bofilla is La Muralla Roja (translated from Spanish as "Red Wall"). It contains references to both traditional Moorish architecture and Soviet constructivism. Broken, angular shapes, a complex system of communications and thoughtful connections of residential blocks, a mastered roof with a swimming pool and solarium, but the main thing is color. In the rays of the sun, La Muralla Roja takes on the same pink shade that millennials are now incredibly fond of. So, thanks to its unusual color, which contrasts with the blue of the sea and the sky, today the architectural masterpiece of the late 60s has become an “Instagram star”. Today, clips and lookbooks of new collections are being shot in the apartments of the Red Wall.
Another Bofill project that has regained popularity in our time is, again, a residential complex - Les Espaces d'Abraxas in France. It reflects the urban planning ideas of the Catalan architect, who believes that apartment buildings should protect the privacy of citizens and at the same time be symbolic, filled with poetry. “Cities don't have to be destroyed, but healed,” says Bofill. He opposes the zoning and isolation of urban areas. Les Espaces d'Abraxas buildings merge with nature, their monumental forms are inspired by the classic architecture, reworked, author's reinterpretation. Les Espaces d'Abraxas was not particularly fond of the French, but it served the cinema well, having appeared in many films - from Terry Gilliam's Brazil to the Hunger Games trilogy, where he embodied the pathos and abandonment of a dystopian world in the best possible way.
Bofill is by no means a “shoemaker without boots,” and his residence, The Factory, is also one of the iconic buildings of the 20th century. The abandoned cement factory, which no one seemed to have designed, but rebuilt a million times, perfectly preserved, became for Bofill a real home, a source of inspiration, and a springboard for further experiments. "Factory" continues to be rebuilt for four decades without interruption - this is its meaning. It will never be finished.
For fifty years of tireless creative work, Bofill has developed more than a thousand projects that can hardly be attributed to any particular style - for example, the futuristic Hotel W in Barcelona is completely different from the Xanadu resort house with its medieval forms, and the rhythmic complex Walden 7 cannot be confused with a cozy Church of the Virgin of Meritxell, but they are all about love. To man and to architecture, to modernity and to history …
And today, with many complaining about the crisis of ideas and at the same time nostalgic for bygone times, Bofill's romantic and brutalist fantasies inspire a younger generation of creative people.
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