LIVING

He has been garnering press recently for two major works, both of which opened this year: the second terminal at Barcelona’s airport (the first was converted to its marble and glass appearance by Bofill in 1991, preparatory to the Olympic Games) and the controversial W Hotel on Barceloneta’s beach. Yet, paradoxically, his work is otherwise thin on the ground here and there has been a long gap between the buildings mentioned above and his last major local project, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, completed in 1996. But one only needs to venture out to Sant Just Desvern to understand Bofill’s widely-held esteem. Built in 1975 (the year of Franco’s death), Walden 7 is an extraordinary work of New Brutalist architecture, a residential complex of towering geometric volumes covered with terracotta tiles and dotted with covered, cylindrical balconies. The complex, across from the studios of Catalan television, TV3, and clearly visible from the A-2 motorway, was designed to make the building’s residents accessible to each other, to give each apartment both privacy and integration into the whole structure. For many, it symbolises the year zero of New Spanish architecture.

Bofill’s studio, or the Taller de Arquitectura, sits next door to Walden 7, an extraordinary conversion of an abandoned cement factory surrounded by a lush garden. Bofill formed the Taller de Arquitectura in 1963, a multi-disciplined group of architects, artists, philosophers and musicians, a high-brow Catalan equivalent of Madrid’s ‘La Movida’. “When I was growing up, Spain was a ‘grey’ country, everything was shadowy, dirty and dull,” said Bofill in his capacious office with an echo, located in one of the factory’s former silos. “Spanish fascism was brutal.”

Born to an intellectual Catalan-Italian family in 1939, Bofill admits that he had a privileged upbringing, and a rebellious young adulthood. “I was a prodigious child. When I did my thesis at the university I started the students’ union, and I became very involved in anti-fascist politics. But they expelled me from university many times. Fame [in architecture] came quite quickly, in the sense that people were very interested in my work. So I started my first phase in Barcelona with an international, multi-disciplinary team.”