Freedom is incompatible with love. A lover is at all times a slave.
– Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) French author and mental.
These are my rules, and in case you don’t like them… properly, I’ve others.
– Groucho Marx (1890-1977) American comic, actor, and author.
Ricardo Bofill at all times moved freely, a freedom exercised from a younger age and that accompanied him all through his life. Freedom is hard and troublesome to handle, because it implies that nothing nor anybody decides for you. Solely you’re liable for your actions, your selections and, on daily basis, on each new challenge, each resolution is made alone. Accountability is rarely shared and subsequently, one is condemned to loneliness.
Bofill completely embodied this freedom assumed as loneliness. His reluctance to share selections with anybody made him an austere particular person, centered on work and reserved. His life was filled with paradoxes and contradictions, of self-centeredness and loneliness, of successes and failures, of ups and downs and all of that might solely be understood from a single thought: Freedom.
Freedom to study
Bofill had 4 vital pillars in his coaching as an architect: the household, the College of Barcelona, the College of Geneva, and being self-taught. Emilo Bofill and María Levi, his dad and mom, have been centered on Bofill after his older brother, José, handed away, and pushed him to proceed the household enterprise and change into an architect like his father. The College of Barcelona gave him the primary years of studying and made it simpler for him to satisfy different architects, who, years later have been colleagues, associates, and enemies. Ricardo’s expulsion from the College for his communist hyperlinks and attitudes induced his departure to Switzerland, the place he completed his research.
Bofill was additionally an autodidactic who continually redrew and traced works by different nice architects to study, observe and perceive their structure. To look at is discovering the variations that we’ve got between comparable realities, to grasp is looking for the coincidences we discover between completely different realities.
In the future Bofill advised me that the plan of a constructing exhibits the boundaries of structure, however the part exhibits the standard of the areas.
Freedom to work
The Taller de Arquitectura was fashioned round 1962-63 however was consolidated in 1964 because of starting the design the Barri Gaudí in Reus. The start of the Taller was centered within the first years round two folks: Ricardo Bofill and his first cousin Xavier Bague, however Ramón Collado, Ricardo’s foster brother and son of the Bofill household’s maid, instantly joined the staff. Over time, Collado additionally studied structure and at last took an lively half within the initiatives and particularly within the building administration that they carried out throughout the next years. Shortly after, Manolo Núñez Yanowsky (1942-) joined, an incredible sketcher with a background in theater able to imitating the type of any painter. He was launched to Bofill and Bague by Catalan theater designer and director Fabià Puigserver. The membership of Bofill and Bague within the clandestine communist social gathering PSUC facilitated sure contacts with some Russian exiles, amongst whom was Núñez Yanowsky. The Taller started to develop little by little, incorporating some thinkers similar to Salvador Clotas and José Agustín Goytisolo (1928-1999), a person of nice tradition who collaborated along with his concepts and arguments.
It’s throughout this era that Bofill met Serena Vergano and Peter Hodgkinson, each of whom have been a part of the Taller to today. Hodgkinson got here to Spain from the UK the place he studied structure on the Architectural Affiliation and the place he met some members of Archigram and Group 10. His strong educational coaching helped his growth and development inside the construction of the Taller performing an important position within the growth of the manager initiatives and within the realization of particulars, fashions and including a dose of realism that facilitated the development of the proposed concepts.
The Taller has at all times been structured round Bofill, with two artistic pillars that fashioned: Núñez Yanowsky and Hodgkinson. Núñez Yanowsky was the artistic, theatrical visionary and Hodgkinson redirected his histrionic concepts by imposing order, structuring them and caring for the development. Bague and Collado have been secondary but in addition essential.
The Taller meant to be a multidisciplinary follow round structure, headed by Bofill. It was a neighborhood impressed by “The Manufacturing unit,” which included writers, critics, mathematicians, architects, and every kind of people that may contribute concepts to the work that was being executed. However most of those collaborators ended up leaving the Taller, combating with Bofill for his rising position and for making selections unilaterally. The incorporation of Jean Pierre Carniaux (who joined in 1976 and opened the New York workplace in 1986) and the loyalty of Hodgkinson ended up with them being the definitive companions of the Taller, which ceased to be multidisciplinary and have become the Ricardo Bofill agency.
Freedom to create
The Taller was based with the clear thought of placing an finish to Le Corbusier’s linear block and creating a complete neighborhood that may facilitate the connection between neighbors and the town. He started to hold out modular and aggregative techniques analysis that lasted about 12 years, which may be probably the most fascinating interval of his profession. The initiatives that got here out of this analysis—Kafka’s Citadel, Crimson Wall, Walden 7—definitely gave him worldwide fame.
When he started to construct in France, he deserted aggregative techniques to change into extra fascinated by prefabrication and postmodern structure, which led him to change into a world architect, constructing a skyscraper in Chicago. The previous couple of years have been centered on massive interventions in neighborhoods and cities with an eclectic type and a few influences from the previous.
Bofill’s profession has been irregular, with surprising and infrequently inexplicable stylistic twists. He was at all times bold and wanting to develop and it is extremely potential that these modifications have been brought on by the affect of trend, modifications within the scale of the initiatives, the accessible expertise or the affect of his collaborators. He by no means justified his modifications in type, he by no means wished to be linked to any college, he by no means wished to have followers or create any kind of college; he at all times moved with absolute freedom with out having to clarify his selections to anybody.
Private freedom
On a private stage, he was in keeping with that spirit of freedom. He was untrue to anybody, as an example the fixed altering of companions, the main target within the Taller in addition to in his personal life. He had two kids with two completely different girls to finish up with a 3rd one along with the innumerable lovers he had, that solely provides us an thought of the sexual freedom he maintained all through his life. His political beliefs had additionally modified all through his life, from being a communist to constructing a skyscraper in Chicago’s Loop and different completely costly buildings for personal firms.
He was Jewish by delivery, but in addition in love with the international locations of the Maghreb, and this exhibits his whole freedom of perception and little religiosity.
An architect centered on his work, who didn’t hesitate to be the middle of gossip magazines when his son married the daughter of Julio Iglesias, throwing a spectacular banquet in his studio. Ricardo Bofill, a contradictory, good, untrue, selfish, and controversial architect, however who at all times has been and at all times will likely be a free spirit.