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January 26, 2022
January 15, 2022
Ricardo Bofill, December 1939 - January 2022
Ricardo Bofill passed away yesterday in Barcelona. Obituaries are multiplying and generally emphasize his boldness, unique sense of scale and space, and unwillingness to yield to convention or fads. For me he had been a mentor and friend for nearly three decades, since I completed my training at Ecole Polytechnique with a three-months internship at his firm's offices in Barcelona and Paris, in the spring and early summer of 1992.
He subsequently offered to work together on a book of ideas about urban design, which was written in French and published in 1995 (L'Architecture des villes, Odile Jacob publishing). For this I had multiple preparatory discussions with him, at his famed house and offices near Barcelona, at his no less memorable family house in Mont-ras off the Costa Brava, or at the apartment he kept at that time by his firm's Paris office. After the book was done, we did not lose touch and I visited regularly in Barcelona and/or Mont-ras. I have also been in frequent contact with Pablo, his younger son, who was more often in Paris, especially in recent years.
He had a powerful vision of the importance of architecture and of livable cities, which he expressed first and foremost in his projects but also in numerous writings. A recent synthesis is in the lecture he gave a few months ago when the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) awarded him an honorary doctoral degree, a kind of reparation gesture (for which the UPC's Félix Solaguren-Beascoa deserves much credit) 64 years after having expelled him as an anti-Francoist student in 1957. I was greatly honored to be invited to participate in a series of pre-recorded tributes delivered during that ceremony, together with Elia Taniguchi, Paolo Portoghesi, and Norman Foster; the video of the event includes Prof. Solaguren-Beascoa's oration, the four tributes, Bofill's acceptance speech, plus assorted pomp and circumstance in Barcelona's extraordinary church of Santa Maria del Mar.
He has had considerable influence on the way I look at the world, at buildings and landscapes, and at cultures and history. For me, as for many others, he will remain a major inspiration and reference. Even though he is no longer around, his work and ideas live on.