Ricardo Bofill
Bofill built large housing complexes in France with classical forms in concrete and used the same approach at Fatbursparken in Södermalm. His office was in a converted cement factory outside Barcelona.
Ricardo Bofill was born in 1939 in Barcelona. His father was an architect and developer and his mother came from Venice. He began studying architecture in Barcelona but was expelled in 1957 for his political opposition to the Franco regime and continued his studies in Geneva. In 1963 he founded the Taller de Arquitectura, an interdisciplinary group of architects, engineers, sociologists, philosophers and writers. The group’s early works in Catalonia and Spain were experimental housing schemes, often in strong colours and with complex volumes, inspired by Mediterranean villages. Bofill wanted to unite modern architecture with a more humane, social and poetic view of housing and to explore new ways of living together.
His early works include La Muralla Roja in Calpe, with red stairs and courtyards like an Arab kasbah, and Walden 7 outside Barcelona, a large housing complex with internal courtyards. He converted an abandoned cement factory in Sant Just Desvern into an office and home, La Fábrica. From the late 1970s he designed large housing projects in France, such as Les Espaces d'Abraxas in Marne-la-Vallée and Antigone in Montpellier, where monumental classical forms, columns and temple fronts are expressed in precast concrete. In Stockholm he designed the housing around Fatburstrappan and Medborgarplatsen in Södermalm, often called Bofill’s Arch, in the same spirit.
Bofill died in 2022. He was one of the most debated architects of postmodernism: supporters saw his French housing projects as an attempt to give ordinary people a monumental city, critics saw stage sets. The buildings have since become popular film locations and gained new interest through social media. Bofill’s Arch in Södermalm, built around 1990 on the former Södra station site, is one of the clearest examples of postmodern architecture in Sweden and showed how a classical, enclosed urban form could be restored after functionalism’s open plans. The project was part of Sweden’s return to the perimeter-block city in the 1980s. His firm continues to work internationally under the leadership of his sons.