The adventurous architecture of Ricardo Bofill

Bofill is loved for his boundless imagination, courage and passion for experiments. About his own multifacetedness and stylistic variety of projects, Bofill said this: "There are some architects with a world name, they are my friends and generally very good people, but they do the same thing in all cities." And again: "I compare my style with a writer's manner of writing. This is a special space-filling handwriting. But the fact is that I would prefer to write in any manner."

Bofill is the heir to an architectural dynasty. His grandfather and father were architects and builders in Barcelona. Thanks to his mother, Maria Levy, since childhood, Ricardo has been in the circles of the Catalan bourgeoisie and among representatives of the world's cultural elite, improving the skills of conducting social conversations and business negotiations.

Outstanding communication skills, family support, excellent education (Beaufill graduated from the French Lycée in Barcelona and the Geneva School of Arts and Design) and the talent of an artist — all this contributed to the fact that Beaufill became a recognized metro at a young age.

He developed his first project at the age of 17, and the first realized - in 1960 - was a summer house in Ibiza for one of the members of the Bofill family. Ricardo founded his firm Taller de Arquitectura when he was only 24 years old.

Thousands of words can be written about any of Ricardo Bofill's more than a thousand projects, so each of them is full of individuality and originality. However, today we would like to remember the building that brought the architect world recognition and opened the door to the international arena for Bofill. It is a residential complex in the town of San Pere de Ribes, near Alicante, built in memory of the absurdist writer Franz Kafka and recognized as a classic of world architecture.

The concept of the residential complex "Kafka's Castle" with 90 apartments intended for rent is closely related to the cultural movement "Archigrams". In the 60s, a group of young neo-futurist architects was formed in London, who experimented with hypothetical architectural projects based on technological research, denying the social and consumer demands of the modernist community.

Bofill and his team at Taller de Arquitectura were keen to meet this fashionable challenge and also wanted to create something that would go beyond the Spanish regionalism in which they had previously worked.

The building on a hill overlooking the bay of Sitges is designed as a set of cubes - residential capsules that lean on each other, forming a chaotic accumulation on the outside. The theme of "Cubism" was at the peak of popularity at that time.

Therefore, it is fair to note that Bofill's "Kafka Castle" resembles Habitat 67 from the outside, a residential complex in Montreal, Canada, designed for Moshe Safdie's Expo-67 world architectural exhibition a year before Bofill erected his building.

Nevertheless, Bofill proposed his own approach to the study of the typology of link housing and decided to structure the location of the capsules as much as possible. He laid two mathematical equations as the basis of the concept and constructive calculations.

The first regulated the number of link cubes "strung" at different levels on a tower with stairs, and the second determined the connection angle and height of each such spiral. The application of mathematical formulas generates the number and shape of the spaces inside the cubic composition.