Ricardo Bofill Levi

A nomad, I’m still a nomad. A traveller with no haven, forced to establish his points of reference depending on the route he takes.

I was born in Barcelona of a Catalan father and a Venetian mother. In other words, at the crossroads between two cultures that have confronted and merged with each other over the centuries. When you’ve grown up in Catalonia during the Franco regime, you’ve few choices before you. You dream of freedom and great journeys. It’s for this reason that my adolescent dreams were invariably tinged with bitterness: I had the impression of living in a country apart, far removed from all the social and cultural events of the time, with the intolerable sensation of being relegated to a suburb of Europe.

I left as soon as I could.

First to the south. Andalusia, with its colours, its simple volumes, the marriage between Islam and Italy beneath the vibrant midday sun. This was my initiation into light. Now, when I’m there, I invariably feel at home.

Then I crossed the Mediterranean. In the Drâa Valley of Morocco I discovered villages of piled-up cubes, built on a day-to-day basis depending on the families’ growth rate, and yet mysteriously well-organised.

All around, the desert. The strange forms that dunes adopt, endlessly transformed by strong winds, struck me as the essential, though underlying; elements of everything we might draw. The pink Tenere sands standing out against the indigo blue sky and the infinite spaces of rocks and stones were my initiation into absolute beauty.

There I also came across men. Several of those nomads, who live in a civilisation totally different from mine, became my friends. In them I discovered the people most familiar of all with space, due mainly to the fact that they have to get their bearings constantly as they travel, that they have to read the landscape and transform its natural features into points of reference. What’s more, in this almost static landscape time is also a barely perceptible category whose variations, mutations and rhythms are experienced almost organically by these men: they must know how to interpret the relationship between hadows and light, splendid when the fire in the sky refuses to pardon even a few metres of error. Likewise, these dark men taught me a philosophy, a way of life conditioned by the elements of nature that is dramatised in the spirit of Greek fatalism and tends to found beauty anew. This is what is defined in the long run as the essence of all artistic projects and, consequently, of all works of art; this is also the consummate raison d’être of Classicism, in the sense that nothing is completely finished, even when the contrary is apparently believed. Classicism is ‘incompleteness’ – the absence of satisfaction –, since it is accomplished in desire, in the project, in a vectorial sense of the work. Furthermore, these men introduced me to their supreme sense of elegance, an elegance that has nothing to do with material wealth. For them, the most insignificant gesture, the tiniest fold or the slightest bouclé are, quite simply, beautiful.

My brothers of the south were there, but the north continued to be unknown territory for me. I discovered Paris. A city at times disproportionate, strictly marked out, covered by an excessively grey sky and for a long time alien to me, as alien and disconcerting to my mind as its social customs. In time, I set up a studio there. In Paris I have lived and fathered a son. The city has begun to be familiar to me.

I still had to discover Denmark, Sweden, Holland, the United States, whose secret mechanisms I subsequently tried to decipher. Although I’ve done all this as a citizen of the periphery. Because it’s true: Catalonia is not a centre. Perhaps it’s a springboard, an articulation, a kneecap, an information node that makes it possible to understand the north and the south and provides access to the general network of the territory. If I had been born in London, in Paris or in New York I would have been on an equal footing, in the pole position in the international race. But Catalonia, however off-centre it may be, at least has the advantage of stimulating hopes: maybe to be a good listener you have to come from the periphery. How can you open yourself up to the world when you’re convinced that you live in its centre?

My Catalan – peripheral – origins have made me more receptive, more attentive towards civilisations far removed from the centre, and for this reason they are essential to my work as an architect.

And this, needless to say, is due to the fact that this discipline is based on the interpretation of landscapes that lies in the subconscious of the people who inhabit them. A city provides all kinds of information: one may recognise the structure of property through the size or decoration of houses; the relationship between rich and poor through the layout of districts; the prevailing lifestyle, extroverted or introverted; also the value that a given community attaches to encounter; or the contrast between palaces and slums; the triumphant expression of skyscrapers dedicated to the ego cult; the orderly, symmetrical monuments in the French style, invariably tinged with surreptitious political ambitions; and lastly, the patios of certain oriental palaces, preserved from the indiscreet gaze of the passer-by, belonging to a civilisation that prefers observation, the interplay of gazes and the imbrication of passions.

To be an architect means understanding space organised by man, decoding the spontaneous behaviour and movements of a population and, additionally, perceiving the needs for change that this population may unconsciously express. We have to locate these shortcomings in order to make our own contribution.

But in order to read each gesture as a sign one has to become totally submerged in a culture, to descend to the most insignificant details while at the same time preserving an objective viewpoint. In this respect, there are two ways to be an architect. One is traditional – that of Gaudí, whose gaze took in a perfectly delimited territory, or that of Palladio, who at most travelled from his native Vicenza to Venice -, and the other more contemporary, which involves the risk of being an architect of the world, which does not lack merit since it carries with it a risk and a challenge. The life that forces me to devise an ever increasing number of projects in the four corners of the world, between Boeings and hotels, may lack the serene poetry of Palladio, though it has the advantage of cleansing my gaze after each trip.

All the above refers to spatial itineraries. However, this same itinerary must be made through history. As André Malraux observed, we live in the era of the imaginary museum in which the Baroque and Classicism, Romanticism and Surrealism coexist without colliding. The time has now passed for debates on style, like those which took place in schools that ceremoniously excluded dissident voices. In one and the same work we may recognise different influences, yet this doesn’t mean we must change the project’s objective. In a work of creation we may use different elements inherited from past eras without necessarily producing a collage. In this sense also, art consists of knowing how to interiorise the formal elements that belong to the work while at the same time preserving indispensable critical distance. In this process there is no fixed domicile, but rather many oases, stopovers on a historical road, resembling post houses. If these pauses become a conscious process, it means that the artist controls them and possesses mastery over his own creative process. In my own personal case, the nucleus of this process is architecture. And more than a deliberate choice, this was a product of my origins. My father is a builder and when I was a child he would take me to his construction sites. It was from him that I learnt the craftsmanship of brick, how to build the Catalan staircase and vault and how to use ceramics as a construction element. It was also at that time that they told me about one of my ancestors, whose name and surname I bear, who built Girona Cathedral. It seems that he was a man with both feet firmly on the ground, for it is said that due to lack of funds he decided to endow the cathedral with a single nave only, thereby creating a vaulted space of impressive dimensions.

In on-site work I came across a universe that I would hardly have discovered at the university. By talking to the foremen, I tried to understand/learn how they managed to place the bricks to make a spiral on top of a chimney. I contrasted by first drawings with this phenomenon. Likewise, I strove to grasp the limits of manufacture, of ‘savoir faire’, and I often felt incapable of surpassing tradition. Occasionally I dared propose new forms based on simple logical reasoning. With a variety of results: some collapsed, others remained standing.

In more personal, human terms, I greatly admired the building labourers when I saw them hard at work in the heights of the scaffolding, loaded with bricks, giving form to plans that someone else had drawn up. When they had finished their day’s work, these same labourers would tell me in the cafés about a lost war, about a defeat that I somehow made my own and which became another of my initiations.

Politics, like school and military service, reinforced my twofold sensation of being where I was and somewhere else at the same time. In my earliest memories – it must have been in 1951, during the first strike that marked the beginning of social resistance to the Franco regime – I see an eleven-year-old boy, me, who wanted to do what the grown-ups did and struggled to take down the trolley poles from the trams. When I was sixteen and had just started at university, together with a group of friends I founded the first free students’ union, which constituted open provocation against the regime. I associated with communist students, who at that time were the only really organised ones. Together with my generation, I supported the transition back to democracy in Spain and in 1976 turned by back on all forms of political activity, with the intention of definitively regaining my individuality and thereby acquiring a personal view of the world. That is, for a time I was interested in the mechanisms of resistance and power-taking; later, due to the fact that all ideologies struck me as partial and all politicians uncreative, whenever I could I avoided taking an active part in politics. Consequently, there was in me a will to understand and, at the same time, a desire to place things in their true perspective. I’ve no doubt in my mind that my devotion to architecture was born from this split in my character.

It’s for this reason that military service was a far more painful experience for me than being jailed. The difference between them was that in Franco’s time prisoners, above all political prisoners, could preserve their own identity. Barcelona jail, for example – a model construction in the form of a star, like an eighteenth-century Utopia -, is a beautiful space in which no personality disintegration process took place by which to crush the individual, unlike in the military sphere, where not even the tiniest hint of rebellion was tolerated. You had to follow the group and keep in step. Only very occasionally did I manage to escape from the barracks, a fortress on the highest point of the island of Menorca. I went down to the sea which lashed against the rocks and there I recovered the sensation of immutable space.

I still suffer from a number of phobias after all these rebellions. For example, I can’t possibly queue up to see a film. It suffocates me. I can’t maintain a network of mundane relationships. When I have to take part in a rite, in any form of ceremony, I feel uncomfortable. Although instead of rejecting all systems as a block, I’ve striven to become familiar with them and, in this way, use them and place them in my service.

To become an architect and to build requires the stance of the spectator, of the social conduct analyst. It’s a matter of assuming the point of encounter between our own personality and the different contexts of reality. For this reason, one must acquire great methodological rigour.

I don’t believe in the myth of pure inspiration, of the delirious view of a world within our reach. Talent, even genius, exists, but it needs the support of a line of development consolidated day after day. How, then, can we separate the essential from the superfluous if we are not sure of the direction our quest takes?

Consequently, the objective of this book is a threefold one: in the first place, it will attempt to reveal how creation management works in my case, a form of management that includes organisation of my own personality and the establishment of links between my different projects, as well as a deep analysis of the political, administrative and financial framework, which is indispensable to an understanding of the realm in which such creation takes place.

Having established this realm, in the second place I shall attempt to follow the route of the nomad I am from the vocational viewpoint: from vernacular architecture to Classicism, from craftsmanship to the most sophisticated industrial processes, explaining how my style has formed and what is to be understood by style.

Thirdly, this analysis of my activity would not be complete without reflection on the power that tradition provides us with. An architect isn’t God, even when God sometimes borrows His art from him, metaphorically speaking. But this doesn’t mean that the architect has fewer responsibilities, responsibilities he must know in order to assume them better.

The last few decades have constituted a disaster for our habitat. We know how to build cities, but we’ve forgotten the art of embellishing our historical centres. We’ve invented new materials, but buildings continue to exhibit their perennial ugliness. The constructions in the suburbs of our metropolises are no more than urban pollution. The time has therefore come to rethink the world in architectural terms.

To this end, the architect must reoccupy his place in the heart of the everyday, though he must respect, needless to say, the economic and commercial order. As an artist, it is up to him to avoid misunderstandings and hasty exaltations. The following pages respond to this and no other ambition.

“Espaces d’une vie”, by Ricardo Bofill and Jean-Louis Andrée

Editions Odile Jacob, 1989