Modularbauten: The word many think of gray plate. Residential buildings such as those in the Splanemann settlement in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, in the sixties unlovingly assembled from concrete slabs and steel housing containers. The building with prefabricated parts should then create living space, as quickly and cheaply. In Chemnitz and Halle - as well as in West German cities like Cologne - entire settlements with prefabricated buildings sprang up.

What is less known: Well-known architects used this modular system at that time. One of them is Ricardo Bofill, to whom Gestalten has just dedicated a new monograph. The Spanish architect is now known for luxury houses such as the "W Hotel" in Barcelona or the Platinum Tower on the coast of Beirut. Before that, he was still in the low cost area - and developed a very unique style.

Ricardo Bofill decided with his "Taller de Arquitectura" (German: architecture workshop) for many of his houses for cost-saving concrete parts, especially in Spain and France. However, he did not put the pieces together to form identical cuboids. He wanted to connect abstract, geometric forms to houses in such a way that they feel familiar and homely to the inhabitants. "Architecture is the victory of man over the irrational," writes Bofill in "Visions of Architecture". In the end so completely different residential complexes emerged.

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Architecture by Ricardo Bofill: master of blocks

One of his first works, "Kafka's Castle", a residential building in the province of Barcelona, ​​initially seems like a jumble, like a Lego kit. In fact, the cubes are mathematical calculus. All are exactly 70 centimeters offset to their neighbors. Each box is exactly one room. Seen from the street, the concept is hard to see through, but the façade is an architectural masterpiece. In addition, the flexible Bofill modules provided the opportunity for a "Ciudad en el Espacio", a city in space.

For his project "Walden 7" he was similar. Bofill nested 18 towers and residential units of 30 square meters each, creating bridges, balconies and viewing platforms. The buildings are often like encapsulated, their own worlds. As a "foreign-looking fortress" described photographer Nacho Alegre in the book the building.

Bofill had rather the utopia of a so-called urban "megastructure" in mind: a city in which individual components can be flexibly and repeatedly adapted to the needs of the inhabitants and moved. Houses like "Walden 7" come very close to this idea. But Bofill's vision was never realized.

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design, Ricardo Bofill
Ricardo Bofill: Visions of Architecture

Publishing company:

The Gestalten Verlag

Pages:

300

Price:

EUR 45.45

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Therefore, Bofill did not spend a very long time on bare modular buildings, even though he experimented again and again with industrially manufactured forms and materials in his later buildings. From the seventies on, however, he combined these more and more with neo-classical elements to make pompous buildings of splendor.

Bofill himself, for example, lives and works in his home "La Fábrica" ​​in Sant Just Desvern, a municipality with 17,000 inhabitants, ten kilometers west of Barcelona. In 1973 he bought a vacant cement factory there: 5000 square meters, high silos, engine rooms and a concrete sluice that towered over all the roofs in the area.

Bofill converted the facility to his private factory lock, with offices and studios. He let in the silo towers, narrow and high. With a strict geometrical tracery, almost like in a gothic church. From the towers plants grow. The concrete facades behind it look like something from another era, like a petrified utopia. Finished "La Fábrica" ​​is not yet, maybe never. Bofill will be 80 this year. It will probably remain his unfinished masterpiece. For buildings of these dimensions, there are no prefabricated parts.