The man who mistook style for a living : on the work of Ricardo Bofill

• Ricardo Bofill is perhaps better known to the general public than any other living architect. It is hard lo imagine a more photogenic style of architecture than his. Countless viewers must have seen, at some time or another, a television fashion show, an erotic film or an Open University programme with one of his buildings in the background. Yet his work is at the same time extremely controversial, probably precisely because of his mass popularity. Commentary on Bofill's palaces has often been devastating. Here are a few phrases, just to remind you: mastodons in the urban tissue; disregard for the public sphere; you cannot make a gentleman out of a prole; soulless prefab Classicism; with Bofill, if you want to be beautiful you have to suffer in a cramped little box; the iron will of a flamboyant superstar... These are just a few snatches from a dis­course that needs no repetition here. These critiques have always given the impres­sion that no one could really wish to live in such lordly mansions. But in the meantime it is surely clear that quite the contrary is true.Many of Bofill's projects betray a passion for the crescent. Bofill succeeds in using this type to give his housing developments a grandeur recalling the stately architecture of the aristocracy of former centuries. Now, however, this grandeur is available to one and all. The renowned crescents of Bath stand as examples. Co-architect Peter Hodgkinson put it as follows: 'Within the Taller Bofill, we look to Bath as a dream model - by no means utopian, but totally realistic. Bath was built all in one go by a small group of financiers and develop­ers and architects who could impose - and that is the important word - impose their will on the general public.' This approach has gained a fitting epithet in history: enlightened despotism. Everything for the populace, but nothing by the populace. The populace may now live in Walden, Les Arcades du Lac, Les Echelles du Baroque, Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Le Theatre, l'Antigone. When you take up domicile in one of Ricardo Bofill's residential projects, you don't live just anywhere. The inhabitants often have visiting cards proudly printed with logos of their imposing dwellings. The power of style seems to have turned into the style of power. As long as one can identify with the greatness of the past, that is to say the past of the big male overlords (slight exception for Antigone), it doesn't matter too much if there is something missing from these grands ensembles of reincarnated self-respect. As long as the inhabitants can flatter themselves with the idea that their home is literally their castle, they are hardly likely to be put off by the thought that the justification for these castles is no longer their social legitimacy but the added value of an architecture with an arrestingly dramatic iconography. As long as one's own lifestyle is fully furnished with the right status symbols, the empty centre is not a problem. So Bofill has no reason whatsoever to be concerned about the dubious­ness of the content. His concentric courtyard is empty and partly forbidden territory, a domain for the all-seeing eye of the unsurpassed French concierge whose presence you suspect somewhere behind the mirror glass of the fake colonnades. It is not a (chaotic) public sphere that prevails here, but the self-centred morality of imposed beauty. A certain message seems to keep springing to mind: il est interdit de...

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HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

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The Invisible in Architecture

Ricardo Bofill

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