Ricardo Bofill Leví, who died last week at 82, in Barcelona, of Covid-related complications, is best-remembered for his giant, and often controversial, 1970s and 80s housing projects in France, whose overblown concrete classicism came to define an epoch. But during his six-decade career, he made his mark all around the world, from his native Spain to Russia, the US, India, north Africa, and recently China.
Born in Barcelona in 1939, Bofill was a highly successful businessman, entrepreneur, talent spotter, and team leader, the ideal company figurehead who knew exactly how to talk to clients and politicians. These are skills he no doubt learned from his father, an architect and builder who had worked with figures such as José Luis Sert and Antonio Bonet. Bofill consequently “had the advantage of being able to start building very young,” as he recalled in an interview in 2020, looking back on his career. Indeed, he was just 19, and still a student in Geneva (after he had been expelled from Barcelona University for his links to Catalonia’s communist party), when he began his first project, a family home in Ibiza.
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