Remembering architect Ricardo Bofill and La Fábrica, the cement factory that became his astonishing home

MAY WE SUGGEST: An extraordinary Keralan house by Axel Vervoordt with grounds by Tom Stuart-Smith

The factory also represented, in architectural form, many colliding worlds, especially in the context of industry in Catalonia. It had been constructed during Catalonia’s first golden period of industrialisation in the early 1920s, then built gradually, with new structures and extensions added on when production demanded them. Its sprawling, improvisatory plan reflected Catalonia’s incremental industrialisation—each extension signalled another bout of prosperity in three-dimensional form. In many ways, it shared characteristics with vernacular architecture—in which homes are formed organically according to need or, say, an increase in family size over time—but as expressed in the industrial realm. Contributing to this strand of the architectural canon was of great interest to Bofill, with his refreshing take on urbanism. It appealed to his desire to conserve and add to the built environment, just as cities were formed throughout history, rather than simply tearing down existing structures in the more contemporary model. Like the ruins he was fascinated by, it was a somewhat romantic vision. “In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, somebody would turn up and add a new bit to an existing building that remained in place. I wanted to repeat this experience, only not with a normal building, but the most complicated one, a cement factory,” says Bofill.

The factory that he found was the sum of disparate architectural parts and, therefore, of a myriad of stylistic flavours, a fact that was highly inspirational to Bofill and the team. The building flashed a variety of imagery at them, charging their vision for what they could do with it: the factory was a surrealist masterpiece, with stairs leading to nowhere and various spaces that were simultaneously visually powerful and actually useless. With its abrupt treatment of concrete, it was both primitive and brutal. The factory was, paradoxically, also abstract—made up of pure volumes and basic shapes, each with their own independent virtual existence. The allure was immediate: “Seduced by the contradictions and the ambiguity of the space, I decided quickly to retain the factory and, modifying its original brutality, sculpt it like a work of art,” says Bofill. The contrasts would prove to be deeply important to the vision for the factory as it developed over time.

An extract from Ricardo Bofill, words by Tom Morris, gestalten 2019.