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Ricardo Bofill
The celebrated Catalan Ricardo Bofill imposes today his signature till China. But his Taller de Arquitectura resides in Barcelona, a city « unequalled where all radiates the charm of unfinished », an example of diversity and mixture of architectural styles. Over there, in an old transformed cement factory, an enormous site, surprising and unfinished, he leads his very numerous projects. The passionate Bofill is actually for more than forty years a bulimic for architecture.
In France, he started his international career in the beginning of the seventies. His first big œuvre, les Arcades du Lac, in the Paris Quarter served as a model for an important series of projects developed hereafter. The efficiency of the perspectives and the presence of garden passages tempted the municipalities of new towns, in particular in Montpellier (Antigone, 1982). Pediments and colonnades demonstrate his desire to play with architectural shapes of the past to assert the present architecture.
The mark of this duality memory/modernity for which Bofill has a great liking in particular, that is the Paribas building, place du Marché Saint-Honoré in Paris was finished in 1997 and renews the tradition of the covered passages of the XIX century. A large glass hall, « fluid and transparent » attributed to Baltard is covered by a transparent capital reminding of a market. The traditional columns typical of the architect are very discrete here only reminding his trademark. Nowadays, his style has evolved. Bofill multiplies his interventions everywhere in the world : a skyscraper in Chicago, the new airport terminal in Barcelona, the City of the Future in Kawasaki, …. Specialized in large urban restructuring, Bofill also remodels the Monchyplein quarter, in the historic centre of The Hague and at the same time, he draws the immense district Daxing, in Peking. Some 2800 hectares of houses, shops and offices emphasized by a public park and an emblematic building, like an enormous carved rock.
The history of the Taller de Arquitectura is also a history of a polyvalent and multidisciplinary team. From large urban complexes to houses, skyscrapers to tiling and architectural hardware, Ricardo Bofill pursues the same demands and specificities. A quest for modernity seen as a mixture of history, knowledge, tradition with innovations and avant-garde technology.
http://www.bofill.com/ |
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Building Shisheido, Tokyo 2001
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Paribas, Paris 1997 | |
