The Ricardo Bofill Universe

La Fábrica Studio · La Muralla Roja · Walden 7

Ricardo Bofill (1939–2022) was one of architecture's great romantics. A Catalan rebel expelled from architecture school under Franco who went on to design airports, housing projects and government buildings across Europe and America. But his most personal creation was neither a public monument nor a commission. It was a derelict cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona that he found in 1973 and spent the next five decades transforming into something that defied every category the design world had invented.

La Fábrica "The Factory" is 3,100 square meters of repurposed silos, underground tunnels, machine rooms, and overgrown gardens. Eucalyptus, olive, and palm trees grow from what were once factory floors. The room known simply as "The Cathedral" soars to cathedral height from what was a concrete silo. Bofill wanted to create, in his words, "something halfway between a ruin and a cloister." He succeeded so completely that fashion houses, film directors and artists have been staging shoots here ever since. It remains the headquarters of the Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, now run by his son Pablo.

Tours of La Fábrica are offered by appointment the studio periodically opens its doors to design lovers who reach out directly. It is not a museum, but an active architectural practice in a building of extraordinary beauty, and visiting feels accordingly intimate and rare. We were able to access the building by joining an existing student architecture tour, sweet talking the architecture firm into making an exception for us. So you might need to hustle to get a viewing but it's well worth the trouble.

Two hours south of Barcelona, where the Costa Blanca meets the Mediterranean, sits Bofill's most visually incendiary creation: La Muralla Roja, The Red Wall. Built in 1973 directly into the cliffs above the Cala Manzanera cove in Calpe, this 50-apartment complex is a labyrinth of stairways, rooftop terraces, and corridors in shades of deep red, blue-violet, and pink. It draws from North African casbahs, Greek crosses and constructivist geometry, filtered through the particular kind of postmodern audacity that Bofill made his signature.

It is, by every measure, one of the most photographed residential buildings on earth. The kind of place design lovers plan entire European trips around. The light at golden hour, when those deep crimson walls catch the sun above the Mediterranean, produces a scene of almost theatrical intensity.

Villa Savoye

Le Corbusier's Manifesto in White

In 1929, Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret completed what is perhaps the most influential house ever built. The Villa Savoye in Poissy, 30 kilometers west of Paris, is the physical embodiment of his five points of modern architecture. Columns that raise the structure off the ground, a free facade, an open floor plan, horizontal ribbon windows, and a roof garden. Every architecture student on earth has studied its blueprints. Standing inside it is an experience of strange, quiet recognition: like finally meeting someone you know entirely from their photographs.

The house is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site managed by the French national monuments body, and it is open to the public year-round. Arrive early. The house is best appreciated in silence, moving slowly through its signature ramp — Corbusier believed in promenade architecturale, the idea that a building should be experienced as a journey through space, which rises from entrance to rooftop terrace in one continuous, gently ascending curve. The views of the Poissy countryside from the roof garden are exactly as he intended them to be.

The César Manrique Island

Where an Artist Redesigned an Entire Landscape

Most destinations have a museum. Lanzarote has an island. César Manrique (1919–1992) was a painter, sculptor, and architect from Lanzarote who returned home from New York in 1966 with a radical mission: to ensure that his small volcanic island developed in harmony with its extraordinary landscape, not in spite of it. What followed was one of the most remarkable acts of environmental and aesthetic stewardship in the history of 20th-century art.

Over the following decades, Manrique designed, transformed, or directly intervened in the major tourist and cultural sites across Lanzarote. He worked from an artist's vision rather than an architect's brief, and the results are sites unlike anything else in the world. Jameos del Agua is a series of partially flooded volcanic caves transformed into an auditorium and lagoon experience; the water is home to a rare species of blind albino crab that exists nowhere else on earth. Mirador del Río is a former military fort converted into a white-walled viewpoint perched 475 meters above the sea, where the interior architecture frames the view of the neighboring island of La Graciosa like a living painting. The Cactus Garden, Jardín de Cactus, is an amphitheater-shaped terraced garden containing over 10,000 cacti, crowned by a restored windmill.

The César Manrique Foundation, housed in the home he designed over volcanic bubbles from the 1730s eruptions, is the heart of it all. Rooms built into lava chambers, connected by tunnels, opening onto gardens that grow from the black rock. He lived here for twenty years. The collection includes work by Picasso and Miró alongside his own.

Arcosanti

The City of the Future

An hour north of Phoenix, just off Interstate 17, an indiscrete sign reads "Arcosanti." Turn down the dirt road and the Sonoran desert opens up around you and then, through the dust, a cluster of concrete structures begins to materialize from the landscape. They are curved and organic and brutally beautiful, as if someone had imagined a city for another planet and then gone ahead and built a small piece of it in the Arizona high desert.

Paolo Soleri (1919–2013) was an Italian architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, then spent the rest of his career pursuing a vision that was either utopian genius or magnificent folly, depending on who you ask. He called it "arcology", architecture plus ecology, the idea that a city could be designed as a single, integrated, self-sustaining structure in which the built environment and the natural world were not in conflict but in profound cooperation. In 1970, he found a 24-acre site in the desert and started building it.

More than 8,000 people have contributed to Arcosanti's construction over fifty years. About fifty residents live there today, making bronze and ceramic wind bells using Soleri's original methods, the bells fund the ongoing project. The structures they inhabit. The Vaults, the Apse, the Sky Suite are extraordinary: raw concrete cast from the earth itself, shaped by the principles of passive solar heating and natural ventilation, oriented to the desert sky.

Rumor has it that Arcosanti inspired George Lucas's vision of the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. Standing on the terrace at dusk, watching the Arizona desert turn amber, it is easy to believe it.

Site of Reversible Destiny — Yoro Park

Architecture Designed to Defeat Death

The name alone should tell you that this is not an ordinary destination. The Site of Reversible Destiny, created by Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa and American poet Madeline Gins in the foothills of Gifu Prefecture, was built on a premise that most architects would not dare commit to paper: that architecture, properly designed, could extend the human lifespan. By disorienting the body. By refusing to let the senses relax into habit. By making even the act of walking through a room into an act of conscious engagement with the world.

The result is a 18,000-square-meter landscape of deliberate disequilibrium. Floors tilt at impossible angles. Staircases lead nowhere obvious. The pavilions with names like "Geographical Ghost," "Exactitude Ridge," and "Critical Resemblance House" are pastel-colored mazes in which walls bisect furniture and ceilings mirror floors. Nine structures sit in a vast concave basin arranged in the shape of the Japanese archipelago. The park's official documentation instructs visitors, rather magnificently, that "instead of being fearful of losing your balance, look forward to it as a desirable re-ordering of the senses."

Free helmets and sneakers are available at the entrance. You will need them. This is the most genuinely strange, genuinely exhilarating architectural experience available to the public anywhere in the world, and almost no one outside Japan knows it exists.