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

There are no lost causes in architecture. This was the belief that defined the Taller de Arquitectura’s repurposing, begun in 1973, of an abandoned cement factory outside Barcelona. Named La Fábrica, the colossal (and ever ongoing) project saw the practice transform the existing property into a pioneering studio, with Bofill and his family’s living space nestled inside the premises too. When Bofill first came across it, however, the factory was an out-of-use monument to Catalonia’s industrial past. The architect’s life mission has been to resuscitate, repurpose, and revalue this construction, which was left for dead, and which many others would have disregarded. “I wanted to live there for the pleasure of the challenge,” he has said. La Fábrica has certainly proved to be no lost cause.

Bofill first encountered the 31,000-square-meter (322,917-square-foot) factory on a drive around the Catalan suburbs. “I liked to stroll through the industrial waste sites and through this no-man’s land, where the city is torn apart, where old brick chimneys punctuate the anarchic struggle between the fields and blocks of concrete,” he remembers. He had been looking for a property that would allow him to construct both a spacious office for the workshop and an ample home for himself and his family. It was a relatively radical proposition at the time: in Barcelona, where he was living, a series of regulations meant a work-cum-living space was impossible. However, the drive to the western outskirts of the city provided what he saw to be a monumental opportunity. Pumping smoke into the sky was one of the oldest cement factories in Spain, with the tallest chimney. Bofill saw the factory from the road and went in to speak to the manager, who said they were leaving in a month. He then bought the property and all the land around it in a bid to bring his vision to life.

Still full of workers and dust, and belching smoke, the factory was not quite a ghost, but it was certainly a relic, and therefore appealing to an architect with an ongoing fascination with ruins. “I like the idea of a ruin philosophically. Life is a ruin,” he says. The half-finished work is a subject that has always fascinated Bofill. “The work of art doesn’t exist; it’s like a greyhound race in which you race towards something but never manage to reach it. All work has something wrong with it.”

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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.