Concrete ideas on architecture.

Right outside Barcelona one of the most peculiar buildings can be found in Sant Just Desvern.

It all started in 1973 when renowned architect Ricardo Bofill (previously covered in this blog for his Walden, Prat, and W Hotel) decided to buy an abandoned WWII-era cement factory and turn it into what is today known as La Fabrica, the headquarters of his Taller de Arquitectura.

Part residence, part offices, part work-shop, the idea behind Bofill’s Taller was to invite engineers, sociologists, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, in search of ways to re-conceptualise architecture.

The transformation from Fabrica to Taller was seen as a destruction based on creation of space. By leaving much of the original foundation intact through connecting and repurposing the existing shapes and elements the process was seen by Bofill as a hybrid between ‘Memory and Future’.

By adapting the usage to the given spaces instead of letting the function dictate the space, this construction was meant as a negation of functionalism, showing that any space can be made to inhabit its intended use.

Seeing as Bofill is famous for his concrete-heavy Brutalist style buildings it seems almost poetic that the place where his ideas and plans originate would itself be a repurposed concrete factory.