; in front of
W Barcelona Hotel In 1963, Bofill and a group of close friends created
Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (Ricardo Bofill Architecture Workshop), initially hosted in his father's construction business with offices on
Plaça de Catalunya in the center of Barcelona. Building on Catalan traditions of craftsmanship, he enlisted architects and engineers but also writers and artists into a multidisciplinary effort, which later branched into
urban design and
urban planning. The team experimented on original methodologies based on three-dimensional modular geometries, such as those of the in
Reus (1964–1970),
El Castillo de Kafka in
Sant Pere de Ribes above
Sitges (1964–1968),
Xanadu (1966–1971), and
La Muralla Roja (1968–1973) in
Calp. The same thinking was developed on a larger scale with the project
La Ciudad en el Espacio ("The City in Space"), whose construction started in the
Moratalaz area of
Madrid in 1970 but was abruptly stopped by Francoist mayor
Carlos Arias Navarro. It was instead realized with the construction of
Walden 7 in
Sant Just Desvern near Barcelona (1970–1975). These projects were recognized as exemplars of
critical regionalism and can be viewed as a reaction against both architectural modernism and the
Francoist dictatorship in Spain. Bofill then started working in France, and gradually introduced symbolic elements into the
Taller's designs that echo French traditions of
classical architecture. In 1971, he was invited by , a key planner of the
Cergy-Pontoise urban project, to develop a design concept analogous to that of the in Reus. This morphed into a project named
La Petite Cathédrale ("the small cathedral") but actually intended as a large-scale development, which was approved in 1973 but canceled in 1974. Another major development was a competition-winning concept for
Les Halles in Paris in 1975, whose construction subsequently started but was reversed in 1978 by the newly elected mayor
Jacques Chirac. Other projects did come to fruition in the ''
around Paris which offered a favorable environment for large-scale experimentation, including Les Espaces d'Abraxas in Marne-la-Vallée and Les Arcades du Lac'' in
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. This phase culminated in the expansive
Antigone new district of
Montpellier in Southern France, for which Bofill presented the initial master plan in 1978. It is associated with both large-scale industrialization in
precast concrete and classical forms and geometries in contemporary architecture, which Bofill called "modern classicism". As a consequence, Bofill opus is often cited as that one of the most representative and signififant
postmodern architects to have lived and created in Europe. From the mid-1980s on, he increasingly shifted to glass and steel for the materials used in his projects, while still using a classical vocabulary of columns and
pediments. Representative projects of that period include the
77 West Wacker Drive office tower in
Chicago, the extension of
Barcelona Airport ahead of the
1992 Summer Olympics, and the
National Theater of Catalonia, also in Barcelona. In 2000, Bofill re-centralized the activities of the
Taller at its
head office near Barcelona. His designs in more recent years gradually shed his classical decorative vocabulary of the 1980s and 1990s, while retaining a highly formal sense of geometry. Representative buildings of this more recent period include the
W Barcelona Hotel on the Barcelona seafront and the
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in
Ben Guerir,
Morocco. ==Personal life and death==