Ricardo Bofill

Born in Barcelona in 1939, Ricardo Bofill Levi is the city's best known late 20th/21st-century architect. He grew up in a liberal well-to-do household; his father was a developer and like many Catalans, an ardent anti-Franco-ist.

Bofill attended the Barcelona School of Architecture but after joining a student protest against the regime, was expelled from the university, but continued his education a architectural school in Geneva. In 1963 he returned to Barcelona and joined his father's firm, and with a group of friends (architects, engineers, planners, sociologist, writers, musicians, movie makers and philosophers) founded an architectural and urban design firm Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.

One of the group's first major projects was the 1972 Walden 7 subsidized workers' housing project in the industrial suburb of Sant Just Desvern, just past Barcelona airport. Bofill named it after B.F. Skinner's Utopian science fiction novel Walden Two, subscriing to the then popular leftist theory that architecture had the power to socially condition the people living in it.