Ricardo Bofill
Ricardo Bofill Leví (riˈkaɾðu buˈfiʎ ləˈβi; 5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022) was a Spanish architect from Barcelona, Catalonia. He founded Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura in 1963 and developed it into a leading international architectural and urban design practice. According to architectural historian Andrew Ayers, his creations rank "among the most impressive buildings of the 20th century." Born in late 1939, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Ricardo Bofill grew up in a well-to-do family with deep Catalan and Barcelonese roots. His grandfather Josep Maria Bofill i Pichot (1860-1938) had been involved in prominent local institutions such as the Institute for Catalan Studies, the Catalan Institute of Natural History, and the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona. His father Emilio Bofill (1907-2000) was an architect, builder, and developer who studied at Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, Catalonia's oldest professional architecture school. Ricardo Bofill would later describe him as "republican, liberal, progressive, austere and logical." Ricardo's mother, Maria Levi (1909-1991), was an Italian of Jewish descent born in Venice, who became a prominent sponsor of Catalan literature and culture in post-war Barcelona. His sister Anna Bofill Leví is an architect, composer, pianist, and author. Bofill went to school at the Escola Virtèlia from 1942, the Catholic Escuela Andersen in Barcelona from 1949, then at the Lycée français de Barcelone in the 1950s. He spent much of his youth traveling, first with his family and later on his own, and developed a passion for vernacular architecture. In 1957 he enrolled at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, where he engaged in student activism with the unauthorized Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, and was soon arrested in a demonstration and expelled from the university and from Spain. He moved to Switzerland and enrolled at the Haute École d'art et de design Genève in 1958, which he left in 1960 to return to Spain.
