Many are those who have been able to enter La Fábrica for the first time this Wednesday, the headquarters of Ricardo Bofill's Architecture Workshop and his own home in Sant Just Desvern. This has been the space that his family and friends have chosen to bid him farewell, a couple of weeks after his passing. It is expected that some 10,000 people will come to pay tribute to him during the two days that this old cement factory will be open to the public, including Wednesday night, also taking the opportunity to discover the place from which he conceived some of his most emblematic works and where he lived.
Bofill discovered La Fábrica in the early seventies, when he learned that Sanson had ceased its activity in Sant Just, after neighborhood protests forced it to move to Sant Feliu de Llobregat, the neighboring municipality. The industrial complex that fascinated the architect began operating as a cement factory in 1921 and was built in different stages, expanding when production required it. Bofill found enormous silos, a chimney, machine rooms, underground galleries... All of this in a brutalist complex that he decided to transform into a work of art to demonstrate that any space, regardless of its shape, could adapt its use, as long as it was done with sufficient skill.
The different characteristic elements of the building's industrial past survive in the new use that Bofill gave it, turning it into an architecture office and home. "Currently I live and work here better than anywhere else. This is for me the only place where I can concentrate and associate ideas in the most abstract way. I have the impression of living in a closed universe that protects me from the outside world and everyday life. La Fábrica is a workplace par excellence. Here life unfolds as a continuous sequence, with very little difference between work and leisure," Bofill explained.
That is the environment that has been admired by those who, since 9 AM this Wednesday, have accessed its interior, which has equally amazed neighbors, curious onlookers, students, and admirers of the Barcelona architect's work. People of all ages have toured part of the studio and the garden, flooded with candles and photographs of the architect, of his life and work, accompanied by models of some of his best-known creations, such as the Walden, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC), or the Factory itself. Cameras and mobile phones have taken over the premises, wanting to go home taking a bit of these corners with them.
Among the attendees was a neighbor from Sant Just, who came to see what the building was like that had allowed her to stop having dust in her house. She lived near the Sanson when it was still open and remembers how the dust stained her walls until it closed and Bofill completely transformed the place. "It changed the town," she summarizes.
Inhabitants of one of his most iconic works, Walden 7, located right next door, have also ventured inside La Fábrica. One of those who visited Bofill's workshop did so to thank him for having conceived the characteristic red housing block, where he has lived for 15 years.
Workers from the area, who saw his profile every day without knowing what its interior was like, and clients of the Architecture Workshop, such as a furniture store in Barcelona, were among the other attendees at the tribute, which, as expected, included admirers of the architect. Some arrived with flowers, and there were even those who made the tribute the first activity they could do after overcoming COVID, like Natàlia, a neighbor from Sant Just.
Others were moved when they saw the magnitude of Bofill's creation. This was the case of Elisabet, a designer who sees in the architect "everything I like." She, who feels it "a gift" to be able to enter the workshop, declared herself fascinated by "how he conceives space, which makes you connect with nature, feel at peace, and inspire you." "It has impacted me a lot," added Montserrat, another admirer of Bofill who had already been able to visit Walden but not La Fábrica and applauded his very different and transgressive conception of architecture.
Bofill's family and friends mingled among the attendees, most of the time listening seated on the floor to the Tuareg music played by the artist Atri N'Assouf. His songs set the rhythm inside La Fábrica, where colleagues from the Architecture Workshop and renowned Barcelona architects such as Fermín Vázquez and Daniel Mòdol, as well as Madrid-based Rafael de la Hoz, were also present.
And the architect's voice could be heard in the background, telling who he was, where he came from, how he understood life and architecture... A video compiling interviews Bofill gave throughout his career revealed that, if he hadn't been an architect, he would have wanted to be a scientist. That his worst nightmare was exams and that he would have liked to be born in the 2000s. That if he could choose how people would remember him, it would be with the label of intelligent. And that, if he could make a wish, it would be for students 300 years from now to learn his work.