Bofill, Ricardo (1939- )

Spanish architect. He has been active largely in France since the late 1970s. In 1965 he set up the Taller de Arquitectura (Architecture Workshop) practice in his native Barcelona, in which an economist and a poet worked alongside architects. He established his reputation with low-cost designs for social housing, notably Walden 7, near Barcelona, 1970-75, a geometrically complex scheme incorporating a disused cement works in a towering, picturesque composition. An increasingly grandiose form of classicism characterizes his later work in France.

Notable among his French housing schemes are Les Espaces d'Abraxas at Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris, 1978-84, and the Antigone development in Montpelier in 1992, both of which use an inflated Doric order to theatrical effect. Among Bofill's most significant projects are the Madrid conference centre, known as the Palacio Nacional de Congresos (the site of the 1999 Super Cities Conference), the Barcelona airport (completed in 1991, and its extension to be completed in 2008), and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, Texas (1991).