Abstract
Henri Lefebvre in Writings on Cities introduces us to Ricardo Bofill as the one who concretizes the desire for monumentality of the time in which he operates. In the 1960s Archigram and Superstudio imagined unprecedented paper architectural manifestos. Bofill goes beyond: he makes his Utopie Realizzabili, Realizable Utopias tangible, quoting Yona Friedman's writing, not only by building them, but also by patenting a novel architectural language for an almost magical residential typology: the castle. An exuberant and determined character, Bofill throughout his career tirelessly experimented with new languages applied to different urban scales, in a continuous zoom in and zoom out from the general to the particular, where both the generic mass of a building and the courtyards, terraces and individual windowsills, are designed in detail, with great attention to materials. The result is a journey made up of very different buildings that can be divided, by stylistic similarities, into two major groups: the residential castles in the 1960s, Act I, and the interventions with a strong neoclassical character from the second half of the 1970s, on Act II. Although in these two historical periods Bofill designed works with distant aesthetics, they are the result of a rigorous creative method based on a combination of continuous reflection on the architecture of the past and constant involvement in the sociocultural issues of the present.