La Fábrica: Ricardo Bofill designed a building by deciding what not to demolish

ARCHITECTURE · ADAPTIVE REUSE

Reading time: 8 min

Most architects design by adding. At La Fábrica, Ricardo Bofill spent two years taking a cement works apart with dynamite before he built anything at all. Twenty-two silos came down. Eight stayed. The design decision was not what to put there, it was what to leave standing, and he carried on making it for forty-nine years.

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There is a way of writing about La Fábrica that treats it as a mood. Ruined concrete, hanging ivy, cathedral light, a man who saw poetry where others saw rubble. All of that is true and none of it explains how the building was made.

What Bofill actually did at Sant Just Desvern, on the edge of Barcelona, was invert the normal sequence of architecture. He acquired a working industrial complex, spent roughly two years removing most of it, and only then began building. The creative act was editorial. Out of a sprawling cement works he selected a fraction, and everything the place is now follows from that selection.

It is the most interesting thing about the project and it is the part that never gets described.

The design tool was dynamite

The factory was built by La Auxiliar de la Construcción, a company formed around 1916, which registered its Sanson cement brand in 1920 and completed a 105 metre chimney in 1924. By the time Bofill’s team spotted it in 1972, it had stopped working and had accumulated the shape all industrial sites accumulate: not designed, but added to. Silos, tunnels, machine rooms, subterranean galleries and stacks, each built when it was needed and where it fitted.

He bought it in 1973.

Then came the part that matters. Using dynamite and jackhammers, over approximately two years, the team took the complex apart. Twenty-two silos were removed. Eight were kept. Bofill described the operation as sculpting, and the analogy is exact in a way most architectural metaphors are not. A sculptor working in stone does not add material. They establish a form by deciding, cut by cut, what is not part of it. That is what happened here, at the scale of a factory.

It is worth pausing on how unusual this is as a method. Architecture is almost always additive: you draw a thing and then it is built. Subtractive design is rare because it requires a designer to see a form that already exists inside something else, and because the process is irreversible. A wrongly placed wall can be moved. A demolished silo cannot be put back.

That irreversibility is also why the result could not have been drawn in advance. Bofill has said he already imagined future spaces when he first walked the site, and the sequence of works suggests something more improvisational: remove, look, remove again. The building was found rather than designed, and finding it took two years of controlled destruction.

A building made of the thing it used to make

There is a neatness to the material that is easy to miss.

La Fábrica is a concrete building that was a concrete factory. The structure that survives the demolition is made from the substance the site existed to produce. Nothing has been clad, faced or converted into another material; the walls are the walls, and the surfaces still carry the marks of an industrial process rather than an architectural one.

That is why the interiors read as they do. The Cathedral, the former cement storage hall now used for meetings, lectures, exhibitions, concerts and rehearsals, has the proportions of a nave because a hall for storing bulk material and a hall for holding a congregation have similar requirements: height, span, and no columns in the middle. Bofill did not make it look like a cathedral. He noticed it already was one, and named it accordingly.

The retained silos took the accommodation. Their circular plans and vertical proportions became offices, the archive, the library, the model-making workshop and, eventually, his own home, including the double-height Cubic Room. A silo is a difficult shape to live in and an excellent shape to work in a room of, which is roughly how the programme distributed itself.

The whole site runs to about 3,100 square metres, which is smaller than most people assume from the photographs. The sense of scale comes from the height and from the fact that so much was cleared around what remains.

The garden is the second demolition

The planting is usually described as softening, which undersells it.

Eucalyptus, palms, olive trees, cypress and climbing vines were introduced across the site and onto the roofs, so that the retained volumes are read through vegetation rather than against sky. Ivy runs down the concrete faces. Roof terraces are planted rather than paved.

Functionally, this does the same job as the demolition, by another means. Removing twenty-two silos established the form. The planting then dissolves the edges of what is left, so that the boundary between structure and ground becomes uncertain. A hard industrial object in an industrial landscape becomes, as Bofill intended, an oasis inside it.

It is also the element that makes the building age well rather than badly. Concrete left alone in a Mediterranean climate stains and streaks, and the stain reads as neglect. Concrete under fifty years of planting reads as time passing on purpose. The garden is doing reputational work as well as environmental work.

The studio that needed this building

The choice of a cement factory makes more sense once you know what Bofill had assembled to put inside it.

He founded the Taller de Arquitectura in 1963, aged twenty-three, with the encouragement of his father, the architect and builder Emilio Bofill. It was never conceived as an architectural office in the conventional sense. Bofill set it up as a deliberately mixed group, intended to hold architects, engineers, planners, sociologists, writers, filmmakers and philosophers in the same room.

The early membership bears that out. Alongside architects including his sister Anna Bofill, a mathematician and composer as well as a designer, and the English architect Peter Hodgkinson, the Taller included the poet and writer José Agustín Goytisolo, the actress Serena Vergano, the polymath Manuel Núñez Yanowsky and, from 1971, the writer Salvador Clotas.

A practice constituted like that has a real accommodation problem. An open-plan studio floor is designed for people doing the same task at adjacent desks, and it is precisely the wrong container for a group whose whole premise is that its members are not doing the same thing. What such a group needs is a set of distinct rooms with distinct characters, connected but not continuous, plus somewhere large enough to gather everybody.

A dismantled cement works supplies exactly that. The retained silos give you a series of separate, strongly characterised volumes. The Cathedral gives you the room where everyone can be in one place. The building is not an eccentric choice of premises. It is the correct plan for the organisation that moved into it, arrived at by clearing away everything that was not.

The year he bought it

Here is a coincidence worth noticing, because it says something about the architect.

1973 is the year La Fábrica was purchased. It is also the year La Muralla Roja was completed, the apartment building at Calpe that is the most colour-saturated project of Bofill’s career, a labyrinth of reds, pinks, blues and violets set against the Mediterranean.

So in a single year he finished the most chromatic building he would ever make and bought the greyest object he could find. One is a sealed geometric puzzle designed on paper and executed exactly. The other is a found industrial ruin that he would take apart with explosives and keep altering for the rest of his life. They could not be less alike in method.

What they share is an interest in what geometry does to a person moving through it, and a refusal to treat a plan as something you look at rather than occupy. Read together they give a fuller picture of Bofill than either does alone, which is why the two projects should be looked at as a pair.

He never finished it

The transformation is usually dated to 1975, when the first major phase was complete, and the project won the Barcelona Architecture Prize in 1980.

Neither date is really an ending. Bofill lived and worked at La Fábrica from the 1970s until his death on 14 January 2022, and continued adjusting it throughout. That is forty-nine years on one building, by an architect who in the same period delivered major work across France, Spain, the United States and North Africa.

This is the part that reframes the whole project. La Fábrica is not a conversion that was completed. It is the place where the conversion never stopped, because the client and the architect were the same person and there was no reason to hand it over. Most buildings are finished and then endured. This one was inhabited and revised at the same time, for half a century, by someone who could change it whenever he wanted.

The Taller de Arquitectura still works there, which means the building is doing now exactly what it was cleared to do in 1973.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

La Fábrica is regularly cited as an early example of adaptive reuse, which is accurate and slightly beside the point. Plenty of industrial buildings have been converted since, and most of them were converted by working out what could be inserted into the existing volumes.

Bofill did the opposite. He worked out what to take away, and he took away most of it. The two years of demolition were not site clearance before the real work started, they were the real work. Everything afterwards, the planting, the programme, the fifty years of adjustment, followed from a set of decisions made with explosives about which eight silos deserved to stand.

There is something clarifying about that as a way of thinking. A building already on a site is not a constraint to be worked around or a shell to be filled. It is material. What it becomes depends entirely on what you are willing to remove, and on being right about which part was the good part.