LA FÁBRICA

La Fábrica

Ricardo Bofill’s lifetime project to turn an old ruin into the perfect creative powerhouse.

Built to house the offices and private residence of the late Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, ‘La Fábrica’ was formerly a nineteenth-century cement factory, who’s structure has been slowly chipped and chiselled piece by piece from an industrial ruin into a monastery of design. La Fábrica, (or 'The Factory') is now a workplace for the forty architects that make up Bofill Arquitectura and a complex of residential quarters for Bofill’s family and friends.

Ricardo Bofill first stumbled across this site in 1973 while the building was on the verge of being decommissioned. As he recounts himself, the building was in need of a second life. The rest of the industry in the region, which had sprung up in the early 20th century, was now moving overseas. Its position on the periphery of the city, and the cultural change that the building was a signifier of, made it something like a bridge between the old world and the post-industrial vision of Spain that Bofill could see rapidly approaching.

The dramatic transformation is made infinitely more impressive by how little was actually added to the original building. Most of the realisation process was actually a matter of trucking materials off-site rather than on, in an attempt to recycle what was already there and liberate nature and light to fill in the gaps.

It's a different story inside - the interior is neat and curated, still exposing many of the original industrial elements, which appear almost surreal when re-contextualised as a creative and living space.

Most of the realisation process was actually a matter of trucking materials off-site rather than on

In some areas, staircases lead nowhere, and massive concrete blocks and beams protrude from ceilings and walls seemingly without purpose - other than to facilitate machinery and industrial paraphernalia that has long disappeared. Outside, the crumbled surfaces and the brutalist forms invite a melange of vines, olive trees and greenery to take root everywhere, softening the harsh edges.

From a distance, 'La Fábrica' almost feels like a jungle ruin that nature reclaimed centuries ago, a relic of a past civilisation. But it isn’t derelict of course, far from it. If Ricardo Bofill's La Fábrica was a character in a novel, one might comment on its 'arc'; once a brutal and gruff machine of industry, now a quiet sanctuary for artistic expression.