Ricardo Bofill from Both Sides of the Wall. RBTA’s reception in German Architectural Journals during the Late Cold War (1975 –1990)

Abstract

This article examines how Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA) was produced, contested, and instrumentalized in the architectural journals of West and East Germany between 1975 and 1990, with brief antecedents from the early 1970s. Using a reception-studies approach to texts from Bauwelt, Baumeister, ARCH+, Der Architekt, Deutsche Bauzeitung, and Architektur der DDR, the paper argues that RBTA’s combination of classical monumentality and prefabrication during the so-called “French years” operated as a technology of image whose meaning shifted with the patronage regimes and evaluative frameworks on each side of the Wall. In the FRG, criticism crystallized around three value regimes—moral-aesthetic (the trauma of monumentality), urban-functional (the user and the built environment), and political-economic (the image of public power and corporations)—turning RBTA into touchstone of local cultural debates. In the GDR, reviewers acknowledged technical prowess yet evaluated RBTA primarily through the lens of industrialisation and socialist planning priorities. By triangulating these readings with Bofill’s own programmatic texts, the article shows how German journals did not merely “reflect” RBTA; they constructed it as a sign within late–Cold War urban politics. The contribution is twofold: a comparative map of RBTA’s German receptions and a broader diagnosis of how prefabrication can act as symbolic accelerator—either as a public expression of authority or as an operation of urban legibility—depending on the political context.