The Origin of the Internationalisation of the RBTA: La Manzanera, 1963-1978, in the Mass Media

Abstract

This article delves into the origins of the internationalisation of the first works of Ricardo Bofill's Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), tracing a genealogy that goes through five pieces built in Spain in the decade 1965-1975 that had great repercussions in the professional mass media abroad: the Gaudi Quarter (Reus), Kafka Castle (Sant Pere de Ribes), La Manzanera with Xanadu and the Red Wall (Calpe) and Walden 7 (Sant Just Desvern). All of them, with a greater or lesser profusion of pages (first with black and white photographs and, after, in colour), were reproduced in L'Architecture d'Aujourd d'Hui (Paris), Architectural Design (London), Architectural Forum (New York), Architectural Review (London), Architecture and Urbanism (Tokyo), Abitare (Milan), Baumeister (Munich), Global Architecture (Tokyo), Progressive Architecture (Stanford) and Zodiac (Milan), among others.

In addition, the text traces, in particular, the media fortune of the different tourist properties of the La Manzanera complex in Calpe: the Castillo-Plexus (1963-1966), Xanadu (1966-1968), the Red Wall (1968-1973-1975) and the Viaduct (1975). In this journey, the magazines' eagerness to supply iconic images to the detriment of plans to a public eager for novelties is evident, but this strategy served for the RBTA to disseminate its own poetics and signs of identity through architectures that were striking in their material and chromatic formality. The text stops when RBTA is developing the Les Halles competition in Paris in 1973-1975, reflecting on the evolution of the compositional systems from the modular combination to the hierarchy of the Beaux Arts systems, entering into a new historicism that the magazines once again sanctioned.