The Future of the Past

The Berlin based magazine Mono.kultur features in its current issue the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, who, since 1963, continues to lead the international architectural and urban design practice worldwide.

The Mono.kultur magazine on arts and culture published thoroughly selected interviews with different artists four times a year. Each outlay features one artist with a corresponding interview and introduction to his work and life. The topics vary from music, film and literature over architecture to media. Previous editions featured artists such as Marina Abramovic and Ai Weiwei or the musician Brian Eno. Instead of the art itself, the creative minds behind it inspire the publishers of the magazine. The issues are carefully designed and aim to offer opinions, experiences and lives.

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“Life is a change of construction and destruction” – Ricardo Bofill

The new issue of Mono.kultur features now under the topic The Future of the Past Ricardo Bofill. He is known for his extraordinary style of usefully reconstructing old and especially industrial buildings into new space for living and working. The most popular and significant example of his work is a former cement factory in Barcelona. He transformed it to a building, which provides a variety of different uses without losing its original character of a factory. Today, the building comprises both the center of his life and work and a library, several gardens and an atelier.

The atelier is called Talle de Arquitectura and serves as a working space for a team of international and multidisciplinary artists to work on the analysis of the emerging problems of modern cities, its people and their relations. But the factory is only one of over thousand projects which where planned by Ricardo Bofill or where he contributed with his ideas of creative destruction and construction.

Mono.kultur interviewed the postmodern architect and delved deeper in his understanding of life and work by talking with him about fifty years of work experience and architecture. A special emphasis is here put on Bofill´s opinion on modernism, the transformation of cities and the vagaries of ambition. Furthermore, the magazine offers a visual experience/journey with unpublished images from Ricardo Bofill´s archive.

Mono.kultur