Legendary Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill may be most widely known for his dystopian-looking postmodern housing estate Le Palacio d’Abraxas as well as his own reclaimed cement factory home, but his body of work is much more colorful and diverse than these examples would suggest. Celebrated for modernizing historic and regional architectural attributes in his own distinctive style, Bofill counts a number of iconic structures among his oeuvre, including the vivid La Muralla Roja (The Red Wall, 1972), a vision in pastel hues set against the Mediterranean Sea.

Bofill founded his architectural and urban design practice Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura in 1963, and nearly sixty years later, after completing over 1,000 projects in over 50 countries, he’s still working. Born and raised in Catalonia, he’s credited with helping to revive the signature craftsmanship of Catalan architecture.

A period of time spent working in North Africa in the early 1970s, where he completed such works as the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco (above), seems to have infused Bofill’s sensibilities with a kind of color palette not often seen in Western architecture and enhanced his fondness for abstracting traditional patterns and manipulating classic forms. These elements, melded with a certain idealism and controlled theatricality, make Bofill’s work over the decades truly unmistakable.

Bofill’s planning skills are evident in such large projects as Walden 7 (1975), a terracotta-colored apartment building in the town of Sant Just Desvern near Barcelona. Even with a minuscule budget, Bofill produced a wonder of a tower full of intricate geometries. Its name is derived from the sci-fi novel ‘Walden Two’ by B.F. Skinner, referring to a utopia, and the attention to detail afforded to its every nook and cranny gives us a sense of how Bofill saw the project at the time. Walden 7 is an illustration of Bofill’s theory of “The City in Space,” a formal approach to architecture that envisions collective housing serving all the necessities of people and communities through design.

It’s monumental by nature, more than a little radical, incorporating elements of Bofill’s then-Communist politics. Looking at this building and others Bofill designed around the same time, one sees strict geometric order enforced through cubic volumes, grids, courtyards and arcades, all arranged very precisely to make maximum use of the space. This is also clear in one of his earlier works, Kafka Castle (1968), an apartment complex consisting of 90 units, restaurants, a pool, a sauna and a bar. However, a series of designs that would remain unbuilt would ultimately lead him to abandon this theory.

Where other postmodern architects of the time took a far more minimalist approach, Bofill clearly enjoyed bringing a touch of the Baroque into his projects, a tendency exemplified in Les Espaces d’Abraxas, an otherworldly housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, France. Designed as a direct rebuttal to Le Corbusier’s utopian visions of the 1950s, which Bofill saw as lacking style, the Espaces Abraxes in Noisy-le-Grand was meant to represent an ideal city. In practice, to the residents who have lived in it over the decades, it’s said to have felt closed-off, lacking in community spirit – the opposite of what Bofill intended.

Along with similar structures built at the same time in the area, onlookers typically compare it to a prison or a fortress. Fittingly enough, it has since been used as the setting for such films as Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ and ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.’ Photographed here by Laurent Kronental as part of his series ‘Souvenir d’un Futur’ (Memory of a Future,) the Espaces Abraxas is still in use today, its residents having fought off several attempts to demolish it. Clearly, whether or not it’s your architectural cup of tea, it has significant value.

Many of the individual elements that can be identified among all of these works can be found unified in La Fabrica, Bofill’s own residence and the headquarters of his eponymous firm. Post-Modernism, Catalonian vernacular, industrial architecture, Brutalism and other styles converge in a project Bofill first began more than forty years ago, and which he says will never be officially complete.

Formerly a cement factory built in the 19th century, La Fabrica now looks like a lush reclaimed castle covered in grass and vines and packed with surrealist features, like staircases that lead nowhere. It’s a fitting home for one of the world’s greatest living architects, imbued with his spirit and his vision of what urbanism could look like.

Retro-futuristic architecture seems to exist outside of time, perhaps in parallel universes where the versions of the future envisioned by their creators actually became reality. They combine design elements from the decades in which they were built with futuristic elements as the architects imagined them, recalling the science fiction of their respective eras, often seeming like remnants from movie sets. Many still stand in a rapidly changing world, feeling like portals to somewhere very far away.

Walden 7 by Ricardo Bofill

Built in 1975, this housing structure by Ricardo Bofill located outside Barcelona, Spain takes inspiration from the science fiction novel Walden Two by B.F. Skinner. It originally included 446 residences in 18 towers, resulting in a labyrinth organized around seven interconnecting interior courtyards. Bofill imagined that this structure would be a utopian urban residence addressing many of the problems of urban life, with space for gardens and social interaction as well as two swimming pools. The high rise still stands and functions as an apartment building, with some units combined to create larger spaces.

Palais Bulles by Antti Lovag

The strange and bulbous Palais Bulles, or Palace of Bubbles, was built in 1989 on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Though it’s often used as a setting for fashion shoots and film festival parties, architect Antti Lovag emphasizes that how the structure is inhabited is its most important aspect. “Whether for economic reasons or lack of technical solutions, human beings have confined themselves to cubes full of dead ends and angles that impede our movement and break our harmony.”

Monsanto House of the Future by Monsanto

Did you know that infamous agrochemical giant Monsanto (known for creating Agent Orange during the Vietnam War) built a ‘house of the future’ at Disneyland in 1957? Located at the entrance to Tomorrowland, the house was designed by Monsanto in collaboration with MIT and Disney Imagineers, showcasing their vision of what life would be like in 1987. Made of fiberglass, the house was elevated on a pedestal with the intention of allowing it to rotate. Everything was modular and made of synthetic materials. Monsanto’s House of the Future closed in 1967, and though it was scheduled to be demolished in one night, the wrecking ball bounced off its tough facade, and a 2-week demolition job was ultimately required to take it down.

Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie

First built as a pavilion for the World’s Fair in 1967 after architect Moshe Safdie conceived it as his master’s thesis, Habitat 67 remains one of the most unusual buildings of its kind, featuring 146 residences and a network of interlocking forms and walkways. The architect wanted to maximize the amount of private space and natural environments within a small urban footprint, enhancing the quality of life with gardens, fresh air and views. It was intended to be the first phase of a much larger complex, but Safdie’s vision for futuristic affordable housing failed to proliferate due to the high per-unit cost of his design.

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Somewhere Outside Of Time 13 Classic Retro Futuristic Architectural Visions

Icons of midcentury modern design by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer still stand across America, showing off the simplicity, clean lines and extensive use of glass the style is known for. Many are so perfectly preserved they’ve become actual museum exhibits, while others have been well-loved and lived in over the decades or restored after falling into ruin. These 10 examples represent some of the most famous midcentury modern homes in the country, as well as a few hidden gems.

Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois (1951)

Renowned architect and designer Mies van der Rohe created the most beautiful example of a glass midcentury house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a place to play violin, translate poetry and enjoy the landscape on the edge of the Fox River. About 1500 square feet, the house features floor-to-ceiling glass with exposed steel structural members in white. Elevating it 5.3 feet above the flood plain didn’t prevent it from being inundated after Hurricane Ike in 2008, but most of the home’s original midcentury furniture was saved, and it re-opened to visitors by 2009.

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1935)

The most famous creation of America’s most well-known architect, Fallingwater (or the Kaufmann Residence) is also one of the nation’s most-visited homes. Fallingwater was built right on top of a series of cascading waterfalls on Bear Run in the Allegheny Mountains, which might be a beautiful choice stylistically, but led to a series of architectural challenges and some extensive mold problems. The fact that the location on the bank of the river was not large enough to support the foundation of a typical Wright house is what prompted the cantilevered design. The original owners used it as a weekend home until 1963, when it donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and it’s been open to the public as a museum since 1964.

Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames, Los Angeles, California (1949)

One of about two dozen homes built as part of the Case Study House Program, an experimental architecture project sponsored by Arts & Architecture Magazine after World War II, the avant-garde Eames House resembles a Mondrian painting with its panels of white, blue and red separated by stark black beams. While many iconic midcentury modern houses have been preserved as they were originally decorated, the Eames House has a thoroughly lived-in feel because it has actually functioned as a comfortable and functional home for decades rather than a museum exhibit. It consists of a main residence and studio separated by a courtyard.

Hooper House II by Marcel Breuer, Baltimore, Maryland (1959)

Known for beautiful streamlined furniture designs as well as some of America’s most amazing Brutalist structures, Marcel Breuer showed an unusual restraint in designing the simple Hooper House II for philanthropist Edith Hooper. Two separate wings of the home, one containing the common spaces and the other the bedrooms, are connected by a glazed passageway to form a U-shape. Large segments of glass offer views of the courtyard as well as Lake Roland to the east, broken up by long walls of Maryland fieldstone.

Stahl House, Los Angeles, California (1959)

Is this the quintessential Los Angeles house? The Stahl Residence is certainly one of the city’s most iconic, cantilevering out of the Hollywood Hills to gaze upon the urban skyline, and it’s magnificent at night. The glass and steel volume projects the common areas outward while maintaining privacy for the bedrooms in a separate wing. The swimming pool serves as an interstitial space between the two. The house serves as one big lookout taking in panoramic views of Los Angeles.

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Mid Century Modern America 10 Classic Houses For The Ages

A master of Modernism whose architectural legacy includes a range of monumental concrete structures around the world, Marcel Breuer remains divisive among Brutalism’s admirers and detractors decades after his death. From the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to the vaguely dystopian IBM headquarters in Paris, Breuer’s work is alternately described as majestic and depressing; cold and clinical to some, and peacefully minimalist to others. Regardless of how you feel about concrete architecture in general and Brutalism in particular, Breuer’s buildings are emblematic of this architectural style. Here are 14 of his most notable creations, as preserved by Syracuse University’s Marcel Breuer Digital Archive.

St. John’s Abbey, Minnesota

After completing a series of modernist residential projects in the 1930s and ‘40s, Breuer moved on to work on a far more ambitious and awe-inspiring scale, starting with the stunning St. John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota. The cast-in-place concrete wonder features a towering bell banner shielding the church’s honeycombed facade. Breuer also designed a number of buildings on the St. John’s University campus, including a dormitory hall (bottom photo.)

Whitney Art Museum, New York City

One critic of Breuer’s 1966 building on the genteel Upper East Side of Manhattan called it “one of the most aggressive, arrogant buildings in New York.” An inverted ziggurat, the structure is undeniably bold. The Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect “believed that modern architecture needed to reintroduce monumentality and symbolism, age-old characteristics that had been disregarded by modernists earlier in the 20th century.”

UNESCO Headquarters, Paris

As far as surviving Brutalist structures go, the UNESCO headquarters are nothing short of spectacular. Completed in 1958, the Y-shaped administrative building features a sculptural canopy and spiraling fire escape stairs that reach all the way to the roof. The whole building stands on 72 concrete piles.

The Lost El Parador Ariston, Argentina

Among Breuer’s classics is the Ariston Hotel in Argentina, a curving clover-shaped building that has been abandoned and left to deteriorate despite its status as one of Argentina’s modern architectural landmarks. Architecture faculty and students at the University of Buenos Aires are currently flighting to preserve and restore it.

The Pirelli Tire Building, New Haven, Connecticut

Originally built as the headquarters for Armstrong Rubber, what’s now known as the Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven, Connecticut stands out as one of America’s foremost surviving Brutalist structures. Testing of the tires on the ground floor research and development facility would be noisy, so Breuer elevated the administrative spaces. The result is imposing and authoritative; it’s easy to imagine it standing in as the headquarters of a villainous corporation or classified government agency in a movie.

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Brutalist Wonders Or Blunders Architecture By Marcel Breuer

Dark wood, dazzling details, leaded glass windows and tier after towering tier of books – classic historic libraries are a bibliophile’s dream. These 13 (more) libraries, dating from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, represent some of the most astonishingly beautiful book repositories ever built.

Rijksmuseum Reading Room, Amsterdam

(images via: rijksmuseum.nl)

The largest public art history research library in the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Reading Room was formerly located in the stunning main Rijksmuseum building, established in 1800. It has since been mod to a new, separate building, but images of its tiers of books in a massive historic room continue to dazzle.

Trinity College Library, Dublin, Ireland

(images via: irish welcome tours)

At Ireland’s oldest university, home to the book of Kells, the ‘Old Library’ stuns with its dark wood, spiral staircases and seemingly endless aisles of books. It was built between 1712 and 1732 and renovated in 1860 to include a barrel ceiling for a second floor of book shelves.

Canadian Library of Parliament

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Canada’s LIbrary of Parliament was originally built in 1876 and is the only part of the Centre Block to remain untouched after a fire in 1916. Inspired by the British Museum Reading Room, this library features a massive main chamber with a vaulted ceiling. The walls and bookshelves are lined with intricately carved white pine paneling.

Strahov Monastery Library, Prague

(images via: claudia dias, architecture.artyx.ru)

Part of a monastery that was established in the year 1143, the Strahov Monastery Library has a 46-foot ceiling decorated with a 1794 fresco entitled ‘The Struggle of Mankind to Know Real Wisdom’. It contains a vast collection of books as well as ancient printing presses.

Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington

(images via: railgun)

Completed in 1926 in Collegiate Gothic style, the University of Washington’s Suzzallo LIbrary contains an incredible 250-foot long, 52-foot wide Graduate Reading Room featuring a timber-vaulted ceiling, leaded windows and cast-stone ashlar wall blocks.

Admont Abbey Library, Austria

(images via: wikimedia commons)

The largest monastic library in the world is located in Admont in Austria. Admont Abbey was founded in 1074 and settled by Benedictine monks, and the spectacular gold and white library was added in 1776. It survived a disastrous 1865 fire that destroyed the rest of the monastery.

Real Gabinete Portugues de Leitura, Rio de Janeiro

(images via: rbpdesigner, servuloh)

This dark and somber reading room contains an amazing 350,000 books. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura was built in the Manueline Portuguese style in 1837 and is four stories tall inside for maximum book storage without a cluttered, maze-like floor.

Iowa State Capitol Law Library

(images via: rata  bibliotecaria, state library of iowa)

A lacy white banister flows along tier after tier of books and down a beautiful spiral staircase at the Iowa State Capitol Law Library, located in the Capitol building. The library provides Iowa lawmakers, lawyers, government employees and the public with a specialized legal collection of treatises and law books.

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

(images via: the great geek manual, torontoist)

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is located at the University of Toronto, and is the largest publicly accessible collection of rare books and manuscripts in Canada. It contains Darwin’s proof copy of On the Origin of the Species among other notable works.

George Peabody Library, Baltimore

(images via: elibris.jhu.edu)

One of the most beautiful libraries in America is located in Baltimore. The George Peabody LIbrary opened in 1878 and contains five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies rising to the skylight 61 feet above the floor. It contains 300,000 titles, most dating from the 18th to early 20th centuries.

Reading Room at the British Museum

(images via: tony harrison, pragmatopian)

At the heart of the British Museum is the Reading Room, completed in 1857 and restored in 2000. Considered a masterpiece of mid-19th century technology when it was built, the reading room was inspired by the domed Pantheon in Rome and measures 140 feet in diameter. The original gold, blue and cream color scheme was reinstated during the restoration.

Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland

(images via: chippee)

The library at the Abbey St. Gall in Switzerland is the country’s oldest, and considered one of the most important monastic libraries in the world. Its 2,100 manuscripts date back to the 8th through 15th centuries, and it also contains 160,000 books. The library, along with the rest of the abbey, is now a World Heritage Site as an ideal example of a Carolingian monastery.

Stockholm Public Library

(images via: marcus hansson, smath)

Stockholm’s rotunda library building, designed by architect Gunnar Asplund, was completed in 1932 and is still considered one of the city’s most important buildings. It is primarily comprised of a round lending hall in a tall cylindrical shape and also contains interior reading rooms. Polished black stucco gives the entrance a dramatic flair, and the hanging chandelier captures lights from the high clerestory windows.

Handlingenkamer, Netherlands

(images via: tweedekamer.nl)

The Old Library at the Dutch House of Representatives contains volume after volume of verbatim reports of parliament proceedings and debates. The roof was constructed as a leaded glass dome to allow daylight to filter down the four stories to the floor, which was necessary at the time it was built in the 19th century to avoid bringing combustibles like candles and gas lamps from setting the 100,000 volumes on fire.