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.

Brasilia was designed by visionary architects as a utopian city of tomorrow. Now that tomorrow’s arrived, it appears those plans haven’t panned out.

It took just 41 months to build Brasilia, which was officially inaugurated on April 21st of 1960. The original plans called for a resident population of 500,000 but as of 2011, five times that number lived in the city and its surrounding metropolitan area. Over 50 years of unplanned urban sprawl has resulted in dysfunctional neighborhoods blighted by abandoned structures of all shapes and sizes.

Typical of Brasilia’s dark side is the Torre Palace Hotel. Built in 1973 and boasting 14 stories with a total 140 rooms, the hotel closed in 2013 – a victim of unsolvable financial disagreements among the original builder’s heirs.

Photographer Ricardo Padue and Flickr user -Paulo -Bragga (collspooky) document the current sorry state of the once-swanky former hotel now taken over by looters, squatters and the homeless.

Theater of Pain

Designed (like many of Brasilia’s iconic structures) by Oscar Niemeyer, the Claudio Santoro National Theater has spent a significant percentage of its lifespan closed for “repairs”. Lack of funds for operations and maintenance is the culprit here, a situation exacerbated by the world financial crisis of 2008-09. When not hosting theatrical troupes, this strikingly futuristic building shelters drug addicts and the homeless.

Sloppy Cop Shop

In some ways Brasilia is the victim of its own design: built as a beacon of enlightenment smack dab in the middle of an historically poor region, the city acted as a magnet for central Brazil’s unemployed, disenfranchised and opportunistic citizens. Unfortunately, opportunities are limited in a city whose raison d’être was to house government ministries, foreign embassies and federal employees.

One might expect the city’s police to have their hands full; yet the above Brasilia police station snapped by Flickr user Lúcio Costi Ribeiro is as abandoned as the day is long.

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Brazil Nots Abandoned Buildings Of Utopian Brasilia

Slated to be constructed in just 7 years and cost $300 billion (more than the GDP of Egypt), this ambitious design for a brand new capital city of 5 million people is unprecedented – if completed, it will be a record-setting endeavor. And it is not just a conceptual vision, or at least not entirely- the site has been selected and a 100-square-kilometer test section has already been approved by the Egyptian government.

The new capital-replacing city is described by its proponents as “the catalyst for an Egyptian renaissance” and “a momentous endeavour to build national spirit, foster consensus and provide for the country’s sustainable long-term growth.” Inspired in part by Silicon Valley, buzzwords about in the promotional materials related to the project, tentatively titled “The Capital.” It is intended to be a “smart city” and “hub of innovation” to carry its country into the future of technology and sustainability.

Transportation is to be a big component of the design, both within and beyond the city – it is meant to become both a hub as well as a walkable metropolis. Lessons are being taken from extant clogged and congested urban centers, particularly Cairo. However, it is not clear through the gloss and glamour just how these innovations will manifest themselves – there are some statistics, though, that are at least superficially impressive.

Environmental friendliness is also high on the list, with plans to sustainable local food, use eco-friendly modes of power generation (wind and solar) and, of course, deal with waste and recycling in a green and efficient manner, avoiding a repeat of Cairo’s infamous “Garbage City.”

Some might question whether the futuristic renderings are really representative of what is planned or if they are simply designed to impress. Critics note that the scheme seems too good to be true, and may be intentionally positioned as a Utopian project in order to draw outside investors. Building a new city from the ground up may result in that space being more efficient, but it leaves one wondering what the country has planned for its former capital. Perhaps there is room for generosity in expectations, however – lessons learned and developers deployed in this massive construction project could be turned around afterward and reassigned to fix existing cities.