Chapter 2 of 24
The Paris Team (Bofill Bottom Right)
In this photograph you can see the Paris office with Ricardo Bofill's back turned to you, sitting over a table and discussing a project. These friends of ours are more or less dedicated to the actual building development and the building technologies, building investigation, for the projects which we've designed in Barcelona. And when they do go ahead, they are in charge of looking after the whole operation from the moment it leaves Barcelona to the moment it's fully occupied as a building. There again, the group is multi-national and extremely young. The work they do there is absolutely vital, in the sense that it continues the thought processing in Barcelona in terms of how to develop our language and our style, using possibilities of a new technology and using possibilities of a new designed language which will naturally develop from this new technology. Our method of building, which has changed radically over the last twenty years and which process you will now be seeing in the slides, has gone from a very, very artisan way of building - really one brick upon one brick, and very short little small beams, and very easily stuck-on tiles - to a highly sophisticated system of factory-made panels - panels which are made of a beautiful type of developed concrete, with colours and stones giving it the aspect of many types of marble types of artificial stone, and which at the same time is ornamented with different types of moulds and almost engravings - which in fact are full-sized wall-panels, arriving from the factory, and loaded by cranes up onto the buildings, and pushed into place. This technology and this method of building, which is enormously complicated, can only really be done in France at this particular moment, because of the last twenty years of French development in the concrete and the heavy wall concrete panel system.