The Village in the Sky

Built on the site of an old cement factory in the industrial town of Sant Just Desvern, on the dusty outskirts of Barcelona, Walden 7 is notoriously hard to navigate. Delivery drivers frequently get lost inside it. New residents have trouble finding their own homes. It's not uncommon to see visitors simply standing around, bewildered, like they can't remember where they parked their car.

With its zig zag staircases, suspended bridges, hidden courtyards, and maze-like, honeycomb structure, living in Walden 7 is kind of like living in an MC Escher lithograph. The rules of physics look like they don't apply here. Please remove common sense upon entry.

For architectural photographer Jill Singer, entering Walden 7 was "like walking inside a box where all the pieces seem to move around you. Every corridor seems familiar, yet everything is different, you go up, you go down, you take a few turns and you're as good as lost."

Writing for Frieze, Emily Smith was more blunt: "Approached by taxi at the start of my overnight stay, Walden 7 sprang into sight like a vast, jagged red-clay death star."

Built by visionary Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill (and his firm, Taller de Arquitectura) in 1975, Walden 7 consists of 14 floors and 446 apartments – each made up of modular rooms, known as 'cells'¹ – spread over 18 interconnected towers. Each cell measures 28 square metres and can be linked sideways, upways and downways with other cells to form weird, multi-module apartments. The windows are small and uniform. In a nod to passive design and the building's inherent thermal mass, there's no central heating.

While the exterior is wall-to-wall Catalonian terracotta, the interiors are picked out in bewildering shades of azure, purple, turquoise and yellow. The effect is somewhere between vertical labyrinth and human beehive.

No linear plane could accurately capture Walden 7's floor plan – for that you'd need some kind of Star Wars-esque holographic display. But then, that's kind of what Bofill was going for. Walden 7 was conceived as utopian social housing. A vision of what communal living could, or maybe should, look like. Unlike the grey, brutalist cubes popping up in Soviet Russia, or the functional, prefab apartments of modernist Europe, Bofill imagined something more like a vertical village, slightly detached from reality, where private and public spaces all got jumbled together.

"From the building's interior, it immediately becomes clear that the cells all differ from one another," Taller de Arquitectura's website says. "Not only does each have a separate entrance, but the location of the entrance door ensures visual privacy. In other words, it was not a question of dividing up a large building in the traditional manner, but of creating a series of individual cells that combined to form a block.

"It's as if the architect had taken wooden construction blocks and assembled them on top of and beside one another to obtain an organised yet organic unit."

It's kind of ironic that Bofill became known as a utopian architect, since his structures often feature as backdrops in notoriously dystopian sci-fi movies: his insanely cool and relentlessly colonnaded Espaces d'Abraxas appeared in both Brazil and The Hunger Games, and Netflix clearly riffed off the pastel pink staircases of La Muralla Roja when designing the sets on Squid Game.

Still, there is something inherently cinematic about Bofill's style. His utopianism always came with a twist: it was bold and fantastical, a mix of radical social ideals and dreamlike aesthetics, all wrapped up in a very deliberate sense of place. As an architect, Bofill was always more concerned with the Here than the Now. His buildings are direct products of their location, not their time.

"Fundamentally and artistically, architecture is about space and the relationship between time and space," he used to say. "Architecture cannot be translated from one place to another."

Ricardo Bofill was born in Barcelona in 1939, just after Franco declared bloody victory over the Republicans. His family was well-to-do and fiercely parochial – Bofill's grandfather, Josep Maria Bofill i Pichot, had been a prominent member of the Institute for Catalan Studies and the Catalan Institute of Natural History. So it's probably no surprise that the young Bofill's designs were possessed of a certain 'sod you' independence of spirit. Technically, he never even completed formal training².

Bofill wholly rejected the rationalism and ‘sameness’ of mid-century European design. As a born-and-raised Catalonian, with concepts like liberty and defiance against authority drilled into him from an early age, he hated any architecture that treated people like things, or afterthoughts, or anonymous drones in some bigger political game. Humanism was good design, and good design was humanism. A society was only as free as its architecture.

"Walden 7 was, if you like, a critical response to the entire European intelligentsia," he said. "It was a critical response because we said: 'There! It's a monument in the middle of suburbia, a vertical monument in the suburbs!' And straight away there were critics who said: "One cannot experiment with social housing, with architecture for the poor.

"But at the time that's exactly what it was, it was a building populated with people of all varieties."

The construction of Walden 7 took about five years, from 1970 to 1975. The building's complexity extended the timeline, as workers tried to grapple with Bofill's weird, modular apartments, interconnected courtyards, sky bridges and hanging gardens. The original cell design featured a bath in the middle of the room (which most residents quietly removed³). In keeping with the futurist-utopia vibe, each of the open-air walkways was named after poets, activists, philosophers and scientists: Jesse Owens, Pablo Neruda, Frank Kafka, Albert Einstein and so on.

For the exterior, Bofill chose tiles crafted from warm, red-clay terracotta – a nod to his Catalan roots⁴. There was a snag, however. Due to some mix-up with the adhesive, not long after residents moved in, tiles and masonry started randomly falling off Walden 7. This led to long periods of structural repair (and some pretty hairy moments for residents). Bofill didn't seem too fussed about the setbacks.

"All places of beauty have a very negative side about them. There can’t be beauty where everything works to perfection."

In 1995, a government-sponsored refurbishment actually removed most of the terracotta and replaced it with red paint, which is why, these days, you can only see tiles on the smaller balconies and curved minaret-type structures that run vertically up the building's exterior.

Still, the project was a triumph. In July 1975, Walden 7 made the cover of Architectural Design, and in the years following its completion, the building attracted exactly the kind of people you'd expect an experimental Catalonian social housing project to attract: a mix of young creatives, anti-establishment types, intellectuals, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and families drawn by radical ideals of community living.

Some early residents tried to organise shared childcare, collective dinners and cultural events in the courtyards, and the two rooftop pools were a big hit in summer. Bofill's spirit of experimentation proved infectious, too, with many residents making adaptations and improvisations to their cells, sometimes knocking down internal walls to merge units. As families grew and moved away, cells multiplied and divided accordingly.

This spirit didn't last, however. After 20 years, Walden 7 lost its status as Vivienda de Protección Oficial social housing, and a more moneyed crowd gradually moved in. Today, 1000 people call the building home.

"It was supposed to be accessible to everyone, and every resident would have a share," Bofill lamented. "Now it's become a bit more bourgeois – the price has gone up and the community is a bit insular. They don't want to let anybody in."

The name, incidentally, is a reference to a reference. It comes from the novel Walden Two (1948) by BF Skinner, which envisioned a utopian society designed to maximise human happiness through social engineering and behavioural conditioning. And that book was named after the classic, Walden, published by Henry David Thoreau in 1854.

In some ways it's an odd name for a communal housing project, since Thoreau's Walden is – if nothing else – a famous ode to solitude. But Bofill was always intrigued by the gap between the public and the personal, between society and the individual, and the freedoms and responsibilities one owes to the other.

He famously said that, "Architecture is the victorious utopia", which is kind of interesting, since in the original Greek, 'utopia' basically means "no such place". That's the thing about utopias: they don't really exist. The world's not built like that.

But for Bofill, and others like him, that wasn't the point. Utopia was a vector, not a fixed position. Architecture really could offer a glimpse into another world, a more perfect world; not just a place to live, but a manner in which to live. That perfection may be unreachable, sure, but what a tragedy never even to extend your hand and try.

"I wanted, once and for all, to create a space powerful enough to make normal people who know nothing about architecture realise that architecture exists."

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¹ ‘Cells’ might sound a bit ominous, but given Bofill’s passion for human-centred design, it’s pretty clear he’s referring to life’s biological building blocks here, not, you know, prison.

² Franco’s Spain was not a cool time or place to be a communist, and in 1957, when he was just 18, Bofill was expelled from the prestigious Barcelona School of Architecture for his role in a Marxist protest. In some ways he never stopped rebelling.

³ I mean, who could blame them.

⁴ Terracotta (literally “baked earth”) has been used in Catalonia for centuries. Catalan farmhouses (masía) and rural buildings often featured terracotta roof tiles, brickwork and ceramics, mostly because there was tonnes of the stuff lying around in areas like La Bisbal d'Empordà.