Case
Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
Site for the Taller de Arquitectura founded by Ricardo Bofill in 1963, working from a cement factory outside Barcelona. Thirty projects across four continents and a journal that reads them.
The brief
Bofill Taller de Arquitectura has worked from a converted cement factory outside Barcelona since 1963. Ricardo Bofill founded it with engineers, sociologists and filmmakers; today Pablo Bofill runs it with teams on site in Morocco, Albania and Saudi Arabia. The site had to hold Walden 7 and a campus under construction in Benguerir as one body of work, and a journal that reads the one through the other. Sixty years of archive, edited by the studio.
The decision
Every project is laid out from modules. The studio composes each page from a fixed set of blocks, text, images in one column or three, credits, related work, so Walden 7 and a campus under construction can tell their stories differently and still read as one site. The text has an editor of its own, with footnotes: the Taller marks a word, writes the note, and the page numbers it and sets it at the foot of the text.
The photographs open as an overview. The whole set on one screen, every image at its own proportion, or one at a time in a slider, 4 of 22, and a tap between the two. Projects is a grid of thirty works with a second photograph on hover, and three filters, region, typology and status, that cut it from Africa to Europe and from Completed to Under Construction: thirty to three in two taps. Over all of it, a header that takes its colour from every page, white over a dark hero, black over a pale one.
The part nobody sees
The site is one graph. Region, typology and status are references, so the filters are the lists the projects are tagged with; journal entries point at projects, and related projects are references too. The studio adds a work and it appears in the grid, in the filters and wherever a story mentions it.
The header colour is content. Every page carries its own header state and the layout reads them all up front, so the wordmark knows what colour to be before the hero has loaded. Images arrive with their dimensions and a blurred placeholder from the same pipeline, and the film on the home page comes from Vimeo in the rendition each screen needs, one cut for desktop and another for portrait, rather than hosted by the site. Under it, structured data for the organisation, the projects and the articles, so the archive reads to machines the way it reads to people.
