Arquitectura en movimiento. El archivo filmado de Ricardo Bofill

This session comes about from an exceptional find: a series of silent Super-8 films found in the warehouses of Bofill Architecture Workshop, which document Ricardo Bofill's architectural practice and his surroundings in the late 1960s. This footage chronicles an era of creative effervescence and utopian impulses, where architecture reached out to other artistic practices, including cinema.

Some of the most notable tapes recovered are short advertising fictions about his projects, recordings of works under construction or completed—some now disappeared—and diaries of his trips and visits to emblematic buildings in the history of architecture. These audiovisual snippets raise some fundamental questions: how to archive architecture? What role can film play in building and preserving its memory?

To delve deeper into these issues, the screening of the selection of previously unreleased films will be accompanied by a discussion with Alexandra Garzón, art historian from the University of Barcelona and archivist of the Bofill Architecture Workshop, who will provide her view on the conservation and dissemination of the architectural archive. We will also hear from architect David García-Asenjo Llana, a researcher and disseminator specializing in 20th-century Spanish architecture and a contributor to such media as El Español, CTXT, and the radio program Julia en la Onda, in addition to being the author of the book Manifiesto arquitectónico paso a paso: un ensayo sobre arquitectura contemporánea a través de las iglesias.

His talk will expand on the relationship between cinema and architecture by exploring how the motion picture can become a key tool for preserving and reinterpreting architectural heritage. This session invites us to discover Bofill's architecture in its most dynamic state: under construction, in transformation, in motion, while also taking us through the surprising images of a film archive that not only rescues the past, but also helps us rethink the future of architecture and its forms of representation.
The session will include the screening of the short film Miratges (Héctor Civera, 2025), created from fragments of various works by Ricardo Bofill.

This session was made possible thanks to the collaboration of Bofill Architecture Workshop.