Walden 7: This is what it's like to live in Ricard Bofill's fascinating building in Sant Just Desvern.

Esplugues de Llobregat"This building is like a Bach fugue." Anna Bofill means it, and she will explain it later, sitting on one of the benches in one of the four blue courtyards of the building she helped build from the Taller de Arquitectura. We are in Walden 7, this great mass in Sant Just Desvern that stands out from the highway and most people know only from hearing about it or from photographs. It's cold, and the interior is somber and imposing. It's no wonder some compare the building to a cathedral, perhaps Baroque like the musician, because in these ground-floor communal spaces there is a clear—and perhaps too obvious—desire for monumentality. But they achieve their effect. They are imposing, they fascinate. The apartments will be another matter later, which are of different types but in many cases cozy and, surprisingly, bright.

Walden is a village. In fact, there are more than 500 villages in Catalonia with fewer inhabitants and perhaps fewer stories than this building, which over the years—this one turns fifty—has become one of the great landmarks of 20th-century Catalan architecture. It houses around 1,100 people—the population fluctuates, as it does in all villages—in around 430 homes of various sizes and shapes, but ultimately they all have in common that they are all made from the same cell that is repeated and combined. This is important because it is the center of the project. The building is constructed from 1,084 cells, cubes of about 30 square meters (in fact, 28.10 m², since the remaining space is used for common uses) which were the basic unit. The homes could be one, two, three or four cubes that were combined horizontally or vertically, although over the years some residents have acquired more modules to configure larger homes.

It is fascinating to read the explanations of Anna Bofill, composer and architect who has just published, precisely, an unpublished text from those early seventies -Towards ecomorphology: Between utopia and reality (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2024) – in which he explains the geometric and mathematical background of the entire construction. And also the musical one. "It's a Bach fugue, because it's made with the same compositional principles that Bach used for fugues and counterpoints," Bofill explains. "It's about taking a motif, in this case a cube, which is transferred and forms this Walden staircase by applying symmetries [...], you grow in space."

Symmetry is fundamental to Walden, explains architect Fernando Marzà, who was one of the first to move there in 1975. Although he hasn't been a resident for years, he remains equally fascinated by this building, which he has studied for years and which he shows us with delight. It's not easy to explain or describe, because it's full of details and changing perspectives. He insists again and again that we focus on the axis of symmetry between the two entrances, the north and the south, between which there are two large halls These connect to the four large blue interior courtyards around which all the apartments are structured. The building changes slightly in the central section, where access to the apartments is no longer through the interior courtyards but through the exterior, via the façade.

"When I leave the house on the 14th floor, to go to the elevator if it's raining, I have to take an umbrella," says Natàlia Bravo, president of the Walden homeowners' association. "I don't feel like I'm living in an apartment building, but in a small town with streets and community life, which is also very peaceful." She's proud, and wants the residents to be proud too: "We want to restore the Walden's value and place it in the place a building like this deserves." That's why, in addition to the 50th anniversary events, which are still being finalized and will have one of the highlights in Sant Joan, they plan to create a foundation that can manage visits and requests of all kinds—groups, advertising, film, photography—to do things in the building. Visits are now available upon request (email: visitas@walden7.com), but they can't keep up with the number of requests. He explains that in 2026, when Barcelona will be the world capital of architecture, the building will be fully incorporated into the capital's tourist routes. I don't know if they're aware of what this might mean for the residents.

Bravo, in fact, has been living at the Walden for many years, but he arrives, he explains, in 1996, a year after the completion of the major restoration that put an end to the building's dark legend. This legend still has a strong imprint on the collective imagination: the idea of a building that was falling apart and had nets to collect the falling façade tiles. This is history now, but it's worth recovering it a bit to properly situate the building in its historical context.

A troubled first twenty years

In the book Walden 7 and mig, published by the Sant Just Desvern Town Hall in 1995 –and which It can be downloaded free of charge from the municipal website–, includes an exhaustive chronology of these first twenty conflictive years of the building. From the explanation of why it was built on the former Sanson cement factory grounds to the City Council's complicated process to prevent its demolition after the construction company went bankrupt. It's no joke.

In 1984, the developer Ceex.3.SA (an acronym for The City in Space Experience 3) was already in the hands of the Bank Deposit Guarantee Fund (Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos Bancarios), since the parent institution on which it depended, Banca Catalana –Ricardo Bofill acknowledged and thanked Jordi Pujol for being able to move forward with the project– was under intervention. The conflict with the neighbors over construction problems with the building—the work was carried out by Dragados y Construcciones—which included cracks and leaks in the roof, as well as the spectacular collapse of tiles, had begun a year after the work was completed, in 1976, and the owners' meetings of those years, they explain, were a living hell.

Lawsuits and controversies filled the pages of newspapers – Juan Marsé mocked the building, and what it symbolized, in his novel The bilingual lover– until, after much negotiation, the Sant Just City Council was able to acquire the company and the surrounding land, take over its rehabilitation, and develop the surrounding area to create more social housing through a public developer. Thus, the entire immense contaminated site of the old cement factory, which neighborhood protests forced to close in the late 1960s and which Ricardo Bofill had acquired in 1970 for 108 million pesetas, began a new life with a renovation that eliminated practically all the tiles, better insulated the building, and repaired everything that had been damaged by the haste in construction, scarce resources, and excessive experimentation with the materials used.

The origin and context of Walden

The project was indeed unusual. As proof, the access vestibules to the parking garages are paved with poems by José Agustín Goytisolo, a poet and one of the main ideologists of the Taller de Arquitectura, which was directed by Ricardo Bofill but which, especially in its early days, was a collective effort by a diverse group of progressive and idealistic people—also prick– among whom there were, depending on the period, sociologists such as Salvador Clotas, actresses such as Serena Vergano, architects such as Peter Hodgkinson, artists such as Daniel Argimon, philosophers such as Xavier Rubert de Ventós and students or young architects and quantity surveyors such as Joan Malagarriga, Manuel Núñez Yanowsky, Dolors Rocamora, Anna Bofill and Ramon Collado. It must be said, however, that the works of those early days, including Walden, were signed by Emili Bofill, the father, architect and builder, who was a mentor, protector and patron of the entire group.

Goytisolo published a collection of poems about that experience. The first stanza of the poem Walden It says: "They wanted to build / a place very different from those already known / a refuge in the air / against indifference and vulgarity" And the last one concludes: "Of what happened with this project / time will leave marks on the walls. / If the dream failed it was because everything / was prepared for it to happen that way". Utopia and its failure.

The very name Walden refers to utopia, which the behavioral psychologist BF Skinner imagined in 1948 in his novel Walden two, which in turn was inspired by the ecological essay Walden or Life in the Woods, published in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. The American author describes the two years, two months and two days he spent in a self-built cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. Skinner's novel, however, is more in line with the philosophy of the building and is the one that lies at the origin of the project, as Anna Bofill explained. In this case it has the number 7 next to the name because in his book the psychologist already spoke of the Waldens previous ones.

Walden's main utopia, however, beyond its name, was its desire to reinvent urban planning and housing for a type of society that was undergoing a period of change. We're talking about the 1960s, a time of revolutions in every sense: cultural, sexual, and also social in terms of family structure and housing. It was also the time when criticisms of the Le Corbusier-inspired rationalism model emerged in the world of architecture. The model had become an international style that was reproduced everywhere to address the ever-increasing population—the generation baby boom– and the migration of the rural population to the cities.

"We said we didn't like that, the typical blocks, those shoe boxes that are placed one after the other, in the industrial estates, the first ones, and also those that came later," says Anna Bofill. "The first experience was the Gaudí neighborhood in Reus. We thought about how to offer these families decent social housing, grouped in a pleasant way, forming a kind of village and avoiding the typical block." Reus was the first step in a series of experiments they called "city in space," a concept that alludes to a vertical urban organization. In other words, the city in space presupposed high-rise streets with various services distributed throughout the structure. This was attempted in Walden, but ultimately it didn't work, and there's no mixing of functions; everything is residential.

"We said: "we have to break up the facades, they can't all be straight. We can't have these corridors with door, door, door, door... This is like a prison. All the homes can't be the same, all the doors the same, all the windows the same, this repetition is monotonous, it has no personality, it has no expression, it has nothing. We have to look for a volumetry that breaks with all this, that plays with things, that allows the attic of one home to be at the same time the street to access another..." And we started all this in Reus," recalls Anna Bofill.

As antecedents of Walden, then, there is the Gaudí neighborhood of Reus, but also formally we can consider the Kafka Castle in Sitges, the Xanadú building in Calpe and, the most significant although never carried out, the city project in the Moratalaz space, which was interesting for its commercial structure, since they wanted to sell "shares" and not square meters. Walden, Ricardo Bofill explained in an interview, was a way of applying these ideas on a smaller but controllable scale, although in the end he also considered it a failure, among other things because the urbanization of the project was left half-finished and there was no mixing of uses.

One million pesetas for 120 m²

But seen from today, it's surprising how much vitality that utopia still has. Especially considering that Walden was a protected housing development that, admittedly, broke the strict regulations of the VPOs of the time thanks to Bofill's connections.

"In 1975, my apartment, which had four modules, or 120 m2,², and a parking lot, cost a million pesetas," explains Fernando Marzà on the building's rooftop, one of the highlights of the exceptional guided tour he gives us through the labyrinthine building. "It was affordable at the time, but they gave you the basics; there was no flooring or tiles in the bathroom. If you wanted the finishes, you had to adapt to their proposals." This meant, for example, a whole series of innovations, such as stepped interiors that served as sofas or beds, or shower screens that doubled as projection screens. Over the years, residents have adapted the apartments to their needs, but some have kept the two bookcases that separate the kitchen area from the living room and were originally joined by a table that served as both a dining room and an office. It is known as Bofill's H.

"I arrived at the Walden five years later, in 1980, and I paid a little more, but it was still affordable," explains Miquel Abella, one of the building's long-standing residents. As a jazz expert, he has been a major cultural activist in Sant Just, who initially welcomed the experiment with reluctance but has ended up making it a symbol for the town. A good portion of his apartment, also consisting of four rooms, which he shares with his wife, Lola Castañ, is occupied by blues records and books. It's a bright and comfortable apartment, the second they've occupied in the building—"We moved when our daughter was born, because there were already four of us and we couldn't fit," he explains—and which had originally belonged to the poet and architect Joan Margarit. Among the Walden's residents are all kinds of people, but also famous figures such as Carles Santos, Carme Elias, Gabriel Brncic, and Carles Segarra, to name a few, live or have lived there. Although it was subsidized housing, the building's characteristics meant that it was mostly settled by educated people, professionals eager to experience new things and who more or less shared the project's ideas, which were promoted largely by word of mouth. "Back then, it was very isolated, poorly connected to public transport, but by car there weren't the traffic jams there are now, and you could be in Barcelona in ten minutes," Abella recalls. Now they have a tram stop, called Walden, right outside their house, and Sant Just has grown towards them, which has brought the old industrial estate to life.

"The interior communal spaces, such as the blue patios and the large halls, they haven't worked too well," admits Marzà, who is proud that a ping-pong table has been maintained, which, he says, was one of his contributions, along with Miquel Abella, to making these spaces more friendly, which the new board now also wants to revive by giving them new uses. "The truth is that the roof, where from the beginning the two water tanks for the firefighters were also reused as swimming pools, and the outdoor plazas have been the most useful in creating community," he adds. The roof, with exceptional views of the mountains and the sea, is full of corners to hide away and read and sunbathe, but it is not suitable for people with vertigo and is, like all very tall buildings, too attractive for lovers of abysses.

However, residents also frequently use the "streets" that provide access to the different homes and serve as small terraces. The building is sometimes described as a castle and other times as a kasbah because it's full of nooks, stairs, and hallways, which, admittedly, is somewhat uncomfortable for older people. "In the morning, during rush hour, you might find a line for the elevator, but it's not common; it's generally quiet. If you look closely, in the long time we've been wandering around here, we haven't seen many people," says Lola Castañ.

Indeed, it's one of the curious things about Walden. "Perhaps the surprising thing is that I've found it very peaceful and that it's a very habitable place," explains David G. Torres, art critic and one of those responsible, along with photographer Gregori Civera of the Bofill Architecture Workshop, for organizing the exhibition about the building in the ground-floor courtyards as part of its 50th anniversary. "We came to live here ten years ago for several reasons. One is that I'm from Esplugues but studied at the Sant Just secondary school, and I had friends at Walden. Even then, the building fascinated me. I had always thought it was a place I really liked to live, and after years of living in Barcelona, we decided to move because the city was becoming less and less habitable."

It's a fascination that more and more people share. The queue of interested people waiting to visit it is long, but for years it hasn't received enough attention, possibly because, although he was considered a star in France, in Catalonia Ricardo Bofill wasn't very well regarded among a large sector of the architectural establishment. In fact, Marzà laments, there has still not been a major exhibition about the Taller de Arquitectura, although he attempted one a few years ago. Bofill's approach to architecture jet set The Walden project—his eldest son married Chabeli, Julio Iglesias's daughter, in the studio house that occupies the ruins of the old cement factory, next to the Walden—and the, so to speak, academic drift of the projects of recent years, such as the INEFC, the TNC, or the airport, have meant that his work has not been disseminated with the rigor it deserves.

"The Walden is architectural history; it forms part of legendary buildings and projects for cohabitation such as the Housing Unit in Marseille or the Barbican in London," says David G. Torres. "In this sense, they show elements of a coexistence and ways of doing things that we could call utopian, typical of the sixties and seventies. But, on the other hand, solutions such as modular spaces, family coexistence in spaces that are kitchen, dining room, and living room, and the community of dwellings that respond to different needs are still current and relevant issues today."

However, what captivates about this building is its spectacular beauty. "You either love Walden or hate it, because it's so artistically powerful," says Anna Bofill, whose work is now on display in a solo exhibition at the ETSAB. "How do you live here? Wonderfully. It's an enormous inhabited sculpture, a great work of art. If you're sensitive to art, you'll live here very well, but if you only look at it as a place to eat and sleep, you can find millions of flaws, which it surely has." Torres reaffirms this: "The building's interior is beautiful: from the materials to the shapes, including the changes in lighting and perspectives... Living in a place like this also means quality of life."