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Surreal Spaces Created Within Industrial Ruins

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This outdoor dinner party table setting is not an unusually glamorous hobo encampment under a bridge, but the work of Ricardo Bofill who bought a ruin, and renovated it.

Seduced by the surreality of a rambling old abandoned cement factory, he decided to preserve it, only marginally modifying the original brutality of the huge commercial spaces, both indoors and out.

The abandoned cement factory was partially in ruins, comprised of over 30 silos, underground galleries and huge engine rooms. Bofill’s remodel of the factory spaces creates some unlikely juxtapositions.

Harnessing the enormous scale of the rambling factory, he created mysterious and austere living spaces, including an apartment for him, and guest rooms and gardens, as well as architectural offices, a model laboratory, and exhibition and archival space.

The mysterious, huge spaces, and the impenetrable vagueness of the purpose to which it was originally built, makes for some very weird architecture.

He defined the multiple contradictory and rambling spaces by demolishing some structures and exposing previously concealed ones like these chimneys for the original furnace works.

Outside, where there had been just the abrupt, brutal expanse of asphalt yards, he planted gardens of eucalyptus, palms, olive trees and cypresses.

This is an example of some very extreme recycling! And that’s green.