25. Walden 7. 1970

Authors: Taller de Arquitectura: Ricardo Bofill, Anna Bofill, Salvador Clotas, Peter Hodgkinson, Ramón Collado, Joan Malagarriga, Manuel Núñez Yanowsky, Dolors Rocamora, Serena Vergano and José Agustín Goytisolo

Location: Carretera Reial, 106, Sant Just Desvern

The project is situated on a plot measuring 45,000 square metres, on the site of the former Samson cement factory.

The construction incorporated the maximum area of land in its interior, but on two scales: firstly, a large scale that situated the buildings around the perimeter, enclosing a large central plaza, and secondly, a smaller scale in which the construction incorporated public space in the form of interior plazas and avenues.

Of this complex, only the main building was constructed, which was christened Walden 7. This building occupies 5,250 square metres of land and comprises 1,100 modules of 5.3 x 5.3 x 2.50 metres and 16 floors of constant height.

The basic cell of the building is a 5.30 x 5.30 x 5.30 metre cube, through one side of which all the installations networks pass. Each basic cell comprises two housing modules, and the dwellings have one, two, three or four modules, depending on the occupants’ requirements.

These sections are the result of variations in a model section, the result of symmetry. The model section is constructed by applying a travelling movement to one cell of the building. This displacement moves through three axes in a single vertical plane: one oblique, one vertical and one oblique in the opposite direction.

These displacements of the basic cell produce a gap that is used as a hallway leading to the dwelling. On the lower levels, the gaps are produced in the interior and, on the upper levels, on the exterior. The differing symmetries of this element provide the basis for the building’s configuration. The criterion of arrangement is organisation around five monumental courtyards, one in the centre with four at its vertices. The central courtyard accommodates all the vertical communications.

The building’s circulation is completed by walkways that join the nucleus of lifts in the central courtyard to the perimetric passages described.

These communal spaces between the floors are, however, exclusively communication spaces, the size of which makes them unsuitable for use as communal spaces for relation, which necessarily takes place on the ground floor or the roof of the building. However, unlike the discontinuous roof in Reus that moves in circular fashion around the building, the occupants have to go up to the flat roof of the Walden building on purpose. 

Walden 7 is a building that, for the layout of its dwellings, could have been a city in space, or even for its large plazas, like those on the ground floor and the roof, but it lacks spaces and services in the intermediate areas. Conversely, its lovely outline, the monumental courtyards on the ground floor and the walk-over terrace remind us of Gaudí’s Pedrera.

The conclusion is probably closer to the poem by José Agustín Goytisolo. In all the cases we have looked at, extraordinary buildings were produced, but the utopia of the city in space is precisely that – an unattainable utopia, at least for the time being.

WALDEN  

JOSÉ AGUSTÍN GOYTISOLO

From the book

Taller de Arquitectura

I

They wanted to build

A very different place to those they knew

A refuge in the air

Against indifference and vulgarity.

There they dreamed of a free space

Like a score open to a thousand sounds

Like a church exuding incense

Through windows and cloisters and gardens.

As in a cave or a magic castle

Everything was going to change in this place

Everything was going to change because in dreams

Impossible things happen easily.

II

Ah, how those hopes were crushed

By the darkest of forces:

Ordinances and red ink

Disfigured the plans and blocked out the light.

Everything in its place for once and for all

Remove those gardens and number the houses

Sell the air by cubic metres

And observe the strictest rules.

And that’s what happened to the dream

Reduced to a few variations

While the utopia faded away

Becoming lost in the sky like a proud eagle.

III

If a desire is beautiful

It changes reality even if it fails

And then we can see what has been done

As something unusual and unexpected.

Different lifestyles mingle there

There is some intimacy in the hive

We see places for meeting and rest

Defying the air with their ambiguous form.

Of all that happened in this project

Time will leave signals on the walls.

If the dream failed it is because everything

Was prepared for it to happen that way.

Fernando Marzá and Neus Moyano: “Walden 7: Taller de Arquitectura” Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme, 2004, No. 244, pp. 18-53.