MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The man who coloured architecture
By his own admission, RICARDO BOFILL LEVI was a ‘nomad’ of the profession but his Marxist convictions helped him become an unprecedented innovator of social housing design
EMBRACING: (L to R) Inner yard in Muralla Roja/Red Wall; Ricardo Bofill Levi; the facade of Walden 7 and Muralla Roja forecourt
[(L to R) erichology/flickr/Creative Commons David Olivari/flickr/CC Nicolás Boullosa/flickr/CC Joanbanjo/Creative Commons] 
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JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
RICARDO BOFILL LEVI, the Catalan architect whose studio retained a poet and a philosopher, has died on January 14 aged 82.
A Marxist activist during the Franco dictatorship, he was expelled from university in Barcelona, fled Spain for Geneva and only returned in the mid-60s when he assembled like-minded architects to set up Taller de Arquitectura/Architecture Workshop and located it in a converted cement factory in Barcelona. They were uniquely focused on providing housing solutions.
Bofill’s is a socially aware architecture that addresses the complex problems of urban communal living with rare courage and design flair. The projects were invariably characterised by a flamboyance of form never seen before.
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