Boris Stoyanov
La Fabrica 2077
Columbia GSAPP
Fall 2023
Adaptive Reuse
Professor Rui Wang
Ricardo Bofill’s La Fábrica is a study in transformation—an architecture that refuses to be fixed in time. Originally constructed as a cement factory in the early 20th century, the structure was built for pure function, an assembly of industrial silos, subterranean chambers, and towering concrete forms engineered for production. When deindustrialization rendered it obsolete, it fell into abandonment, its raw geometries left to decay as nature began to reclaim its surfaces. Bofill’s intervention did not erase this history but instead embraced it, repurposing the ruin into a hybrid of residence, studio, and garden. Spaces that once processed materials on an industrial scale now hold intimate interiors, lush courtyards, and monumental voids that frame the sky. The past remains embedded in the walls, but the structure continues to evolve, its unfinished qualities suggesting further adaptations yet to come. The final epoch, projected through speculative drawings and videos, envisions a future in which time reasserts itself once more—where the complex, stripped of habitation, becomes something new yet again. The concrete erodes, vegetation overtakes the architecture, and the once-refined spaces slip into a state of overgrowth and entropy.