Fascinated by the vernacular architecture of North Africa, Bofill deployed its motifs in his spectacular Spanish apartment blocks Walden 7 outside Barcelona and La Muralla Roja near Alicante, both of which rise above the modern cities enclosing them like psychedelic casbahs rising from some desert plain. Both projects seem somehow better suited to our own tastes today than those of the 1960s and 1970s when they were built, as if designed for Instagram: La Muralla Roja’s lurid millennial pink exteriors hiding maze-like Escherian staircases overlooking the blue Mediterranean Sea, and Walden 7’s earth-coloured walls and projecting concrete oriel windows enclosing cool turquoise-tiled courtyards, like some ancient quarter of Marrakech folded and recombined on top of itself, reaching heavenward.

Like the genre of critical regionalism generally, Bofill’s work captured the spirit of premodern architecture more resonantly and meaningfully than any mere pastiche. His Les Arcades du Lac housing project summons up visions simultaneously of medieval bridges crowded with dwellings, Renaissance chateaux, Mughal tomb complexes and Roman aqueducts, and all for the  humble purpose of housing suburbanites in precast concrete apartment blocks. His own home, the repurposed cement factory La Fabrica, was a medieval castle for the future, its vast concrete walls dripping with greenery, its round turrets and high windows projecting grandeur and mystery from the humblest and most reviled of materials.

Through forcing traditional motifs into futuristic directions, Bofill created alternate modernities, visions of paths not taken. His death comes as a reminder that there are other ways of living, and of building than we have come to accept: that scale and ambition are still possible, and that we can still construct monuments that will awe future generations, if we only dare to.