"[1] Born in late 1939, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Ricardo Bofill grew up in a well-to-do family with deep Catalan and Barcelonese roots.

His father Emilio Bofill (1907-2000) was an architect, builder, and developer who studied at Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona [ca], Catalonia's oldest professional architecture school.

"[2] Ricardo's mother, Maria Levi (1909-1991), was an Italian of Jewish descent born in Venice, who became a prominent sponsor of Catalan literature and culture in post-war Barcelona.

[6] In 1957 he enrolled at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona [ca], where he engaged in student activism with the unauthorized Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, and was soon arrested in a demonstration and expelled from the university and from Spain.

[8] The same thinking was developed on a larger scale with the project La Ciudad en el Espacio ("The City in Space"), whose construction started in the Moratalaz area of Madrid in 1970 but was abruptly stopped by Francoist mayor Carlos Arias Navarro.

In 1971, he was invited by Bernard Hirsch [fr], a key planner of the Cergy-Pontoise urban project, to develop a design concept analogous to that of the Barrio Gaudí in Reus.

[5]: 255–256  Another major development was a competition-winning concept for Les Halles in Paris in 1975, whose construction subsequently started but was reversed in 1978 by the newly elected mayor Jacques Chirac.

[18][19] In a noted study of France's evolving social structures and landscapes published in 2021,[20] political scientist Jérôme Fourquet and journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely wrote that "the monumental projects designed by Spanish architect Ricardo-Bofill in Noisy-le-Grand (Les Espaces d'Abraxas), in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (Les Arcades du Lac) and in Montpellier (the Antigone neighborhood) are basically the architectural signature of the 1980s" in the country.

Several architects who worked with Bofill went on to create significant architecture firms of their own, notably Manuel Núñez Yanowsky [es] in 1978, Nabil Gholam in 1994, and Philippe Chiambaretta [fr] in 2000.