From utopian social housing to Star Wars-esque desert caves, Ricardo Bofill’s vernacular defies the classifications of architecture. In a year when the Catalan-raised master is among a group of his peers representing the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, quarterly arts journal Mono.Kultur revisited Bofill's 50-year spanning urban design practise Taller de Arquitectura to celebrate his penchant for the psychological and the surreal. “He is a gem of 1970s and 1980s radicalism that I find is now a little bit forgotten or overlooked,” says founder and publisher Kai von Rabenau, who first came across his work editing an issue on another art-world enfant terrible, Cyprien Gaillard. Enlisting writer and curator Carson Chan for the title's trademark single-interview format, von Rabenau combined it with a visual portfolio of previously unseen images of Bofill's vast 1000 projects, which were then cropped to the title's A2 format. Naturally, the architect's avant-garde work space La Fábrica—a giant converted cement factory in the former industrial fringes of Barcelona—stood out. “It’s a mad, mad space of dreamlike fantasy and a Disney characteristic,” he notes. “I think it’s Ricardo at his best, where he takes something and makes it uniquely, strangely his own.” As for the ten-year old Kreuzberg studio of the publication that has also profiled the likes of Marina Abramović, Wu-Tang Clan and Ryan McGinley, he cites influences as disparate as Brand Ein, White Review and McSweeney's. “I used to always hate it when people called us a fanzine because of the size, but then at some point I realized we’re probably the ultimate fanzine.”

Mono.Kultur issue #36 Ricardo Bofill: The Future of the Past is out now.