A Ricardo Bofill studio tour

I just got back from my run during which I finished my twentieth Call Her Daddy podcast and learned, yet again, that when a thing is popular, it is most likely good. There was something about the CHD podcast that I just utterly refused to partake in – and by ‘something’ I mean I just didn’t get the name – but my brother told me to listen to the Ellen Pompeo episode and one episode turned into five, which turned into ten, which turned into twenty.

This aversion to popular things is an annoying trait of mine that I have to regularly tamp down – if something is so prevalent in the zeitgeist, it’s almost like I’ve absorbed it through cultural osmosis, and it becomes something I can very happily check off my list of things to consume. If everyone else experiences it, then so do I.

For example, I literally did not listen to Lana Del Rey until the drama about her marrying that swamp man made me want to understand who this lady really was, and then I realised I’d basically just deprived myself of pure artistry for ten years – for what?? What am I trying to prove?

And for some odd reason, this is how I felt about Barcelona. ‘You’ll love it there, the buildings are really interesting’, Barcelona-lovers would tell me. ‘Ugh, I need to go one day,’ I’d say, as I’d book another flight to anywhere in Italy.

But I (or rather, Andy), finally bit the bullet and bought a ticket to Barcelona for a long weekend to visit friends, and, very luckily, to visit the Ricardo Bofill architecture studio.

I have been lusting over Ricardo Bofill for as long as Dreamspaces has been alive, so when I reached out to organise a little tour and they said yes – I could not have been more excited.