His structures were so bold, they were the backdrops for TV shows and films, including “Westworld” and a “Hunger Games” movie. But they were also socially aware.

Ricardo Bofill, a Spanish architect behind some of the world’s most startling buildings, died on Friday at a hospital in Barcelona. He was 82. The cause was Covid-19, his son Pablo said.

Among Mr. Bofill’s best known works were public housing projects, most of them built in France in the 1980s, with vastly overscale classical elements, which were both derided as kitsch and hailed by critics as the long-awaited middle ground between historicism and modernity.

He began his career with a series of smaller projects in Spain that followed geometric rules to sometimes mind-boggling extremes. La Muralla Roja, designed in 1968 and completed in 1973, in the coastal city of Calpe, reimagined the North African casbah as a bright pink assemblage of walls and stairways as if arranged by M.C. Escher...

The New York Times: Ricardo Bofill, Architect of Otherworldly Buildings, Dies at 82