In February 1993 I went to Ibiza to see some of the rural houses that I had seen in the Architectural Guide of Ibiza and Formentera by Elías Torres. Many of them were abandoned, others still inhabited by Ibicencos, others by foreigners, others disappeared. I left with a series of photographs and drawings of Ibizan rural houses, images of walls, landscapes, roads, and different questions about how one could intervene in a place with such a strong identity. What interested me was to understand how this landscape was built, and in this sense, the first drawings I made, studies of rural houses as isolated objects, were not useful to understand the complex relationships that houses and its elements established with the ground. After overlapping the drawings of the houses and their surroundings to cartography and aerial photographs was inevitable firstly, to keep drawing and see how the walls and roads were articulated on the relief to find another house, and secondly, to see, making progressive zooms, how the stone walls of the boundaries of a property actually linked with other, and with another, without rupture, forming a continuous structure appreciably in its entirety only at the global scale of the island. That trip was the beginning of a constant relationship with the island, with its architecture and landscape, of walks through the countryside, the city and the villages, which continues to this day. For years the tables and walls of the studio have been occupied by plans, drawings and photographs of houses and areas of the territory that I have been completing through continuous visits to the places, and, fortunately, also of several projects on the island. Throughout these years the territory of the island of Ibiza, a “non-urban” territory, built mainly by agriculture, one of those landscapes that have received less attention from Urbanism, and that are currently undergoing a strong transformation, has been for me an opportunity to work on issues related to the rural territory, its landscape, its architecture and its transformation. Questions that tried to answer some of the questions and issues that interest me most as an architect. How to intervene in the landscape? Is it possible to think of an urbanism appropriate to the scale of the rural territory, that belongs to a place, that is not based on a set of rules, ordinances, parameters and models of urban origin applied indiscriminately to different landscapes, places and contexts? Is it possible to define general planning criteria for the rural territory and its inhabited nuclei based on an understanding of the general laws that have constructed the agricultural systems and the villages? Criteria that comes from an analysis of the drainage system, of the plot system, the road network, the structures of the crops and the natural landscape? The answer to these questions required first of all to improve the knowledge of the rural landscape of the island, which is largely a construction of land rather than of buildings. This knowledge has been generated through walks, visits, drawings and surveys in situ. Then, back in the studio to add the information to the plans, necessarily more abstract, in which everything always appeared clearer than on site. The exhibition presents some of the drawings and photographs made throughout these years. Drawings that begin with 1:500, 1:1.500 scale surveys of the most significant rural houses of the Morna, Atzaró and Balafi bands, and arrives by progressive zooms to a general view of the island's territory. The analysis of the rural space of the island of Ibiza, the study of the elements that compose it (houses, roads, stone walls, crops, plots...) and the relationships they have established with the geographical elements (relief, drainage, vegetation...) has not been carried out with an archaeological, patrimonial vision of protecting versus destroying. The discovery, by means of drawing, of the lines of force of the fabric, of the persistences that have built and articulated the rural territory of Ibiza over the years, has evidenced the structure of the territory. This grid, formed by the system of walls that structures and shapes the rural landscape of the island, is a great territorial project and an essential element of formal control for any intervention, whether it is the construction of a wall, a house, a path, a road or the growth of a village, a rural nucleus or a city.

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Iniciativa Digital Politècnica, 2025
· ISBN 979-13-87613-56-3 · Gratuït · anglès
Matèria: Arts : Arquitectura
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