TEd’A arquitectes

‘Every element must have its own expression.’

Photo: Hisao Suzuki

TEd’A arquitectes is going local: the reuse of buildings materials and working with what is at hand. “For us architecture is about restarting over and over again.”

CAN GABRIEL, PALMA, SPAIN PHOTOS: TED’A ARQUITECTES

“We are where we are.” The Catalan artist and poet Perejaume wrote this simple sentence in his book Local Words. In the words of the architect Jaume Mayol Amengual, everything depends similarly on the place where you are because you respond to the needs that you have there.

Accordingly, this interview took place in an apartment in Palma de Mallorca – not somewhere else, and certainly not in the ultimate placelessness of the Internet. The apartment has been in the throes of an exciting process of renovation for over ten years. The clients were in this case the architects themselves, Jaume Mayol Amengual and Irene Perez Piferrer who together head the studio and workshop of TEd’A arquitectes in Mallorca. Naturally they held up every detail to the light. What was already there, and what constituted the place, has been left as much as it was: in particular the concrete floor and the cement-plastered building blocks that form the ceiling. To create a kitchen, a bathroom and a sleeping room, structural wooden beams were inserted into the large, empty space. But the story of the apartment is as much about how lamps are hung, light switches are attached and the tap in the bathroom is shaped (a garden hose with a bent copper tube inside). In their playfulness, as though improvised, each detail expresses its own essence and beauty with surprising originality.

“When applied to architecture, the repeated words of Perejaume refer to local resources, the landscape and the climate,” Jaume Mayol Amengual explained. “As an architect, you have to read these statements carefully. It is what tradition was always about, and why it differs from place to place. Tradition comes from the Latin word tradare, which means looking back in order to move forwards. When you learn from the past, you are copying the past in a thorough and serious way. The process of copying, reproducing and repeating creates the identity of a place. It really interests us to look back to what has been done before. We, as human beings, cannot simply start from scratch.”

That was exactly what modernism was aiming at, starting again from scratch. Was modernism a huge mistake in your opinion?

“No, certainly not. After the First World War there was a huge need for building materials and technologies, and new housing was needed on a massive scale. That was quite understandable in the circumstances. But the builders then held on to the low-budget idiom of the post-war crisis. The materials that were now being used were neither natural nor local, and they were produced and transported globally. This severed the connection with tradition and with everything that belonged to a specific place. We know the result all too well: contamination, pollution, CO₂ emissions etc. We have to take a new turn, but we must also respect strategies that have proved successful in the past.”

CAN JAIME I N’ISABELLE, PALMA, MALLORCA, SPAIN PHOTOS: LUIS DÍAZ DÍAZ

Globalization led to the practice of mass tourism and the severe changes it brought about. Mallorca, for instance, has been overwhelmed with tourists for many decades. Is it your ambition to counteract the mass tourist phenomenon through your architecture?

“I was born in a village in the centre of the island of Mallorca, where my father worked in the fields. Of course I was aware of the hotels being built there, but I didn’t live there. When Irene and I finished our training as architects and returned to Mallorca, we both happened to favour this local approach. It was intuitive, even though we were not aware of it at first. It was just the kind of thing we tend to do.

I remember very well that when I returned, I looked with fresh eyes at the way vernacular buildings were constructed, for instance how a door or window could be opened. I hadn’t paid attention to things like that before I left the island to study architecture, perhaps because they were so common.”

“Here on Mallorca, we are impressed by the famous Can Lis house built by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon on the island’s east coast. When Utzon came to Mallorca he noticed the local Mares sandstone and used it for building the house. It is clear to me that the local architecture influenced him, a stranger though he was. Exactly the same happened to us in Switzerland. We looked around and built a school based on the farms we saw around us, with their wooden structures, compactness, a pitched roof and a stone basement.”

Modernity has changed life drastically, even in the countryside. Why do you find tradition so relevant?

“A lot has changed but people still adapt to a specific place. On Mallorca, we have a pleasant summer breeze when the sea is cooler than the inland. The breeze is called Embat, and when you open a window to admit the breeze you have air conditioning for free. Another way of cooling without mechanical air conditioning is to take advantage of thick walls. It isn’t because we shouldn’t use modern technology, but because it is important to decrease and decelerate things and to look at how building was done in the past. We expect that the sea level will have risen by sixty centimetres in 2050, so all those hotels on the seafront will lose their ground floor so to speak. We should put an end to the process of acceleration and globalization, for example by no longer importing stone from China or some other country because it is cheaper. We need to work with what is at hand, and rediscover the building methods and knowledge of what is really old.”

That is a proposal to fundamentally change the way we build, isn’t it?

‘Yes, you have to keep your eyes and ears open in order to appreciate the possibilities of a project. When we started work on the house of my brother Jordi, there were heaps of old stones of the building that had been demolished on the site. It was my father who posed a simple but essential question of what to do with those old stones. The answer was not that important, but the question itself was very smart. We found a way to reuse stone blocks in the façades. We cut the blocks in in half and turned them through ninety degrees, so that the slots that were previously meant to be filled with mortar for securing the blocks together now had an ornamental effect. It takes time to come across ideas like that, so it slows down the building process. The architect has to take a different attitude.”

CAN JAIME I N’ISABELLE, PALMA, MALLORCA, SPAIN PHOTO: LUIS DÍAZ DÍAZ

SCHOOL, ORSONNENS, SWITZERLAND PHOTOS: LUIS DÍAZ DÍAZ

The architect usually makes a drawing before the construction starts. Does this open-ended attitude of yours imply that the design emerges bit by bit during the building process?

“Yes, one hundred percent. The outcome, the appearance of the building, is the result of a process. Aesthetics is relevant but it isn’t waiting there in advance. It comes later. The final shape can be more serious or more playful according to the architect’s decisions. It’s a kind of improvisation, like playing jazz. One of the first things I do on site is to put up my telephone number somewhere, to remind the builders to call me when a quick decision has to be made.”

There is an intriguing play of contrasts in your projects, such as between structure and ornament. What normally has a structural function becomes ornamental in character, like the use of loadbearing sandstone blocks as cladding. The slots in the old masonry form a decorative motif on the façade. Why are you so much interested in this game of contrasts?

“We try to give every element a role in the building. Each element must have its own expression. It makes a big difference if you position a brick one way or another. It can be part of the structure, or just part of a partition or for cladding. In the Can Jaime I n’Isabelle villa, there is a single column that stands out, expressing its presence as a column. A mirror is embedded in the floor to express that the column doesn’t end where it reaches the floor. The column continues, seeming to say ‘hey, I am a column and I go all the way down to the foundation’. And because of prominence of the column, the walls themselves gain more presence. Above it there is a skylight, where it reaches to the outer world.”

Usually architects make the design of elements subservient to the overall aesthetics they strive for. However, the result of your strategy is that every element seems to talk to you. As though they share a kind of empathy.

“Every decision that you make during building is a project in itself. It is like storytelling: there is a story behind every element and we like that story to be told. It is easier to work this way and give the elements an expression of their own. You start with the specific qualities of the elements, with what they want to say, and bring them together in the end of the process.”

More exactly, what do the elements have to communicate to the clients?

“We don’t say to clients that they are only welcome when the house is completed. We aim to collaborate intensely with them during the building process.

We want the clients to participate and to make them conscious about the decisions that are made, the place where it is built and the way the house is constructed. It is their house: they pay for it and have to be aware of the role of every element that it consists of. In the past, self-builders would talk to the mason and the carpenter who came to do the walls and the window frames. They would discuss the decisions that had to be made every day.”

CAN JORDI I N'AFRICA, MONTUÏRI, MALLORCA, SPAIN PHOTOS: TEd’A arquitectes

Is it your ambition to revive craftsmanship?

“Absolutely. Craftsmanship is one of the resources that are at hand and should be used. If the craftsmen disappear all their knowledge and skills will vanish too. So it is important to keep these abilities alive and to transmit them through time. On Mallorca, there used to be about a thousand Mares quarries, often very small, made by someone just digging in the ground. Almost all of those quarries closed in the twentieth century, but now some young architects have started using this local sandstone again, and the quarries are being reopened.”

Another contrast emerges in your projects: the difference between the simple, austere and sometimes almost fortress-like exterior, and the complexity of the interior. There, every space is connected with others in an intricate way.

“When a building has to manifest itself publicly, it has to be as silent as possible. Buildings shouldn’t have to shout. They are just part of the city fabric or the landscape, but when you enter a building it can offer a world of its own. The family that lives there can have their leisure in a rich and fantastic way. It is what I would call a domestic answer: in contrast to the ordinary answer of the exterior, the interior consists of many small answers that resonate the complexity of family life. It has also to do with the way humans perceive things. The intricate interior, with its multiple divisions and variety of materials, invites us to respond to the incredible capacity of the human eye and touch and to the sensations they can offer. No stone, no brick is the same, for example. Like human beings, they are irregular.

We love these irregularities.”

For the Can Jordi i n’Africa house, as well as for projects like the tourist apartments in Can Picafort, you use building materials that are traditional in Mallorca. In the way you deploy them, however, they look very original and inventive. They are not particularly vernacular, but they certainly breathe the local atmosphere. These buildings exhale a sense of Mallorca.

“They can certainly be described as Mallorcan architecture rather than vernacular. There is a song by the Brazilian samba singer, Caetano Veloso, that goes ‘I want to be old, I want to be eternal again, I want to be new again.’ 1 Somehow I recognize our intuition and attitude in this song. To us, architecture is about the new and the eternal, about restarting over and over again.”

Would you say that time, the passage of time, is a central theme of your architecture?

“Yes, in many ways it is. The word ‘time’ can be first of all a measure of duration, such as how long it takes to build a house or to complete some other project. Time can also be the period in we live in nowadays, or historic time as expressed by the knowledge that is embedded in tradition. Besides that, there are the traces that time leaves on the building materials over the years. We don’t aim to build something as it appears in the first photo, when the building has just been completed. It should instead be envisaged as a photo that will be taken in the future, when the materials are worn and weathered, and have consequently gained in beauty.”

You don’t seem too concerned about expressing the current time, which is a dogma for many architects. Why is that?

“We have a fascination for transforming tradition, and we have no interest in today’s fashions – neither in clothing, nor food nor architecture. But we love some architectural masterpieces of the last century that in our opinion are still highly relevant, such as Jørn Utzon’s house Can Lis. And we keep an eye open for historical buildings as well as for new ones, for recently published buildings. Together with everything that we have studied and seen over the years, even in our childhood, they form a backpack full of things that has the potential to suddenly spill out onto the table, even if we don’t want it to.”

1 Quero ser velho de novo eterno, quero ser novo de novo