I’ve been thinking a lot about houses lately. Not having one of your own might do that to you. But at the moment I can’t help stopping in front of homes and thinking to myself: who lives there? Who planted that garden? When was it built and how did it come to get so abandoned? Is that house happy and where would my life lead me if I were the one inside? Because there is something very special about the house and the people who inhabit them. It is a relationship of symbiosis, where one is rather dependent on the other, and the more one gives the more one receives in return.
Last week, for example. I went out on my bike in Formentera and I found myself frozen beside a traditional house, a casa pagés they’re called, with a blue painted gate. I lingered beside the garden, planted with sage, freesias, and waited for the old ladies with iron backs to tend their vegetable gardens, to hang their washing on the line. These places are my favourites, the ones that trap me most, not just because they are beautiful houses but because the relationship between the place and the person is most clearly seen, albeit a little less these days.
Usually a single story with a wooden porch for shade, most were built with cisterns below for collecting winter rain. Building materials were what were at hand at the time of building. Planks of raw juniper for roof supports, dried posidonia as insulation between walls and ceilings. Their thick stone walls maintain a cool temperature inside and at the same time the fires heat is protected in the cold and humid months. It was an austere architecture, with little room for thrills or flooring, but exceptionally wonderful in its simplicity, design and functionality.
Speaking of fires, the words themselves speak volumes. Hogar, Spanish for home, has its roots in the word for fire, or more specifically, fireplace-a symbol of warmth, comfort, life. In winter I see puffs of grey smoke exhaling from square chimneys and I picture below the burning fire, the beating heart, the people inside, the vital organ for making a house a home.
While these distinctive buildings have shaped the cultural landscape of Formentera, the island itself, with its combination of extreme weather, frequent wind and relative isolation, have in turn shaped the architecture. Several notable Architects have experienced this and built upon the foundations of self-sufficiency and water conservation that the most traditional houses had once employed.
“I would like there to be stable, immovable, intangible, intact and almost untouchable places, rooted in place: places that serve as points of reference, starting points, origins.”
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
Brutalist blocks, a pine-covered porch, whitewashed walls, a juniper garden and a water cistern under the house define the traditional architecture of Formentera.
Henri Quille, a student of Le Corbusier and a pioneer of sustainable architecture, was one such figure and arguably Formentera’s most prolific architect. Coming to the island in 1968 he built some 30 homes here, most the colour of the earth they inhabit. They are an arrangement of brutalist blocks that interweave private and communal space all at once.
You feel the shade as you enter the open courtyards and the slopping of the floors below your feet to facilitate the collection of rainwater. His homes, apart from being exceptionally beautiful, dreamlike, focused heavily on renewable energy and landscape integration in a time of concrete flats and highrise hotels. “The wind, the sun and the rain,” he once wrote, “were all I needed, nothing more,” a homage to the power of the elements, the potential of wind and solar power.
While his buildings are not exactly subtle, they sit so naturally among their environment that they don’t disturb a thing. Only enhance. The light and shadow are full of emotion and the gardens are so natural that it seems as though the floor of the patio has been cut away to expose what is organically below.
House by the sea near Es Caló. Architects have had to employ inventive solutions to conserve water and combat extreme weather conditions.
Yet seeing these houses now, abandoned for most of the year, bordered up for the winter, eyes forced shut, interior dark, I wonder if they were such a success after all. For what is a house if not something to be lived in? And what is the point of ‘good architecture’, of a sustainable building practice, if a house isn’t allowed to fulfil its purpose? For beyond architecture an empty house is as good as a sculpture. And on an island of vacations and vacational houses, are we in danger of losing that bond of place and person? That symbiosis that is so organic and special? As my Father often tells me, there’s no place like home. And here at the moment I don’t see many fires burning.
