Modern buildings made like they were a thousand years ago

The word aulet refers to a small grove of holm-oaks, trees that were planted thousands of years ago so that livestock could shelter in their shade and feed on their fruits. And this was what Francisco and Sebastià decided to call their studio, defending the idea that architecture stems from the relationship with nature.

One of the biggest critics of modern architecture was the author of the book Architecture without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky. The Czech intellectual and architect condemned the way the modernity of the 1960s brushed aside the architectural knowledge developed by civilisations over millennia. “Modern architecture was important for solving the sanitation problems of residences, but the downside was that to provide that response, we replaced materials such as wood, ceramics or stone for other materials that come from fossil fuels, like aluminium and plastic derivates. Rudofsky said that the path we went down led us to destroy this wealth of knowledge. What we wanted to do was go back to working the old way, using the materials we find in the local environment”, the architects explain from their office in Calle Sant Feliu, in Palma’s old town.

For Aulets, the central theme of their projects is focused on certain questions: How do you see your future projects?, or What is it I want to do? “These questions serve to help us determine what it is we want to solve. We have to adapt to what we have. We need to stop making buildings with fifty or a hundred different types of materials; if the place where we plan the building only has five autochthonous materials locally, those are the ones we need to work with, adapting the space to the ancient history of the place. It isn’t about austerity, but returning to the origins in order to try and distance ourselves from the environmental abyss. The most modern thing is to go back thousands of years”, they say,

According to Francisco and Sebastià, Palma has a lot of work to do in this regard, as it is one of the European cities with the least green space per inhabitant. In terms of Spain, Barcelona has nearly double the amount of green spaces, and Madrid has four times the amount. “The reason is the way of understanding the city. In the 1960s the Paseo Marítimo was built as though it were a motorway that connected the airport with Calvià. Now is the time to improve projects that connect us with nature. Society should play an important role in deciding what people want the natural spaces in their city to be like”.

The truly important aspect for these two architects “is the struggle to go back to the symbiotic relationship between the natural and the artificial, as occurs for example in Banyalbufar, because our modern world has broken off its ties with nature. We work on the basis of two variants: the place tells you how you have to work, and the materials tell you how you have to build. We provide solutions to the problems posed using materials sourced from Mallorca”.

They believe that the circular economy needs to be reactivated if we are to be able to develop this construction concept. “That is the first step, because nowadays it is much cheaper for wood to be cut down in Oregon, worked on in Germany or China and then brought to Mallorca, than to work directly with wood from here, from the island. The chains are better established on a global than on a local level, and that makes no sense, we need to re-establish this broken system”.

Francisco and Sebastià point to the consumer society as the reason for this distortion: “We imagine that everything is [...]

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