Pure harmony

The day he was told he had been admitted to the ETSAB Barcelona School of Architecture, Vicenç Mulet Aguiló cried with joy for hours.

That child who had never been very good at football, and who used to spend hours playing and imagining things on his own during breaktimes, who as a teenager covered his school folders with photos of emblematic buildings, who cared much more about his own inner thoughts and observations than what was going on around him, developing his oneiric and analytical ability, dreamed of creating and constructing from a very early age. A dream that came true when, in 1989, he was able to enter architecture school.

The architect Elías Torres (Ibiza, 1944), winner of the National Architecture Award of Spain in 2016, was his teacher and a fundamental figure for his learning process. “Above all Elías would demand creativity from us, he asked us to be very experimental, even reaching the point of the absurd. He used to say to us that our degree course was the only period when we would be able to develop all of our potential, as opposed to the 40 or 50 years in the profession that lay ahead of us, when day after day we would have to fight to be able to attain a minimal level of creativity".

Another important person in his life was Oriol Bohigas, the architect who changed the face of Barcelona and drew the admiration of the entire world to it during the 1992 Olympic Games. “As an architecture student, I could not have been more fortunate than to have lived in Barcelona over those years. It was incredible. All of a sudden, all the professors you had in college were building and transforming the city. Like Beth Galí, who was my Town Planning professor. One day I grabbed my drawings, went into her seminar room and said to her, “I want to work with you”. She looked at my drawings, and then she looked at me, and said, “I can’t pay you, but you can come into the studio with us”. Beth Galí was the romantic partner of Oriol Bohigas’, who at the time was one of the most important architects in Spain, with whom Vicenç would soon begin to work.

They were years “when a kid from Palma”, as he says, was fortunate enough to be welcomed into the family of Bohigas and Galí and through them, be able to meet all the people who were making a milestone in the history of architecture, landscaping, art and society. “And in spite of all that, as occurs with us Mallorcans at times, one day I started to feel enslaved by the big city: the crowds, the metro... So I decided to come back to Mallorca and set up on my own, to work so that I could see myself fully reflected in my projects”.

When he returned, in 1997, “the architecture I was interested in didn’t exist on the island, where it was still the era of the arch and the balustrade. And I didn’t want to do that. From the outset I decided that I would practise architecture as an intellectual profession, removed from mere management or technical solutions without any creative ambition. Over his more than 25 years in the profession, he has worked at all the different levels of architecture, from the information office in Valldemossa, the building for the Es Jonquet social centre – which won the City of Palma prize in 2005, alongside Marcos Alabern –, ephemeral architecture projects like the Balearic Islands’ pavilion at the World Expo Zaragoza 2008, or, more recently, the new Port-City centre, with the engineering firm Idom, in the port of Palma. “Although at present what I have the most fun with is homes for friends and private individuals”.

One of these homes, Ca N’Uli , which he has designed in Son Serra de Marina, in the north of the island, is a veritable jewel of simplicity and good taste. “The materials here are austere and the treatment of colour gives the house a personality that is very much its own. The Ca N’Uli project seeks spatial richness through shapes, voids and shadows, something intrinsically Mediterranean”.

The years of the housing crisis at the start of the last decade dealt a blow to nearly everyone. Vicenç took advantage of that opportunity to take a significant hiatus from his personal and professional life, and embarked on his very own journey into the wilderness, which led him to Chile in 2014. He had numerous adventures in the country, both on a personal and on a professional level, collaborating with the architect Cristian Valdés and the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaíso, a centre where the most important subject of the entire degree is poetry. His experience in Chile changed the way his way of seeing, thinking and acting, to begin down the path all over again.

Vicenç Mulet finds it impossible to speak of [...]

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