Rethinking Architecture: Mallorca's resorts

They're holding a workshop tomorrow at the headquarters of the Balearic College of Architects, the professional institute for the islands' architects. Among those taking part will be the president of the Mallorcan hoteliers' federation, Inma de Benito, and the town hall architect from Calvia as well as a number of architectural students. The workshop's theme is Magalluf and its future. There is to be "critical reflection" on the relationship between architecture and urban planning and the living conditions of both tourists and residents in a tourism environment. Because of Magalluf's issues, it has been chosen as a suitable subject for student analysis.

If, as non-architects, you were to be asked for your architectural prescription for Magalluf's future, it might not get much further than calling in the wrecking crews, but this would be unfair in light of changes already undertaken or in progress in the resort. Indeed, because of these changes, one has to ask if Magalluf is a suitable subject. But your response would probably be one based on something other than architecture, i.e. the resort's poor reputation. Architecture and urban planning can and do determine social behaviour, but Magalluf is not so different, in architectural terms, to other resorts: in fact, because of the recent developments, it is somewhat better than many.

Magalluf was the last of Calvia's main tourism centres to receive the green light for development: it wasn't definitively given until 1959. By then Santa Ponsa and Palmanova were already under development, Paguera's plan had been approved, while Illetes had undergone limited hotel construction (or re-construction) from the late 1940s. Illetes is, in this regard, instructive. When the Maricel was originally built, replacing the previous Cas Català, it conformed to an architectural design, conceived by the Mallorcan Francisco Casas, which owed much to the Mallorcan manor house and it was in line with design thinking of the time. It is one of the great ironies of tourism in Mallorca that, as the island attempts a reinvention of resorts, the model of the 1950s prior to the economic necessity of mass tourism was a hotel like the Maricel and a tranquil spot such as Illetes. This style of hotel was itself a successor to the likes of the Formentor and, much earlier, Palma's Gran Hotel. Architecture was, therefore, conceived with a certain social behaviour in mind: that of the wealthy, the more refined and sophisticated.

The tourism boom shattered all this and introduced a tourism that was neither refined nor sophisticated. The resorts and their hotels complemented their guests. Architecturally, this meant a form of touristic Brutalism. Urban layouts, while many adhered to blueprints from the 1930s of a garden-city nature (like in Santa Ponsa), were compromised by the need for construction which overwhelmed design principles for greater environmental and human co-existence harmony. Tourists, innocents abroad and mostly unfamiliar with alternatives, accepted this Brutalism, as did residents, many of them incomers: the resort workers.

It is interesting to note that tourist and resident co-existence is a factor in the workshop's considerations, because little attention was paid to such a thing when the resorts were springing up. Had there been, there might have been alternative urban planning, as was the case with French resorts that were specifically for tourists. These enclaves can be criticised for being tourist ghettoes, removed from the local community, but they have certain advantages in reducing the potential for resident-tourist conflict. Nevertheless, resorts, in an ideal world, should be places where tourist and resident mingle together in cultural interplay, and some do conform to this ideal better than others, as might be said to be the case with Puerto Pollensa, for instance. But then Puerto Pollensa wasn't an artificial resort. It grew organically rather than out of nothing or very little, and its architecture, even today, for the most part reflects this.

The ideal of cultural interplay, the bringing together of peoples from different nations in peace through tourism, was one that tourism visionaries had: Horizon's Vladimir Raitz, for example. But this didn't happen because of the artificial nature of resorts such as Magalluf and because of the demand for the British bar or the German kneipe. Subsequently, this ideal has been made even more untenable thanks to the all-inclusive.

Though Magalluf has experienced its improvements, the negative legacy of architectural and urban planning, exacerbated by Calvia's 1971 general urban plan and expansion which followed, most definitely remains. But so it does in other resorts. As a case study, the architectural students might come up with some solutions, but it is not just Magalluf which needs one. There again, we have been here before. In 2000, the then government embarked upon a three-year cycle of activities to bring forth architectural ideas for Mallorca's future, its image and its tourism reality. Serious names in the architectural world were asked to participate. What happened? Nothing.