Cultural Centre Casal Balaguer in Palma de Mallorca

Description of project by the architects

Casal Balaguer is a palace of the historic center of Palma, a flood over the centuries family home, starting in 1300, then in 1500 and finally in 1700, which now loses its household to be a public building, a cultural center for the entire city. To value the times contained in the building, without taking physical distance with the historical stages that have shaped its qualities, allows us to act without departing from him: if observation do not distinguish times, the action must not have distances. We act from within it, a physical and direct thought, transforming the building with the decision to re-occupying it, giving it a new era of longer life making it more sustainable. Having drawn the building for a long time let us decide on it, and in this sense the drawing gives us the confidence to work on what was found without physical and temporal distances with the story, in a continuous time which makes new interventions get incorporated appearing to our eyes as if they had already existed. The end result is a new generation, with legacy and new things, a job that takes the strain existing and draw from it. It is a geometric metamorphosis, but also of materials, proportions and dimensions.

The building is updated based on the previous one, a transformation that welcomes the new features. The effort is to make the ancient palace express its maximum spatial, materials, and historical qualities... because the new function gives us the freedom to draw a new project within the previous building. Taking it as a construction, without the typical constraints of the use for which it was intended, allow us to stop seeing it as a building of domestic dimensions, and move on to assess their spatial and physical as the start of the new occupation qualities. Explore the unfinished condition of the existing building, suggests that actions on it are not over, it is something evolving, imperfect result of the addition of steps in which ours is just one more, not the last. This dialogue of confidence in what we find, in a positive observation that values and respects as signs of an earlier occupation, giving the project a temporary sense which makes would not be possible to recognize from what time is this place.

Description of the Panel-Cabinet for Catalan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

To collect and to present the material with which we do the things, valuing it without the transitive character of inspiration, that is always from or towards something, but to recognise its material character, of thing, identical at any moment of a process. The working material has character in itself, independent of any further use. A project is the addition of all these materials. So, a project can be explained by the materials that have been produced for its construction.

In our studio of Barcelona, a huge closet for clothing that was in the old house where we opened the studio, has been accumulating material Casal Balaguer process during the 18 years we've been working on this project. There have been collecting and storing project versions in models, process drawings, photos of intermediate states of the work... Its huge size is related to the amount of material stored inside. This is not a simple wardrobe, but a container that holds all knowledge and thoughts that have been collected or learning over the years and should not be forgotten. This cabinet accumulates documents of different nature and formats: drawings, collages, sketches, models, letters, books... We moved the cupboard of our studio in Barcelona directly to Venice. All four doors were removed and cut to the total height of the panel we had as a base, and in Venice were nailed directly to the panel; then we hang on them the models, pictures and drawings brought from Barcelona.

This cabinet is a time container, containing the time that we have been devoting to the project, which is visible through the material accumulated there. When its doors are opened and actioned, the sequence of appearance of the different documents matches the narration, being a scenographic help to explain the project. The closet is a good metaphor of the Casal Balaguer, a building which is also in a way a container of time. Having grown over the centuries, it has been able to contain successive lives and countless changes over time, absorbing and noting through traces and scars of different actions on it.