Split House Contesti

The Split House in Palma de Mal­lorca is quite rightly so called: the build­ing’s stag­gered floors echo the sur­round­ing topog­ra­phy, cas­cad­ing down towards the sea in stepped fashion. There’s a dif­fer­ence in height of 4.6 feet to be over­come between the road in front and the wall facing the back yard. The theme of steps is re­it­er­ated in the house’s ex­ter­nal cubage in such a way as to give rise to mul­ti­ple façades that allow a greater amount of light to enter from the south. The Split House is located in a work­ing-class dis­trict dating from the early 20th century.

It is char­ac­terised by low-rise, ultra high-den­sity housing. Non­de­script ter­raced prop­er­ties were erected as a means of ac­com­mo­dat­ing the many workers who mi­grated from the coun­try­side during that period. But the dis­trict like­wise con­tains ex­am­ples of the mid­dle-class villas oc­cu­pied by man­age­r­ial staff and in­dus­tri­al­ists. Their highly ornate façades testify to Majorca’s craft tra­di­tion and lend em­pha­sis to the as­pi­ra­tions of their res­i­dents. The façade lan­guage and urbane pro­por­tions of the Split House har­monise well with those of its mon­u­men­tal neigh­bours.

The Ma­jor­can Feina Studio prac­tice is also in­creas­ingly making a name for itself as an ad­vo­cate of sus­tain­abil­ity in the sphere of res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion. Its ar­chi­tects are at­ten­tive to using natural and en­ergy-ef­fi­cient ma­te­ri­als. Use has pre­dom­i­nantly been made of timber and natural cork in the Split House. Just under 76 cubic yards of timber that last­ingly binds 52 tonnes of carbon dioxide went into its build­ing. Its air­tight shell reduces to a minimum the energy re­quired to run the house.

Util­is­ing plywood board si­mul­ta­ne­ously enabled thin, sin­gle-layer walls to be in­stalled. This ensured that, notwith­stand­ing the reg­u­la­tory limits laid down for the build­ing’s depth, the in­te­rior spaces could still be ideally di­men­sioned. The timber walls need no further plas­ter­ing or in­su­la­tion. The eastern façade over­look­ing the yard has been clad in nat­ural-cork panels. The elab­o­rate or­na­men­tal idiom of the timber street-fac­ing façade takes its cue from the villa ar­chi­tec­ture like­wise present in the dis­trict.

The in­te­rior spaces are defined by the del­i­cate “vanilla ice-cream” colour in which the visible timber sur­faces of their walls have been dec­o­rated. The paint allows the wood’s in­her­ent texture to shimmer through. Points of con­trast­ing ac­cen­tu­a­tion are created by the lush, vivid colours used for in­di­vid­ual fea­tures in the rooms. A fitted kitchen in dark-green, radiant blue doors and yellow window frames amount to a cor­nu­copia of colour that lends the house its dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter and helps give it its con­ge­nially pos­i­tive at­mos­phere.

Flex­i­bil­ity in the choice of colours was of the essence if the build­ing’s handles were to blend in with its overall scheme. The FSB 1012 model se­lected was fin­ished to match in a cus­tomised RAL shade of vanilla. Ar­chi­tects Aina Salvà and Alberto Sánchez de­scribe them­selves as being “fans” of Hans Poelzig and their opting for the FSB 1012 handle as also being “a kind of fetish”. Its design is, in their eyes, em­blem­atic of the re­cur­rent and time­less prop­er­ties of ar­chi­tec­ture in general. “Ar­chi­tec­ture hasn’t really changed that much over the cen­turies, and these handles embody that fact very well in our view.”