Inhabiting the 'White Island '- Antonio Pizza (ed.); [COAIB (coeds.)]

The publication Inhabiting the ‘White Island’. Interpretations of Ibizan Architecture deals with the subject of the Mediterranean house, tracing its presence in a peculiar geographical and existential environment, that of the island of Ibiza. This research focuses on how the Ibizan house has been understood and interpreted at various times in the 20th century: firstly through the photographic vision of different authors (Joaquim Gomis, Leopoldo Plasencia, Luigi Figini and Luigi Moretti; late 40s), then through the international exhibition of its heritage (Gio Ponti, José Antonio Coderch and Rafael Santos Torroella; IX Triennale di Milano, 1951), and finally by observing certain modern architectural interventions (Can Cardona, by Erwin Bechtold and Erwin Broner, from 1959; Broner House, by Erwin Broner, 1959-1960; 2011).

This book is organized, then, in three complementary parts: an extensive presentation that contextualizes the object of the investigation, a section entitled “Internationalization of the popular” —from the exhibition Imagining the Mediterranean House. Italy and Spain in the 50s (ICO Foundation, Madrid, 2019-2020) and the homonym catalogue— in which several texts deal with specific aspects of these different approaches to the popular and rationalist architecture; and some essays that, under the heading “Foreign Perspectives to Vernacular Architecture”, they analyse the Broner House and the Cardona House, entering into a dialectic with the timeless theme of the Mediterranean house, from the present and from a more projectual perspective. The architectures presented here (both the “popular” and the “modern”) refer, therefore, to a Mediterranean ideology conceived as a repertoire of formalizations and primary construction techniques, which aspire to a building action more related to the specificities of the place, with the aim of satisfying the basic instances of contemporary life in polemic opposition to an alienating uniformity of a totalitarian and mechanised urban civilization.