Architect Rolf Blakstad on a life spent unearthing Ibiza's heritage
The architect Rolf Blakstad was born and raised in Ibiza. His parents, the Canadian émigré Rolph Blakstad and his wife, Mary, arrived on the island in 1956. Rolf heads up the internationally renowned family firm, Blakstad Design Consultants, whose name is synonymous with the sensitive restoration of Ibiza's vernacular architecture.
The true spirit of Ibiza is found in the heart. If you don't have that passion and respect for the island, then perhaps it might be time to start looking for it.
L’OFFICIEL IBIZA: What was it like growing up in Ibiza in the 1970s?
ROLF BLAKSTAD: I was born in 1972. The ex-pat community was much smaller then and we were still considered a sort of oddity. The locals were perplexed by us. My four siblings and I were raised in our rural family home in the Morna Valley. Our neighbours were farmers and lived like they had for the last 2000 years. They had primitive houses without any sort of modern amenities. Ours were also pretty limited! But our home was a hub for interesting people – there were a lot of intellectuals, artists and liberal thinkers. People from the spiritual world and often some Lama or other. It was generally a thought-provoking crowd.
LOI: Your father was one of the first people to define links between Ibiza’s architectural vernacular and that of the Near East, despite being trained neither as a historian nor archaeologist.
RB: Yes, and I think that helped him in that he wasn’t risking his professional reputation. Thanks to the internet, people are now able to expose their views to a much wider audience. And that comes with risk, because we are constantly finding out new things that force us to challenge our previous understanding of the past. But my father would not have reconsidered his findings. He was absolutely correct, as is demonstrated in his book The House of Ibiza: The Key to a Millenial Tradition. He just may have not been able to assert himself so precociously today.
LOI: Your family name is synonymous with their redevelopment of Ibiza’s traditional fincas. Where do the challenges lie in protecting the heritage of these houses while making them suitable for the future?
RB: The issue is that we are no longer a farming society. The people who developed these buildings and lived in them as they did up until 50 years ago lived a very different lifestyle to us. These were farmhouses and functioned as part of the farm as a whole. The old fincas and our modern lifestyles simply do not match. If you were just to take an old untouched finca and live in it, you wouldn’t last five minutes. There is no leisure space. There is no light. There was no living room as such. It was just a workspace for cold winter days or for the occasional big family gathering, but otherwise time was spent outdoors. There is really no way to make these houses suitable for today’s dwellers without compromising at least some of their heritage. There is an argument to refrain from touching the remaining original fincas and preserving them as they are. I can agree with that.
LOI: In your time of working with these old buildings, what are the most interesting discoveries you’ve made?
RB: We have found many stashes of things hidden in walls – coins, weapons and knives. Signs that people felt they had to hide things away. But the most interesting discoveries are usually frescoes. The most common frescoes are on the altar niche – that’s the little alcove that we sometimes see lined up with the finca entrance. There’s often a cupboard door on it now and when I was growing up, it was where they stored the cognac, but its origins are rooted in worship. We know that these painted niches date back to the time of the Phoenicians, but how much further back is anyone’s guess. A pretty accurate estimate would probably be at least 9,000 years, back to Çatalhöyük in Eastern Turkey. Çatalhöyük is one of the oldest settlements we know of, and it was a very egalitarian society, with a lot of hunter-gatherers but also with the beginnings of agriculture and some domesticated animals. The settlement was large – between 5,000 and 10,000 people – but there were no designated buildings for rituals. Each house had its own altar. The people had common beliefs, of course, but there was no monopoly on religion. And this theme is followed throughout ancient Greece, Carthage and Rome. This family altar tradition was brought to Ibiza from the Near East along with the design of the fincas themselves. Here they were painted with symbolic patterns, images of deities such as Tanit, and references to the celestial worlds. Generations of Ibicencos will have kept painting over these patterns without really understanding their original meaning. It’s very humbling to be aware that we are just another link in an evolving chain of humanity.
LOI: What do you consider to be the biggest threat to Ibiza today?
RB: That has to be the difficulty of the population to evolve with the island. It’s an interesting thing growing up here but not being from here. I’m neither local, nor am I foreign. So, I tend to stand back and look at what’s going on independently. I have seen so often over the last 50 years that people arrive on the island and – as soon as they’ve been here long enough – they say that the next change is not something they agree with. That the island is being destroyed. I think, ‘Well, okay, but when you arrived, you brought change. What makes this worse?’ With any change we encounter, we have two options of how to react. We can try to hold on to the past or we can take advantage of it and evolve and use that change to get to a better place. Right now, we have a massive increase of money flowing into the island. So, these wealthy people could be responsible for making the island a better place, by farming their land or restoring the old stone walls. I’m sure everyone would be delighted with a more beautiful island. I love this island dearly but I tend to just move with the times instead of fighting against change. The true spirit of Ibiza is found in the heart. If you don’t have that passion and respect for the island, then perhaps it might be time to start looking for it.
