People of Ibiza

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.

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Rolf Blakstad Photographed by Macs Iotti

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.

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Rolph Blakstad Senior

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.

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The House of Ibiza: The Key to a Millennial Tradition by Rolph Blakstad

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.

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Casa payésa antigua, Ibiza

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. 

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Rolf Blakstad - Can Toni Martina in Ibiza

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