Driving through the village of Besalú and up a rural road we find Oriol Roselló and Carla Graboleda, the Bangolo architects mid-way through a farmhouse restoration. We walk up the stairs to appreciate the Catalan arch and the lime mortar pillars they are preserving in order to “keep the essense of the place”, says Roselló.
What is the first thing you consider when starting a project?
The customers first, then sustainability. We take it as a challenge to adapt the house to their needs and tastes. A client with ecological awareness will give up on certain comforts that perhaps another customer would want to keep.
We let the owner direct us and we take care to honour our principles along the way.
As with all internal dealings, developing these principles is a process of discovery. Through farmhouse restoration I realised the need to swap classroom knowledge for the builder’s internal artisan knowledge. In 1999 I went to Bangolo, Ivory Coast (Africa) to work with Architects Without Borders. Here, also, we learned to swap the textbooks for experience; local materials and local people helped show me the social community values hidden behind traditional building techniques.
More recently, working with the Roca brothers on the Agora building in Mas Marroch has helped us clarify our objectives: Low-tech, using raw materials not pre-fabricated forms; Km 0, maximising the use of local materials and artisans; re-inventing the “passive technology” of the pre-industrial buildings, such as natural light and ventilation’ and timeless buildings, contextualised within the territory and aging with elegance.
The 22 m diameter, 10 m high dome of the Roca brothers has made me see that traditional techniques have a very important role in the architecture of this century. On a base of dry stone it raises a solid wood and vegetal framework. It’s Europes’ first monumental public building constructed entirely without iron or concrete.
I believe that the knowledge of our ancestors combined with our advanced technology is the only sustainable alternative we can rely on. This is what I mean when I say we work in both traditional and comtemporary architecture.
Tell us, what does Km 0 architecture mean?
It’s based on the restoration of locally identifiable resources, techno-diversity, reduction of CO² transport emissions, and better traceability of materials.That would mean that if you are in Banyoles, you will use slabs from there, which demands very specific techniques that you can not find in Olot or Figueres, but only there. If more architects employ a Km 0 approach this would recover the landscape and bring value to the local community.
How does Bangolo relate the building to the landscape?
The Mediterranean climate prioritizes the intermediate space. In autumn and spring, for instance, there’s more need to inhabit a space that is neither indoors or outdoors. Bangolos’ aim is to make the transition between the comfort of inside and the outside conditions more gradual. The architect’s work in this case is to make the landscape inhabitable.
An example of altering the landscape for habitability comes from the history within Mallorca; they would plant apricot trees in the rye field due to its drought tolerance. This provided them shade and comfort during harvest season. The traditional wisdoms of old contained sophistications we may not have realised, and it is important to preserve what we can. I am optimistic because the knowledge is inherent to ourselves. and if architects allow themselves to be creative and consider certain limitations for building — such as traditional techniques or Km 0 — we’ll retrieve it. The builders also see that because it’s very difficult to compete in the urban building industry, they need to bring something new to the table. ‘Indigenous Builders’ returning to old techniques.//
