The architecture of Ca’n Gallineta, designed by OAM in Manacor, seems to hover between the remote and the contemporary, as if the vernacular were not a nostalgic gesture but a living tool for sensitive adaptation to the landscape. It rejects the picturesque without abandoning the local, dissolving into a mineral mimicry of textured walls and sun-baked earthy tones, echoing not a past image but an ancestral logic of construction deeply rooted in place. Here, the generous porches offer not only shade and threshold, but extend the domestic realm toward the vegetal without breaking intimacy, embodying a notion of porous boundary that recalls Utzon’s latent spatiality—his ability to open architecture to the environment without force, with topographic serenity and patient geometry. The house seems to grow from the soil, humbly embedded among carob trees and scrubland, a dwelling that does not impose but cohabits, claiming no protagonism yet never fading from attention, restoring to architecture the possibility of becoming landscape without forfeiting its formal autonomy. In this context, Mallorca becomes not merely a geographic frame but a fertile matrix where the archaic and the innovative coexist without friction, allowing works like this to emerge as contemporary paradoxes—simultaneously modern and primeval, designed and organic, still and permeable—where the ancient was perhaps never ancient, and the modern has no need to declare itself.
