THE IBIZAN HOUSE
FROM BLACKSTAD TO LUBICZ
Blakstad, an architect and resident in Ibiza since 1956, and Lubicz, a physicist who studied the geometry of Antiquity, were contemporaries but never knew about each other.
However, both come together, each one from its own scope, to give us keys that serve to understand the ancient heritage of Ibizan houses and the character that lies hidden in the elements that compose them and in their distinctive structure.
Photography by @dosmares_ibiza
Text by Daniel Foraster
Time is what often shows us the meaning of what is happening, to both of us and to the world that surrounds us. Although sometimes he does it to point out to us precisely what escapes out of its hands and does not manage to capture.
It’s been years since we left Barcelona for Formentera and it’s not been that long since we arrived in Ibiza. We could list a long list of reasons why we move from one place to another, but there is one that sooner or later always shows itself to us from the tangle of everyday life: the search for the sensitive, the wild, the harmony between man and nature, of the essence, in short, of that which still remains elusive to time.
And here, in Ibiza, it couldn’t be any other way. On this island that apparently is iconic of the image and the immediate fun, of the night that does not know how to wait, we found ourselves one day, almost by chance, in the driveway of a house that we went to visit, the serene gaze of a centenary olive tree. And then, inside the house, with the original floor made of irregular slabs, and with hand-cut juniper wood beams, or with an old wood-burning oven drilled into the wide stone walls of the kitchen.
The house had been renovated, after being abandoned for decades, by the descendants of the old family that owned the estate. But they wanted to preserve details belonging to a past that spoke of several generations ago, succeeding each other under those beams, on that floor.
The emotion we felt that morning awakened in us the need to know more. Days later, in one of the few bookstores that are still open on the island, we discovered a small gem, as the bookseller confessed to us, about Ibizan architecture, Rolph Blakstad’s essay “The Ibizan house. Keys of a millenary tradition”
It is an absolutely surprising book, which proves that the traditional Ibizan house has its roots in the Middle East more than 3,000 years ago. Blakstad, a tireless traveler and resident on the island since 1956, carries out a meticulous study of the structure and architectural elements of what he calls the “arid zone” of the planet, and discovers common features, exported by the Phoenicians, from Yemen to the Atlas Berber, and from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, throughout the entire Mediterranean basin, to Ibiza.
There are countless examples that Blakstad offers us, walls, columns, the capitals of said columns, the design of the floors of the houses, the decorative elements that were in them or even the primitive measurement techniques such as the codada.
But there were two similarities that made us pull the thread of our passion for Egypt and that perhaps provided a new key to Ibizan constructions.
The first of them can be found on the facades of houses such as the Casa Frare Verd de Sant Agustí which, as Blakstad shows us in his illustrations, are practically identical to the one we can see in the Luxor Temple.
The second refers to the feixa portals, of which Blakstad tells us directly that “they are the same as those of ancient Egypt.” They are portals used to bridge the graves in the marshy areas near the port of Ibiza and Talamanca, which accurately reproduce not only the shape but also the measurements that made up those of ancient Egypt.
Schwaller de Lubicz carried out exhaustive measurements of the temple of Luxor, whose most surprising observations are, precisely, on the doors that give entrance to these temples. Those doors that, as Blakstad shows us, seemed to come from that same place
If we take the width of the door opening as a unit, their height is equal to Pi, the irrational number par excellence, whose figures know no limit and invite us to infinity. Furthermore, Lubicz reveals to us, the hieroglyphic symbol that represents “door” is read sba which also means “star” or “teaching”, the doors to the teaching of the stars.
It is absolutely fascinating that this old country peasant, tanned by the sun, wearing his espardenyes, dressed simply in his handmade gray cotton shirts and pants, was able to capture with his hands, in an almost instinctive way, a knowledge of which he did not know its origin and symbology but which he had inherited from the times of ancient Egypt, reproduced exactly generation after generation until reaching almost the present day.
It was, without a doubt, a perfect, efficient system, in which each element had a specific function, a reason for being, a personality within the house and where a harmonious symbiosis existed between them that formed a Whole adapted to the climatic conditions of the island and the essence of man.
Or, in Blakstad’s own words, “Ibiza’s architecture was just one part of an organic, living relationship between man and nature.”
It is possible that it was chance, that luck often guided by intuition, that has given us the opportunity to discover ancient Egypt in Ibiza. Although it is even more likely that it was just a matter of time, that time that passes on this island in such a disparate way, and that sometimes stops to show us, face to face, the true magic of Ibiza.
