‘I’ve spent my whole life here,’ says renowned ceramist Lluís Castaldo. Now aged 90, he is one of the key figures in the revival of ceramics in Spain that began in the second half of the 20th century. The life he’s speaking of has unfolded largely in Sóller, a small town in Mallorca in the heart of the Serra de Tramontana, where he was born in 1936. The few interludes included studies at the fine-arts academies in Barcelona and Rome, as well as periods in Japan.
Castaldo began as an abstract painter – which he still is – although ceramics soon became his favoured medium. He approaches his wheel-thrown pieces head-on, often giving them a pictorial quality, much like his murals. ‘It was the materiality that drew me to ceramics,’ he reveals. But to focus on his craft, he needed a proper space – a place in keeping with his philosophy: he never draws a distinction between his studio and his home, involving his family in his passion, and pioneering the integration of ceramics and architecture in Mallorca. Since the 1950s, Castaldo had been working in a local studio belonging to his family, which had quickly become too small. In 1964 he found, also in Sóller, a former plaster factory where he decided to set up a large studio that could both contain and reflect his expansive practice.
Castaldo asked a friend, the Brutalist architect Sebastià Gamundí, to transform the original building and design a new space. Born in 1930, Gamundí was a leading figure in Mallorcan architecture at the time. Specialising in historic buildings and in charge of Palma de Mallorca Cathedral (known as ‘La Seu’) for over 40 years, Gamundí freely reinterpreted Brutalism in architecture, particularly sacred Brutalism, and would design several churches in Mallorca during the 1970s.
As well as a great friendship, the relationship between the ceramist and the architect is, above all, a story of intellectual stimulation. It was the mid-1960s, a time when Mallorca’s art scene was in full swing, and they regularly rubbed shoulders with the painter Joan Miró and writers such as Cami José Cela, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Castaldo and Gamundí exchanged ideas on art, existentialism and the place of craftsmanship in the modern world. They discussed how to break down the barrier between ‘pure’ craftsmanship – pottery – and modern architecture. As Castaldo argues, ‘The true ceramist feels a deeper connection to their own human origins than any other artist, hence the magic and mysticism of this craft.’ Castaldo also confides that he learnt a great deal from Josep Llorens Artigas, the first ceramist to rise from the status of craftsman to that of artist, thanks to his collaborations with Miró, Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy.
The studio that Gamundí was to design on the site of the former plaster factory would thus break radically with all the aesthetic conventions of traditional Modernism and Art Nouveau, which were then in vogue in the Sóller Valley. Castaldo gave him carte blanche to do so, but there was a challenge: the former factory was built on an extremely challenging plot – a slender strip of residual land, a triangle wedged between two converging roads. Rather than succumbing to the restrictions of this difficult topography, the architect used the narrowness of the site to dictate the dynamic, elongated form of the structure. Every square metre was optimised to accommodate both domestic life and the ceramist’s artistic production.
The ground floor is dedicated to the workshop, housing potters’ wheels, kilns and a clay storage area. It features carefully calculated openings to allow a steady stream of light to enter, which is essential for working with the material. Upstairs, a space that is vast, open and powerful, yet intimate too, forms the display area for Castaldo’s works.
The studio’s distinctive visual signature lies in its animal-like form. Gamundí drew inspiration from the shell of an armadillo. The structure appears to fold in on itself, to shield itself from the traffic and noise of the two surrounding roads, while massive reinforced concrete volumes evoke the animal’s articulated armour plates. The building’s roof terrace, which extends into an impressive concrete slab, juts out to the very tip of the structure, defying gravity and creating a protective area of shade. The concrete also blends naturally with the stone of the former plaster factory. As for the windows and openings, they are carved out of the mass of the structure like surgical, geometric incisions.
The result is a building that moulds Castaldo and Gamundí’s ideas on form and craftsmanship into a single vision: rigorous on the inside and bold on the outside.
For more about Lluis Castaldo, visit lluiscastaldoblog.wordpress.com
