The Mediterranean house. The architecture of tourism and the appropriation of traditional points of reference in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands

Abstract

All along the coast of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, a great deal of architecture was erected throughout the twentieth century. These were mostly detached holiday homes identified as Mediterranean houses, in a clear link between their role as places of rest and leisure and the cultural past, the landscape and traditional architecture. The article examines the reasons and values that link touristic architecture so closely with traditional architecture that it takes it as a point of reference, even a decontextualized one; and how this link is identified as Mediterranean. To this end, various points in time and approaches to this architecture over the course of the century are identified and analysed through case studies. This analysis allows us to identify the initial spread of this architecture, during the 1920s and 1930s with the ideas of Noucentisme and regionalism, on the one hand, and modernity, on the other; to follow the wide range of variations developed in the 1940s and 1950s; and to see how, with the emergence of tourism in the 1960s, it was popularised and appropriated. © 2022 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Departamento de Arte. All rights reserved.