Tourism On An Industrial Scale

“Zone industrielle.” Despite my insistence that we make a detour, we never got to see any industrial zones. This was at the end of the 1970s. In the Dordogne. My wish to take in some industry was vetoed in favour of the hunting out of a chateau or several.

Winemaking is industry, but it’s not the sort of industry that I had in mind back then. I wanted to see plant, machinery, things that went clank and made noise and mess. I was an industrial tourist, without ever having heard the term and without ever managing to become one; not then at any rate.

Industrial tourism is growing. There is a European congress devoted to it; the fourth gathering will be in Portugal next year. The European Tourism Day, celebrated at the end of September, concentrated on the promotion of industrial heritage and on how it can contribute to the diversification of tourism in general.

The growth in interest is to be welcomed. But unfortunately, much which goes under the term industrial tourism simply gets shunted into a museum. Sometimes workings are preserved or simulated, but for me the far greater interest lies in the industrial sites themselves, whether they be in ruin or maintained.

Spain does quite well when it comes to industrial tourism; Toledo, for example, is a major centre. The French do it rather better than the Spanish, and not just in a town’s local “zone industrielle”. Every year some 20 million people visit 1400 sites and museums of different sorts. Sadly, Mallorca doesn’t have much to offer. Or rather, it has quite a bit, just that no one much knows about it and next to nothing is done to let them know about it.

Mallorca’s forgotten industrial past sounds like a contradiction. The island’s industry, pre-tourism, was predominantly agricultural, but by no means exclusively. There is a charity, the Foundation for the Recuperation and Study of Balearics Rail and Industrial Heritage, that attempts to promote the island’s forgotten industry, which, at the start of the 1950s, involved some 35% of the population working in factories producing the likes of chemicals.

Most towns have evidence of old industry, if you look hard enough. Some of it has fallen into a poor state, such as the carpet factory in Pollensa. Closed in 1960 and posing a danger as it might collapse at any time, the town hall wants it declassified as an “asset of cultural interest”, so that it can be demolished and then rebuilt. This would be a shame. Far better would be to perform restoration work and then promote it as a site of tourism interest. But of course no one’s got any money to do anything with it.

Elsewhere on the island there are disused mineworks – in Alaró and Felanitx. Though mining dates back to the start of the nineteenth century, it was stopped until the Franco years, and the mineworks are evidence of the economic strategy of self-sufficiency (autarky) that for many years Franco sought for Spain.

But you don’t necessarily have to go hunting for such sites. In Lloseta, for example, you can hardly miss the giant cement works. Not that this is disused. It benefits from using coal ash from the Es Murterar power station by the Albufera nature park, the power station that took over from the old one in Puerto Alcúdia and which has been all but abandoned for years.

The old power station, though, is arguably Mallorca’s foremost industrial site. It has been named among the one hundred most important industrial heritage sites in Spain; it was symbolic of Mallorca’s more recent industrial development in the 1950s, which is when it was constructed.

Plans to convert the power station into a museum have fallen foul of economic crisis. These plans, if they are ever indeed realised, are sympathetic to the architecture. The chimneys, for example, would be preserved. Though it can be argued that the power station forms something of a blot on the landscape on the sweep of Alcúdia Bay, its main structures should stay. Indeed, it should all stay.

If finance is going to be such an issue for its re-development, and it is going to be, then consideration might be given to a less ambitious scheme; one by which the site is made into one of tourism interest and is open to visitors. It could also include a museum, but on a smaller scale, one devoted to the history of the power station and to all the forgotten industrial heritage of Mallorca.

Industrial tourism is growing, Mallorca has little of it, so why not create some.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

In A Wrong Place: Architecture

Alcúdia has some old ruins, and not just the Roman ones.

The long-abandoned Es Foguero nightclub has been home to vagrants and was the last resting-place of one: “El Gallego”, who was murdered there last summer. Even longer-abandoned is the original power station, the two chimneys of which stand less than proud on the landscape of the bay of Alcúdia.

The site of GESA’s former power station is meant to become a museum of science and technology. The cost has been put at 21 million euros.

In October 2007, a Pamplona-based architects practice, Alonso Hernández y Asociados, beat off competition from the likes of the Millennium Dome designer, Lord Rogers, in winning the pitch for the conversion of the site. The architects promised a concept called “el claro en el bosque” – the clearing in the forest.

What has since happened is that some clearance work has been undertaken, not directly related to the museum. The science and technology clearing in the forest may now never be built.

A year after the award to the Pamplona firm, there was a presentation of what the museum might be. It was made in Alcúdia’s auditorium. A presentation is as much as there has ever been. Even then it was being admitted that the finance for the project was not in place, and it still isn’t.

Economic crisis has caused a rethink of many public developments. If it causes there to be more thought applied to both the necessity and the architecture of some of these developments, then it will have been worth enduring.

There is some really rotten architecture in Mallorca, most of it contemporary. It is not rotten per se, but it is rotten because it has no sense of place. We might not ever know what the clearing in the forest will finally be like, but the inspiration was said to have come from the Tate Modern, the converted Bankside Power Station on London’s South Bank. Would this be appropriate for a tourist location on a bay of some not little outstanding beauty?

The auditorium was an apt building in which to hold the presentation of the museum. The puff maintains that the auditorium is of contemporary design. It may well be, but contemporary doesn’t mean remarkable, and this the auditorium most certainly isn’t. Moreover, it reflects in no way the historic walls of the town which stand opposite, while it has never operated at anything like capacity.

Similarly, the Can Ramis building in Alcúdia’s market square suffers from being under-utilised and from being a totally alien structure. Like much new residential architecture and an absurd building that has risen right on Pollensa’s Plaça Major and next to the church, it is symptomatic of how architects have seen the future – it is block-shaped and cuboidal.

Contemporary design does not have to be a mélange of competing styles. Anyone familiar with Bath’s SouthGate Centre will know that it is possible to merge the new with the old almost seamlessly, while still creating a highly modern feel, so much so that you have the impression of walking through a computer simulation.

Questionable both in design and in purpose. This has been the problem with some local building development. In the same way, so have other projects. Industrial estates, for example. Pollensa’s is far from full. In Alcúdia, the layout was finished a couple of years ago. It stands empty and now blocked to access. The official reason why it is empty has to do with a failure to arrive at agreement over electricity supply, which is ironic, given that it is next to the current power station.

The fact is that some developments are simply unnecessary. Pollensa wants its own auditorium, but why build one when Alcúdia has one with spare capacity? It all comes down to me-too need and suspicions that there might be other factors at play.

The empty industrial estate is next to the Es Foguero ruin, one that became so largely because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The project for the old power station has suffered because the time was wrong. Were the museum to be built, it would still, because its design would retain the landscape-offensive chimneys, be in the wrong place. And in the wrong place is where other buildings now are, or they are just plain wrong because they are not needed.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Wrecking Crew: Knocking GESA down

What do you do with a rubbish building that is as unloved as it is unlovely? The obvious answer is to knock it down. But unfortunately, the obvious is all too rarely considered in the pursuit of some bonkers creation of “emblems”.

The GESA monstrosity in Palma, empty for over two years, took, in all, ten years to construct. I claim no expertise in matters of demolition, but ten minutes might be sufficient to raze much of the damn thing, to put it and anyone obliged to look at it out of their misery.

I am not fundamentally against preserving lousy architecture. Some has a certain idiosyncratic charm, but the GESA building has no redeeming feature. It has no art-deco curiosity, it is not representative of some intrinsically important patrimony; it’s an office building, that’s all it is. Yet it is, absurdly, meant to be preserved.

You can’t necessarily trust everything an architect might say – one was, after all, responsible for the GESA building in the first place – but Patxi Mangado, an architect originally involved with the development of the Palacio de Congresos, by which the GESA building will remain, once a) expressed his surprise that it was still there and b) suggested that it should be pulled down.

So much for common sense though. Instead, we have the situation in which ideas are being tossed into the pot to find the maddest of them to justify the building’s continuing existence. In addition to previous proposals for an auditorium and restaurant, the latest, coming from the co-ordinator of youth activities at the town hall, is that part of the building should be given over to so-called “self-management” whereby several floors would be devoted to youthful artistic endeavours and workshops and a cultural association for showing off whatever work or projects these endeavours might yield.

There is nothing wrong with this idea at all, apart from one thing: locating it in the GESA building. The lack of empathy between a brutalist, early 60s-designed office block and current-day, dreadlocked art and craft is extreme. Furthermore, no one seems to be mentioning how this “self-management” might be paid for, as in, for instance, where the money for the building’s energy would come from. Perhaps GESA should offer to give something back and supply electricity for free.

The bizarre language that surrounds the building, that used by those who seem determined for it to stay, is no better summed up than by this youth activities’ co-ordinator who reckons that “sociocultural self-management” would make the GESA block “an emblematic enclave of the city”.

Here we go again, stuff that isn’t emblematic, as with, for instance, the building of a new road through Playa de Muro, suddenly becomes so. The GESA building is emblematic of one thing and one thing alone – office building design and not very good design at that. The other main suggestion, that it houses offices, is the only sensible one to have been advanced, for the very simple reason that this is exactly why it was ever built.

The rationalisation that is currently going on is weird. There are plenty of buildings in Palma which are emblematic, the Cathedral for example, but to claim that GESA is one of them is to imply that Palma is emblematic of naff commercial architecture. It’s not exactly what the tourist brochures might wish to boast of, though heaven knows they probably will, unless the Partido Popular secure the town hall administration in May and do as they have promised, which is to send in the bulldozers.

What you do with old GESA offices and plant is not confined to Palma. The de-commissioned power station in Alcúdia, idle for years, is meant at some stage to become a science and technology museum. The architectural tendering for its re-development, which brought with it a fair degree of publicity, largely because Lord Rogers was up for the gig, resulted in the plan that is currently as idle as the power station itself. There’s no money in other words.

This may well be a blessing. If it means the museum never seeing the light of day, we might all be spared the waste of money it would be. As with the GESA building, the power station deserves being knocked down. In its place should go a Center Parcs or something of genuine tourist appeal. But this would never happen because it wouldn’t be emblematic. Consequently, the chimneys, at the very least, have to remain and to remain the blots on the landscape as one scans the bay of Alcúdia and spies these two long-impotent erections (if this isn’t a contradiction in terms).

As with some commercial buildings, I am in favour of preserving some old industrial architecture. But whereas a power-station chimney or two or four might look ok in an urban landscape, London’s for example, the same cannot be claimed for the vista across a bay in a tourism zone that is meant to be renowned for its natural beauty. If chimneys are what you want, there is one anyway; that of the power station by Albufera that took over from the one in Puerto Alcúdia.

Both the GESA building and old power station are emblematic, or symptomatic to be more accurate; symptomatic of confused notions of architectural preservation which insist, firstly, that heritage exists where it does not and, secondly, that scenery is enhanced when it most certainly isn’t.

It’s all very obvious, or should be. Bring on the wrecking crew and the explosives.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Charm Offence: Sóller and resort development

When you’re about to spend the best part of two and a half million euros on a construction project, you might hope that someone had first checked that the whole thing wouldn’t collapse or be inundated with water. What am I saying? The recent history of great Mallorcan civil engineering success stories is awash with water. The Palma Metro for example.

Along now comes another rail fiasco which we can all rail against. “The tram now standing at platform …” Sorry, there is no platform. As also there are no proper foundations, other than sand, or adequate drainage. As for the tram, well you can forget that anyway, as they’ve forgotten about the supports for the power cables. Oh, and that bike lane, the one that would have been vital because the tramline had been knackered … .? Nope, they haven’t remembered that either.

Work on the re-development of the paseo marítimo in Port de Sóller, tram and all, is due to start in October. Somewhat belatedly, the technical chaps have had a peek at the plans. What plans, you might ask. There are “deficiencies”, they say. Just ever so slightly there are. One of the companies contracted to undertake the work states on its website: “development is a reality”. As far as Sóller is concerned, that should read, “will be” – with any luck. When though is another matter.

The Sóller promenade development can be viewed in a wider context than just the apparent deficiencies with the project. Bar and restaurant owners in the resort are none too impressed with the scheme. Ditto the on-off and now maybe on again re-development of Puerto Pollensa’s frontline. Pedestrianisation may seem like a way of beautifying Mallorca’s resorts, but strange to report there are plenty of people who would disagree.

An editorial in “The Bulletin” referred to a loss of charm, the consequence of resort developments. One aspect of this charm is that some tourists quite enjoy the bustle that having a road right next to a bar or restaurant can create. So too the owners. It may seem odd to wish to breathe in the fumes of a bus that has mysteriously passed its MOT, but who am I to question what anyone finds charming?

Some years ago Puerto Alcúdia’s prom was pedestrianised. What was created was a spacious strolling boulevard, wide enough to house the capricious folly of a bridge that goes nowhere, an Escher-like impossible reality. The development wasn’t a reality in Alcúdia, it was surrealistic, while the spaciousness is not to everyone’s liking; visitors still talk of that “bustle” and charm which existed previously. There will probably be those who reject the Playa de Palma re-development on the same grounds, though how somewhere lacking charm can lose it is a moot point.

Playa de Palma, though, is a specific case, one in which there is now a collision between civil engineers, town planners and architects like no other resort. This was where the architectural vandals once scaled the ramparts and sacked the place before anyone was any the wiser. What comes now is important. The New Turkey perhaps? A resort for today’s competitive age? One of dome and semi-circular five-star opulence would be in keeping with a Moorish inheritance, and would be an appropriate artifice for an artificial resort, which is exactly what it is. Everything in its place.

But this is the problem. Not everything is in its place, especially building design. It’s not just the resorts. The Can Ramis monstrosity in Alcúdia town is an example of how bad unsympathetic architecture can be. It was the misfortune of the little Ramis houses that they were situated only metres from the sanctuary of the town’s walls, behind which is a heritage law that would have stopped their functionalist conversion in its tracks.

The argument goes, of course, that Mallorca has to upgrade to compete. It’s a fair argument, but only up to a point. The pedestrianisation dogma is not the same as creating new four- or five-star hotels. In Puerto Alcúdia’s case, has the paseo made any difference to tourism competitiveness? Doubtful. But over and above a prom in this or that resort is an orthodoxy of today’s school of architecture which has, for example, succeeded in undermining the ramshackle appeal of Cala San Vicente.

Sóller, Pollensa, Andratx, you can name others. They have thrived on their individual, idiosyncratic charms. But they face the offence of the “new” charm. In Sóller, maybe a botched project wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Living In A Box (Re-mix): Architecture in Alcúdia

The quadratic affront to the eye that is the Can Ramis building in Alcúdia old town (12 December: Toy Story – The Can Ramis Building) is an insult of non-contextual brutalism. But it is, after all, only a public building, one forged from functionalism. Nevertheless, it has no redeeming feature when placed against the neo-Gothic of historical buildings, those classified in terms of local “patrimonio” (heritage, to you and me). The straight lines, the vertical and horizontal, the wood, glass and steel form a passionless abscess-in-a-box of royal proportions – “Carlos Carbunculis”.

There is, one has to presume, a whole school of what we might call the new architecture, or what might more accurately be described as Blockism. This Blockist tendency has infiltrated the residential domain, giving rise to and making rise up a cubist collectivist, close-to-communist conformity of form for housing. It might look in place in some post-modernist new town, but in Alcúdia? In Mallorca? A local fascination with and often brilliance with art and graphics has combined the old, the more recent (post-impressionism in art, for example) and the contemporary in fashioning painting, sculpture and design, but the architecture of “now” has turned its back on the vividness of colour and the diversity of cottage, villa and Moorish shapes in creating a Blockist, soulless landscape. Residential housing has been boxed in by the box of a group-thought architectural design authoritarianism, the fascism of the cuboidal, and most of it divested of primary or strong colours.

In Puerto Alcúdia, there is a new development by the Eroski supermarket and on the edge of the Lago Esperanza. It is indicative of this new conformism, one that has sprouted a pre-fabism, spawned by a computer-based template and using the rotate tool to move left, right, up or down. It has been finished off with what looks like a gradient effect from Photoshop. It is Adobe end-of-terrace. It is also redolent of sixties and seventies British town centres or council estates – the national mural of Brent, tiles of competing browns, greys and what may even be blues that looks ripe for some graffiti artist to complement. New, this “artistic” adjunct may look acceptable, though to whom one can’t be quite sure, but give it a year or three or four and it will have acquired an appearance of obsolescence. As for the dwellings, the interiors, the workmanship, the fittings may well all be superior; there’s no reason to suggest otherwise. But this is not the point.

The development has a certain industrial attractiveness. In a different context it might bring forth the plaudits of a local RIBA** equivalent (well, I say might), for example the context of whole new builds on land previously razed by nuclear or even conventional-warhead attack. No, architecturally, it has a utilitarian beauty, if that’s not a contradiction, which it is. But the pursuit of the Blockist new architecture is changing not just the style of the housing stock in Alcúdia (and elsewhere), it is also altering the landscape, taking away that heritage of style and of colour. It is also, via its soullessness, eating away at a social and physical soul that had previously found building expression in the richness of shades of earth, sea, sun and beach. In the further pursuit of a perceived elevation of quality, it is symptomatic of the tourism conundrum – the move away, so we are told, from sea and beach to an abstract and still undefined “newness” of tourism. Architectural allegory.

Stark and lacking sympathy with the natural environment from which came a more traditional architecture and tourism, Blockism is the housing motif for the new age. But as with tourism, there is more than just a slight sense that architecture has lost its way and is striving for form from the seemingly formless, as with whatever the “new” tourism is supposed to be. Lost its way, and lost in AutoCAD and Photoshop.

** RIBA – Royal Institute of British Architects.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Toy Story – The Can Ramis Building

There was I suggesting yesterday that Miquel Ferrer’s period as Alcúdia mayor has been relatively successful, and forgetting of course the slight blip of the fiasco that was/is the Can Ramis re-development in the old town.

This involved the demolition of the old Ramis houses by the car parking and the creation of something new. It has been a farcically tortuous process. Firstly, the budget was too low, most of this going – in advance – to the building firm which then went bust, the money itself being eaten up, not by the new construction, but by the new plaza by the market. Secondly, there was the collapse of part of the building last March, there having been a hiatus to allow further funding to be put in place. Thirdly, there is what we now have. Not quite finished but close to being so. A piece of Legoland in Alcúdia. The new Can Ramis looks as though one is invited to take it apart and re-do it in a different shape, just like Lego. What do you get if you take some large blocks of wood, attach a load of glass and put it all inside a great slab of concrete in one soulless oblong? The Lego Can Ramis. Maybe Lego is an official sponsor, and the town hall will sell naming rights. They should do in order to re-coup the budget overspend. It’s not as if it’s going to do all that it was intended to. Buses were meant to use it as a station. There was a change of idea, so I am told. Shame, the buses might have managed to knock it down.

No doubt some sap will come along at the official opening, whenever that is, and announce that it is “emblematic” or some such rot. Emblematic yes. Of a Danish toy company. It may well be that it falls to the new mayor to make an announcement. Another Miquel, always a Miquel. Once one Miquel, Ferrer, finally divests himself of the mayoral gown and slides his feet full-time under the tourism ministry desk, another is likely to be mayor: Miquel Llompart.

What will be going into the Lego Can Ramis will be the tourist office, a bus waiting-room and a café; this much we know. Getting on for one-and-half-million euros (the later budget, that is) to house something that already has a house, something that is useful but did not require such a lavish spend and something that is utterly unnecessary. Perhaps there will be more. Something a bit more emblematic. We will have to wait and see. Admittedly, though, the tourist office will be better sited in the new building, but it didn’t need the expense that it has involved.

But more than anything, there is the architectural barrenness and pointlessness of the new building. Situated just outside the walls, it was not covered by the heritage law that protects Alcúdia. They could, therefore, do what they like, and so they have, thanks to Lego. There is not one iota of context to the building, a functional-only rectangular series of blockheaded building-blocks of an edifice with more than a hint of British 1960s town-centre architectural vandalism; all that’s missing is the graffiti. Give them time.

Perhaps Ferrer has timed his run perfectly. He won’t have to be the one pretending that this is any good when it comes to the opening ceremony. Unless they drag out the tourism minister.