The modern legacy of José Ferragut Pou in Mallorca

Abstract

This article, which analyzes the legacy of the architect José Ferragut Pou (Palma de Mallorca, 1912-1968), presents the architecture of one of the most outstanding and singular Majorcan architects of the 20th century, whose extensive production illustrates the desire to achieve modernity through an empirical rationalism attentive to the topographic, climatic and constructive peculiarities of the place. The architecture of José Ferragut Pou is the result of a personal approach and intense experimentation that seeks to recover the traditional construction for the modern heritage, evoking the spatial and constructive tradition of the place, projecting the adaptation of the principles of rationalist orthodoxy and, in short, to propose an adequate architecture to the scarcity of means and to the economic circumstances that characterize the Spain of the autarky. In public architecture, he adopts the reflexive use of diverse resources that coexist orderly, from classicism, which provides, as a system, a series of efficient codes with a plastic richness and an adequate aesthetic, up to empirical rationalism whose disciplined sobriety would take the following decade until the modern constructive abstraction of the GESA building in Palma (1963-1975) and the church of the Porciúncula (1965-1968).