Andrés Jaque, Casa en Never Never Land, Cala Vadella (Ibiza)

With or without optimism, the panorama that the Spanish architect has to face continues to be discouraging. Protracted and profound, both economic and ideological, perhaps systemic, the crisis, which came suddenly and devastatingly, has taken on near-biblical tones, and no Noah has been spared from the deluge. Almost a decade after the skies burst open and the torrent began, one of the questions that remain unanswered (actually everything remains unanswered in this strange crisis) is whether so much destruction has brought with it some kind of good. Joseph Schumpeter popularized the idea that capitalism regulates itself through ‘creative destruction’ – the replacement of old products with new ones – and in this sense what has happened in the last years confirms the model. With an essential difference: it is not the push of new things but, on the contrary, the sinking of the system, that has caused changes, giving way, as it has, to unprecedented strategies for facing reality, fundamentally for survival. Hence, instead of as a fruit of economic readjustment, the crisis of Spanish architecture ought to be interpreted as an ecological cataclysm, and since we are drawing analogies, we would do better using references like Lamarck, the forgotten evolutionist who postulated that organs were modified not by genetic chance, but by changes in the environment. So, if the environment creates the organ, which organs have Spanish architects refined during the crisis of their habitat?...[+]