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art of this approach includes teaching and giving lectures, which both do regularly, on the island and around the world. They have done a collaboration with the AA Visiting School for the last few years, along with architect Guillem Aloy, that brings students to Mallorca for a 10-day workshop with a fixed design brief. In the first year, they worked on a project around water and the infrastructure of water in Banyalbufar, and the next year it was about mares stone, Mallorca’s natural sandstone found in the centre of the island. Mares (named for the sea), is made from layers and layers of compressed sand, shells, fossils, and the reddish dust that blows in every summer from North Africa, perhaps affecting its slightly pinkish hue. For this workshop, they visited two stone quarries in Mallorca, one natural and one man-made and talked about the different approaches to retrieving the stone and its impact on the land. They questioned ideas not only around how and why this stone was formed but also around territory and what to do with this ‘scar’ in the land left by the quarrying. “The great thing about teaching is that it gives you a window to think about things differently and take the time and get input from a younger generation,” says Juan. 

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Isla has always had an interest in questioning materials and local resources. This investigation was pushed further with the award of a competition to build a pavilion in Basel using a catalogue of specific elements and materials that were coming from buildings that were going to be demolished in the city. The project was a prototype of circular construction for a public use space. “What was very challenging was that the materials might change during the process. They might discover that the beams were not structurally sound or that there were less materials available, so we had to keep adapting. It was exciting because we had to make it work within real constraints,” explains Marta. The long, rectangular pavilion, designed like a loggia, was built at the edge of a railyard in a very urban but gentrifying neighbourhood. The pavilion was up for eight months and then dismantled, as was the original idea. But this led Isla to propose this project in a call for submissions to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Spanish Pavilion, which was looking for projects that had already been built and were based on ideas of circularity and innovative approaches to materials. It was selected as one of the sixteen projects that will be exhibited later this spring in Venice. Isla is one of four Mallorca-based architecture firms that were selected for the Spanish Pavilion.