Set against the development that worried Joan Miró, Rafael Moneo's star-shaped gallery anchors Fundació Miró Mallorca, photographed by Nikolas Dost in Palma, beside the studio Josep Lluís Sert designed for him in 1956 and a rural 18th-century house.
After years of travel, Joan Miró settled in Mallorca in 1956 and could at last have the studio he had dreamed of. It fell to Josep Lluís Sert, his friend since the early 1930s, a figure of the modern movement and then Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Barred from practising in Spain for twenty years under Franco, Sert designed it by post from exile in the United States, the site work supervised by Miró's brother-in-law.
The studio fits itself to the terrain's hillside terraces in Cala Major. Miró asked Sert to mind the climate, to split the working and storage areas so a finished canvas could rest at a distance, and to size the main room for paintings as large as his Cincinnati mural. Sert answered with an L-shaped plan on two levels under a vaulted, undulating roof whose curves lend the structure a sense of movement. Concrete meets older Mediterranean materials, stone and clay, and the south façade carries colour: white set against blue, terracotta, and red and yellow woodwork.
By the autumn of 1956 the studio was finished, and Miró filled it slowly with the clutter that fed his work: oils and canvases, crayons and brushes among postcards, clay whistles and Oceanic masks. That arrangement survives. The Sert Studio is now one of Mallorca's emblematic buildings and an Item of Cultural Heritage, considered the origin of Sert's later work.
A second studio stands next to Miró's Son Abrines home. Son Boter, a rural Mallorcan house from the late eighteenth century, is the oldest of the three; Miró bought it in 1959 with his Guggenheim International Award money. He covered its walls with charcoal sketches like graffiti, figures tied to his sculptures, and later added engraving and lithography studios still worked in today.
The third building answers a different need. When the collection outgrew the studios, Rafael Moneo, who would win the Pritzker Prize in 1996, was asked for a headquarters where the work could be shown. He found a site hemmed in by development and turned the design against it: from the entrance, he set out to hide the surrounding buildings from visitors. Moneo set down two linked concrete volumes, one a linear three-storey block holding the centre's different services, a colonnade of brise-soleils filtering the light along its south side. It opened in 1992.
The other volume is the Espai Estrella, a star-shaped gallery roofed with a sheet of water, a trompe-l'oeil that pulls the sea and horizon close. Its points stand like a fortress's bastions against the streets around it; inside, daylight comes softened through outer brise-soleils and inner panels of translucent alabaster, the low windows giving onto nothing but ponds and gardens. On one point stands a ceramic mural by Maria Antònia Carrió, after a work by Miró. In a 1951 interview Miró said, "A sculpture should stand in the open air, in the midst of nature." In the gardens his sculptures do just that, merging into the landscape.
