La Manzanera

In 1962, RBTA began to design a masterplan for a typical tourist complex in Alicante facing the Rock of Ifach. The program itself was similar to other existing residential resorts on the Mediterranean cost of Spain. We were asked to design and to build over the years in stages, condominium apartments, single-family vacation houses, a small hotel, bar, restaurants and sporting facilities for a maximum high-season population of 2,500 to 3,000 people.

We can summarize our intentions by stating that we wanted to create an enclosed Garden of Eden, paradisal in a sense, which would correspond to an idyllic, bucolic vision of the world.

The special qualities of the immediate landscape, largely man-made, of stone terraces, and the natural amphitheater valley formation, and the expressed will of formal creation were all determining factors in the transformation of a magnificent natural landscape into one expressly rebuilt for vacation and leisure time.

There are obvious substantial differences between the first buildings and the later ones, despite the coherence of their design. In a special way the apartment buildings and other constructions were framed in a larger methodological preoccupation, which, like other unbuilt schemes for La Manzanera, acquire visualization in a language we call post-cubism.

However, over the years, the importance of this articulated conception has grown enormously for RBTA. Each building remains an essay in form and language, place and space. In La Manzanera, one can live and experience the transformations that have taken place in the history of contemporary architecture in a single place; from an Archigram-derived form, to a critical regionalism expressed three-dimensionally, and finally, to a recovery of a Mediterranean classical vocabulary.