SPACE IN THE SUN.

Combining simple geometry, minimal materials and an exquisite play of light, Alberta Campo Baeza's business centre in Majorca is a refined yet sensuous abstraction of a traditional Mediterranean typology.

Could it be that minimal architecture is more reasonable, feels more at ease, in a sunny climate? At Inca, on Majorca, the Balearic Technological and European Business Innovation Centre is planar and sculptural, with a colour spectrum from white to off-white, yet has little of the stiffness or pedantry often found in art and architecture of this sort. The project's designer, Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza, would undoubtedly dispute any easy or lazy labelling of his work as minimalist. There is an essential quality to his Inca project, which takes the form of an ordered garden screened from an unremarkable context and open to the sky. It is tactile, sensuous, and humane.

Inca is inland, distant from the beach resorts negatively associated with Majorca. The principal town of the region Es Raiguer, it is an artisanal place renowned for leather craftsmanship. Campo Baeza's project, won through competition in 1995, houses development agencies operating at local, Balearic and European levels. With an emphasis on information technology, it's a showcase and symbol of confidence in the future. Campo Baeza's response is to enclose the triangular site with high walls which separate the venture from the surrounding sprawl of factories and showrooms and Ricky Martin billboards. Contextually and geometrically, this is an idealistic architecture.

External walls are made from exposed blocks of piedra mares, a local sandstone also used by Jorn Utzon for his two houses to the south of Majorca (AR October 1996). Pedestrian access is up a gentle ramp or adjacent steps along a short facade before it turns a 45 degree corner back along the south-facing hypotenuse. The slight shift in the alignment of this entrance facade creates a sense of place or terrace before the visitor moves inwards. A contiguous lid of flat roof floats overhead, so entry is experienced not as a traditional punched opening, but as a gap formed by the assemblage of primary building components. From quite far outside, there's an inviting view through to glimpses of glass and foliage inside the walls.

The ground plane rises because Campo Baeza's second move, after enclosing the entire precinct, is to place services, secondary spaces and rooms not in need of constant daylight in a semi-basement. As a result, he is free to line the courtyard with three wings of office space, separated from the perimeter by a linear interstitial terrace, and use the equivalent space below for computers, a parking garage, classrooms and a 110-seat auditorium. About the building's outer face are small, square (indeed Incan) openings allowing for clerestory illumination and air extract for this secretive lower floor. The basement is reached internally by open stairwells, one towards each apex of the plan, and a glazed hydraulic lift that adds to the compositional interest of the entrance.

The view through this entry porch intrigues largely because of the oblique angle ahead with its layering of white metal-clad columns. The eye is directed to dark green orange trees, each set within its own square trough at the centre of the scheme. In Campo Baeza's more cubic projects (the Turegano House in Madrid, for instance) volumes open up to one another vertically, but his more horizontal projects tend to use the diagonal in plan, creating dynamism or a tense equilibrium akin to that of artworks by Stella and Kelly. At Inca, the ground beneath the orange grove is not inhabited; between the trees, the architect has excavated a hole to form a tiered sunken theatre, whose defining axes are independent of the otherwise rigorous layout.

Offices and meeting spaces are sheltered by thin strips of roof finished with an almost invisible trim as coping. Ranges of universal space are subdivided internally by large timber cabinets and glazed towards the triangular patio and perimeter by sheer membranes. These screens or curtains of glass are theoretically as insubstantial as possible (the travertine flows through uninterrupted). They are frameless, and the roof above cantilevers out 2m on either side to keep the work spaces in deep, cool shade.

The casket that Campo Baeza has made by inlaying his triangular plot with travertine has physical, even luxurious implications, but also a clear mathematical aspect, as the architect has chosen to lay these slabs to a strict I m square grid, with triangular blocks along the hypotenuse. On to this Cartesian carpet is imposed a 6m square structural grid, so the transparent offices read as rational colonnades or stoas (the services emerge from the plinth below). Additional fixtures, such as railings to stairwells and the patio theatre, and the glazed sliding gate at the entrance, are dimensionally subservient to this supergrid and madeof visually unobtrusive components painted white.

The tectonic of Campo Baeza's building, its architectural grammar, is held to a minimum. While the undercroft corridor, classrooms and auditorium are dark and literally inferior, these spaces are for intermittent use only. The visitor's memory of Inca is of travertine, the orange grove, plentiful shade, and then the great triangular opening to the sky. Beneath this blue ceiling, the architect had originally intended to build a tall communal pavilion above the sunken theatre. This has not been realized, but the theatre itself offers a release from the correct co-ordination of the total scheme. By excavating as much as erecting, Campo Baeza shows that his most fundamental concern is the formation of space.

Architect

Alberta Campo Baeza, Madrid

Project team

Alberto Campo Baeza, L. Ignacio Aguirre Lopez, Anton Garcia Abril, Antonio perez Villegas, Julio Perez, Amigo, Emilio Delgado Martos, Daniel Huertas Nadal, Jaan Manuel Sanchez Ia Chica, Raul del Valle Gonzalez

Photographs

1, 3, 4, 5 Hisao Suzuki; 2, Pedro Albornoz

1. In Campo Baeza's magical, modern abstraction of traditional Mediterranean patios, transparent volumes of office space are arranged around a triangular courtyard gridded with orange trees.

2. Set against a jumbled and unremarkable edge-of-town context, the building exudes a calm elegance.

3. Walls of creamy local sandstone act as a foil to ethereal planes of glass.

4. A sunken theatre at the centre of the courtyard gently breaks up the rigorous, gridded geometry of structure and planting.

5. A broad flat roof oversails to protect the office spaces from the sun's glare.