[Originally published in the April 2024 Mediterranean issue of The Architectural Review]
Plaza Gomila, a small urban square in Palma on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, was the epicentre of the city’s glamorous nightlife in the 1970s, but fell into urban decline in the 1990s. At the heart of El Terreno, a neighbourhood rising uphill from Palma’s harbour below a majestic castle, Plaza Gomila was created in the 19th century, when urbanites started building summer retreats outside the city’s medieval defensive wall, and its bars and cafés soon converted it into a hang‑out for artists (the Barcelonese painter Santiago Rusiñol summered here). In 1923, Tito’s dance hall opened on Plaza Gomila, an extravagant venue with an open‑air dancefloor which became a hotspot in the 1960s and ’70s for international celebrities such as Grace Kelly and Sean Connery (a neighbouring nightclub, Discoteca Sgt Pepper’s, was famously inaugurated in 1968 with a performance by Jimi Hendrix).
The heyday of Plaza Gomila’s cultural life was also when mass tourism and real‑estate speculation led to high‑rise development. Hulking harbourfront hotel and apartment complexes appeared nearby with their backs turned to the older urban fabric inland. By the 1990s, El Terreno was in decline, and today, the area’s economy is visibly struggling, with cheap massage parlours and dive bars dotted among empty shopfronts.
Project Gomila, a public‑private partnership between the municipality, global footwear brand Camper (which hails from Mallorca) and Dutch architects MVRDV with local firm GRAS Reynés Arquitectos, aims to revitalise this once notorious bohemian enclave. Seven buildings – six of which are now completed – on and around Plaza Gomila comprise the first phase of this revitalisation project. Four of them involve refurbishment, while three are new infill constructions: an example of micro‑urban development, renovating the degraded urban fabric using an acupunctural approach of infill and restoration – even though the site is not a declared ‘heritage district’ of listed historical buildings. […]
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