"On the one hand, the singular embraces the plural; on the other, the plural is contained in the singular. The singular first expands and then contracts. The plural contracts only to later grow and spread." Aldo Van Eyck, CIAM Otterloo, 1959.

It is by the sea, next to the water, in the Bay of Alcudia in the north of Majorca, in a place that has before it the sublime immensity of the blue horizon, while here and there around it, somewhat residual, are dotted small, irrelevant buildings of uncertain presence, incapable of producing any feeling of order.

The house Josep Lluís Mateo has constructed stands on its own two feet, apparently indifferent to its surroundings, to the local topography, attentive only to the vast spectacle of the open sea and the immediate world the house itself generates.

What strikes us first about this solitary object carefully placed in a privileged spot, its back to what surrounds it, is its status as a solid, forceful artifact resulting from the studied articulation of two elementary prisms. A large volume runs north-south from a hollow on the mountain side towards the sea, a bold, white volume penetrated by a second perpendicular one, greater in height although rather lightweight, of an intense blue, which, grafting itself on the first, irrupts into it without managing to transpierce it. This is the basic gesture defining the building. The physical yet carefully judged encounter of two masses in space. An elementary operation in the best abstract tradition, in which an apparent equilibrium gives way to the tension between both shapes in the form of energy sustaining the complex object located in empty space.

In a way this is a sculptural conception, neither rhetorical nor grandiloquent but calibrated and expertly counterweighted, without renouncing the forcefulness of the basic gesture.

This first decision, the parti of the building, does not stop there. It is only the beginning of a process of increasing elaboration, through successive strata, that will be about introducing diversity within the apparent simplicity of the first movement.

The basic double body also acts centrifugally, outwards from inside, by creating excrescences, ruptures, displacements and hollows, as if the building, endowed with a powerful inner energy, were beginning to exert pressure in many directions, a pressure that would effect its own surface in diverse ways.

Low bodies, porches, jutting volumes, ramps running underground, nicks in the arrises of the angles and perforations constitute a sort of eruption on the emphatic body of the two grafted volumes.

The building expands. It exerts pressure from within, calling for the rupture of volumes too elementary to contain all the energy housed within. It is a question of rhizomic growth in search of a multitude of interests, colonizing. It is a force which establishes transparencies, micro-environments, twinned circulatory systems, sightlines, in-between spaces, reciprocities.

Neither the closed-in universe of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye or the organic bitty quality of Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House.

This is a totally different strategy. The initial, autistic conception of the object in the landscape is submitted to the energy that tirelessly invigorates the interior, a microcosm full of unlimited situations. Up and down; in front and in back; high and low; ascent and descent; open and closed.

The interior of this house is an endless labyrinth of spaces: connected, separated, fluid, boldly defined. An anxious need not to forego ever-increasing possibility and an indefatigable striving to make use of every occasion leads to an interior system of a richness previously unthinkable when faced with the forcefulness of the founding gestures. Through their intense elaboration the plurality of intentions grows within the building, expanding outwards, thereby assuring that what might have been minimalist purity is, by exerting pressure against the original formal matrix, converted into excess and dispersion.

The house generates intermediary, contiguous, abutting interior landscapes… An endless sequence of visions, atmospheres and thresholds converts the building into the aforementioned microcosm. A microcosm now beefy, dense with reality, material and tactile, in which the technical and stylistic decisions are rendered intelligible and apparent by unfolding with no other coercion than that imposed by a sovereign decision best suited to each thing.

What on first meeting might have seemed abstract, elementary, in vitro, almost reductive, is animated; that's to say, becomes heavy with soul, concrete vitality, when the project accepts the contamination the lived space demands from the basic geometrical form proposed as the first configuration.

In general we tend to value the unity of the idea, the rectilinear process that goes from the general to the particular and vice versa. An unconscious laziness makes us privilege clear and distinct proposals.

To proceed from the dual, from the collision of interests. It's not that common to think of architecture as an undertaking founded on a conception of vitality as conflict, as an arduous task involving yoking inevitable different logics together. But an architecture of difference can do no more than accept such an undertaking, the effort of making the straight line and the labyrinth, the reasonable and the desirable possible.

Daedalus, the Minoan hero, the mythical first architect, creator too of the most lifelike statues of Athena, is, moreover, the builder of the labyrinth, from whose complexity only the thread he has given the beautiful Ariadne will enable her to laboriously find the way to get out.

Ignasi de Solà-Morales (Barcelona, 1942-Amsterdam, 2001), architect and philosopher, was Professor of the Theory and History of Architecture at the Escuela de Arquitectura de Barcelona and a guest professor at many American and European universities. A founding editor of the magazine Any, he was on the editorial boards of a number of international magazines. The author of several books and many articles of criticism published in the chief international specialized magazines, he divided his time between his theoretical and teaching activities and his professional practice as an architect.