La Salvada Retreat / Tarek Shamma

La Salvada is an extraordinary architectural project envisioned by Tarek Shamma in response to the client's brief of creating a seamless transition between indoor and outdoor spaces. The project faced planning constraints, as it was limited to the existing footprint of two ruins, while also needing to preserve and design around a magnificent, sprawling cactus measuring 5 meters in height.

Located in Puigpunyent, Mallorca, this project led by the IBAVI (Balearic Housing Institute) proposes a building designed with criteria of sustainability, energy efficiency, and respect for the natural environment. To achieve this, the project develops from a model of local economy that recovers trades, construction systems, and passive strategies inherent to the native island culture.

Amid the orderly grid of the Giardini della Biennale, the Swiss Pavilion appears almost reticent. Its low white volumes, completed in 1952 by Bruno Giacometti, seem to withdraw from the surrounding display of national pride. The building embodies a form of modernism that resists monumentality, where precision and restraint replace spectacle, and architecture becomes less an object than a framework for encounter.

The Reception Pavilion is conceived as an imaginary purgatory — a passage from the polluted urban realm into a landscape of ecological clarity. It stands both grounded and imaginary, kinetic: a tectonic circle in motion, where nature enters from every side and the visitor becomes part of it.