Cultural Center La Gota: Tobacco Museum by Losada García in Cáceres, Spain.

Get ready for today’s doozy-of-a-building guys – a tobacco museum. Yeah you read that correctly, the Cultural Centre La Gota has been designed around the tobacco plant. Inspiring conceptual design to façade detailing, the tobacco industry’s contribution to Caceres, Spain is celebrated by this quirky stack of spaces located in the capital Navalmoral. From a contemporary perspective, it’s a bit ‘WTF’ but as the tobacco industry has been key to Caceres’ prosperity, you can begin to understand that it deserves some recognition. A whole cultural centre though?

Reclaiming a central site in Navalmoral, the cultural centre incorporates a series of small exhibition spaces, a permanent gallery space for artist Sofia Feliu and a big-ol’ tobacco museum. According to the architects the geometry of the building mimics the structure of the tobacco plant, where sub-structures cantilever from a central core.

Mimicking the brick materiality and atmospheric light qualities in traditional Caceres tobacco-drying houses, the building’s façade is draped in a perforated ceramic fabric called FlexBrick. Screw-fixed to each slab and anchored to the ground, the FlexBrick façade system acts as the second skin to an otherwise glass box, dispersing the light internally and dematerialising the building’s presence on the street. Although it looks fairly homogenous, the brick pattern varies along the facade, closing off and opening up the internal spaces and creating a non-uniform face. Neat, right? On a more structural note, the series of impressive cantilevers that create the staggered box affect are achieved through reinforcement and post-tensioning. Helping ventilate the building, a five-story green wall engages directly with the building, creating moments of interior relief from an otherwise purely ceramic façade. On the west side of the building, the cantilevers are offset from the green wall and staggered to create an outdoor public arena.

In principle, I understand this little number is contentious. A tobacco museum is going to be questioned. Yet in spite of this, Losada Garcia cleverly and delicately referenced the tobacco industry to create an otherwise sharp and functional public space of landmark proportions. There’s respect to be had.

[Images courtesy of Losada García. Photography by Miguel de Guzman.]