Fundacion Cerezales Antonino y Cinia [FCAYC]

Location: León, Spain

Client: Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia [FCAYC]
Date: 2017 Completion
Total Area: 2,500m²
Budget: £3.5 million

Team Credits:

Partner in Charge: Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Project Architect: Pep Wennberg

Competition Team: Ravi Lopes, Robert Berenguer, David Prado, Diego Nebra and Manuel Távora

Design Development Team: Ravi Lopes, Maider Llaguno Munitxa, Ivaylo Nachev

Landscape Architecture: Arquitectura/Agronomia, Teresa Gali, Jordi Nebot

The Cerezales Antonino & Cinia Foundation is a private institution, focused on the discussion of rural culture, on a local and global scale, the development of the territory and the transfer of knowledge to society through two channels: cultural production and ethnoeducation. The Foundation is economically sustainable thanks to the support of its founder, Don Antonino Fernández.

The main activities carried out by the Foundation include: plastic arts, music, the environment, sociology and economics, among other disciplines. The institutional policy of the Foundation takes as its key argument its focus on the development of an open culture and the production and distribution of knowledge in favor of the citizenry, within the local framework. As a regional development agency, it acts as a link between diverse projects of cultural interest and multiple local, regional, national and transnational agents.

The building is designed as a series of adjacent N-S oriented bays, located at the highest level of the plot, at elevation +882.80, and consists of a ground floor and first floor above ground level and a partial basement to house facilities. It is an exempt building, which follows the geometrical and constructive criteria of traditional architecture, with features such as the gabled roof ends, the framework and the wood paneling, etc… At the same time, it allows to distribute the different uses associated with the foundation in 5 longitudinal bays oriented from north to south.

A key element of the building’s environmental strategy is the minimization of the building’s energy consumption during the construction and use phases. For this, materials without embedded energy and the incorporation of passive strategies have been chosen, playing with the orientation, shape and characteristics of the skin, as well as renewable energy systems such as geothermal, biomass boiler and energy storage by change phase, to minimize the energy demand of the building.