The FIT Canary Islands Tourism and Innovation Factory is conceived of as a strategic meeting point, connected to both the business and the university sector, aiming to create synergies between the stakeholders in the tourism industry and to contribute to improved quality and excellence.
Studio Name: GPY Arquitectos
Design Team: Juan Antonio González Pérez, Constanze Sixt, Urbano Yanes Tuña
Collaborators: Kevin Lam, Juan Luis Marichal Hernández
Constructed Surface: 856,26 m2
Year: 2013
Location: Costa Adeje Tourism Development Centre (CDTCA),
Calle Las Jarcias 4, Urbanización El Galeón, Adeje. Spain
Consultants: ASAT S.L., GPI Ingenieros, Reveriego y Asociados Arquitectos S.L.
Photography Credits: Teresa Arozena, Jominag
Client: Cámara Oficial de Comercio, Industria y Navegación de Santa Cruz de Tenerife
The FIT is located in the Costa Adeje Tourism Development Centre, a benchmark institute for education in the tourism sector.
Our project deals with the refurbishing of two spaces on the ground floor and basement of the existing building, which were previously used as storerooms. The new premises offer spaces designed to implement the latest products and management models in the fields of catering, leisure, business and hospitality and to provide specialised training and interior design consultancy services.
We created a large, fluid space for interaction and exchange, connecting the centre’s two levels by a central open staircase. The continuous, multifunctional space can easily be divided into meeting, presentation and conference areas and showrooms by means of a space division system of retractable fabric blinds and curtains, assuring different degrees of independence, isolation and privacy.
The functional space is separated from the technical area at the periphery by a continuous enveloping of cast U-glass. The natural darkness of the basement level is thus inverted by a neutral, abstract, back-lit surface that acts as a filter towards an imaginary, external space.
Along with the system of dividing curtains, colour and light play an important role in the definition and dissolution of the space that is in constant flux.
GPY Arquitectos
GPY Arquitectos is formed by Juan Antonio González Pérez, Urbano Yanes Tuña and Constanze Sixt. We understand architecture as a spatial search for new forms of relating the human being with the surroundings, dissolving the limits between interior and exterior, public and private, urban and territorial. We understand the studio as a laboratory and the teaching of architectural projects as a creative and critical practice, inseparable from our professional practice. The scope of our action is broad, but we have a special interest in cultural and educational facilities, thought of as a sequence of social spaces related to the city and the landscape. The studio has received a number of high-profile awards, such as the AR Award of Emerging Architecture, the Chicago Athenaeum International Architecture Award and the German Design Award. GPY was nominated for the European Union’s Contemporary Architecture Prize Mies van der Rohe and for the Iakov Chernikhov International Prize. GPY’s projects were featured internationally at the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and published in the Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture, 1000xEuropean Architecture and 10x10_2. 100Architects 10 Critics.
