Circulo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife

The Tenerife Fine Arts Center (Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife)

Architects: Fernando Menis

Location: Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. 28° 17′ 15.8964” N 16° 37′ 2.9892” W

Use: Cultural

Materials: Concrete, cementCultural

Client: The Tenerife Fine Arts Center (Circulo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife)

Day of inauguration: July 4th 2016

Description: The Tenerife Fine Arts Center (Circulo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife) is a non-profit entity funded in 1925, which recently refreshed its long lasting history with a strong public engagement program. Fernando Menis was entrusted to improve the usability of the building and renew the Arts Center. The project redesigns the entrance and the circulations across the 5 floors in order to make all parts of the building easily accessible. The highlight of the intervention is the custom made welcome desk, which looks more like of a site specific installation than a furniture object. Moreover, the interactive lighting varies in relation with the human presence as well as with the season of the year. Besides energy savings, this system aims to produce a sensitive relation between the users and their environment, enrich the way building and contents are experienced. The low cost materials meet the demands of an extremely limited budget while referring the history of the building: everything is solved with small concrete blocks, cement and painting. Another particularity of the intervention is the collaboration with artists. A 30 x 3 m collective mural made by 47 local and international artists, who got inspiration from aerial images of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in order to paint a contemporary interpretation of the city, dominates the theatre of the venue. This is the biggest mural ever in Col-Art’s history, which counted on the collaboration of two of the founders of this art movement: Rossana Durán from Mexico and Marc Kuhn from Switzerland. Another street artist Shirley Wintsch worked on the intervention of the facade – a geometric abstract painting that plays with luminescence effects.

The renovation of the Tenerife Fine Arts Center enhanced the visual and cultural features of the building and created a suitable atmosphere for the art to spread.