The New Casa de Los Volcanes Exhibition Space by GPY Arquitectos

The Jameos del Agua complex is part of Lanzarote’s network of Art, Culture and Tourism Centres. Designed by the multidisciplinary artist César Manrique, who, as early as the 1960s foresaw the important link between architecture and design, art, landscape and tourism, the Centres make up an important territorial network that establishes links with the most characteristic landscapes of the island of Lanzarote – a Biosphere Reserve and Unesco Global Geopark. Forming part of the La Corona Volcano Natural Monument, Los Jameos del Agua is famous for its carefully staged subterranean garden, a Gesamtkunstwerk, which develops around a lava tube and its three jameos (open, roofless grottoes) and is accompanied by a two-story visitor building, the Casa de Los Volcanes. A visit to the Jameos del Agua is a fully “authentic” experience that brings the visitor up close with nature, and yet there is not a single space that has not been designed and presented artificially.

The project for new exhibition space within the Casa de Los Volcanes proposes a contemporary reinterpretation of the Jameos del Agua complex as a major work of environmental art. The new premises are installed in an unused part of the building, which was formerly meant to serve as a hotel but was left unfinished and unused for decades, concealed from the visitors. While maintaining the exterior aspect of the building with its cuboid shape and traditional white lime-paint finish, the project opens the formerly nested interior by applying a strategy of micro-erasure, transforming minor elements, and respecting the existing structure and its openings. With this strategy, together with the creation of barrier-free connections, the project generates a continuous space that extends the visitor route over three levels and integrates the new gallery space into the complex’s overall dynamics. At the same time, the former exhibition gallery in another area of the building, with its stunning views of both the exterior volcanic landscape and the interior landscape of the jameos, is freed up and reverted back into the Centre’s restaurant and lookout point, as originally planned by César Manrique.

With its contemporary look, the new exhibition gallery offers a neutral background, which intentionally marks a contrast to Manrique’s bespoke designs. Thanks to its skylights and patios, which enable natural ventilation and lighting but also create a sequence of bright and dark spaces, the new gallery presents itself as an open, fluid space, which follows the centre’s idea of a continuous passage through space in the form of a sequence of shadow and light, roof and sky, tubes and jameos, thus creating a contemporary interpretation of Manrique’s staging of the volcanic landscape and its lava flows.

The New Casa de Los Volcanes Exhibition Space is an innovative project within an innovative heritage building. By extending the continuous route through the Centre and thus augmenting the spatial experience for visitors, the new project constitutes the missing link that ultimately completes the Centre. The new exhibition project both interprets and transforms the Jameos del Agua complex. It can be understood as a minimal intervention, which helps the existing building fulfil its original vision by integrating the exhibition gallery into the complex’s dynamics as an open, fluid space and completing the continuous route weaving through the complex. Using a continuous linear route as the unifying fabric, the project converts the Centre from a subterranean garden into a stratified complex of gardens, built over three levels. It is a means to visualise the overall built landscape in a synthesis of conservation and transformation. Interweaving landscape, tourism and cultural activities, the project serves to renew the site’s functionality and acts as a catalyst for the reactivation of the Centre as one of the drivers of the island’s culture and economy.

The new project underscores the relevance of the Jameos del Agua, which cannot only be read as a unique staged landscape of the modern movement on the island of Lanzarote but furthermore has the potential to incorporate a sequence of natural and built spaces into a single, global discourse that overcomes the current dichotomy of landscape versus architecture, exterior versus interior, to establish a form of architecture-landscape. The intervention thus forms an integral part of the Jameos del Agua as a future-oriented, open-ended project, which engages in a contemporary, ongoing global discourse.

• Other credits:
Client: Centros de Arte, Cultura y Turismo de Lanzarote