Tabacalera Building. Valencia. Spain

The City Council of Valencia, upon acquiring all the buildings of the former Tobacco Merchants, and after making an amendment to the General Plan in June 2006 which maintained the protection of the original buildings of the Exhibition of 1909 and withdrew the remaining buildings, decided to designate them for municipal offices and public facilities. After the demolition of the non-protected buildings with unsuitable elements, the UPV team who drafted the Rehabilitation Project, having already participated in the previous research, was put in charge of the supervision of the works, which began in September 2007.

The main building, which was still in operation a few years ago, was inaugurated for the 1909 Regional Exhibition where it was used as the Palace of Industries, assigned to the Mercantile Association by the lessor Tobacco Merchants. It was designed by the architect Celestino Aranguren and the engineers Federico Garcia and Mauro Serret, and the works were carried out under the direction of architect Ramon Lucini Calleja. After the exhibition, the building was recovered by the company which installed itself in its new factory, extending it in later years and making many interventions, practically until the present.

The grouping is cataloged by the General Plan of Valencia as a Site of Local Relevance of unquestionable historical and architectural value. Upon proposing the project, the Consistory expressed interest in recovering in some way the urban environment created for the celebration of the Regional Exhibition in 1909 and the National in 1910, by means of a differential redevelopment, although it has been quite transformed from then until now, having been almost one hundred years. As a result, a comprehensive intervention was proposed on space originally occupied by the Exhibition, which includes the drafting of a development project and underground parking, in coordination with the rehabilitation project of the whole, allowing the city to use part of the basement as municipal parking, with an enormous consequence on the implementation of the building work because of the connections between them.


In the individual projects, the same composition criteria for the free spaces are used, conditioned in the development by the appearance of emergent elements from the parking area (ladders, ventilation, elevators and ramps) integrated into the proposal, at the same time that the treatment of the courtyards of the former “Palace of Industries” is an extension of the exterior development. It should be noted here that we are dealing with primarily industrial typologies.