La Favorita Tobacco Factory

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Industrial architecture · Year: 1959 · Authors: Manuel de la Peña

Designed in the 1960s by the architect Manuel de la Peña, the La Favorita tobacco factory is a standalone building, lacking any reference to its urban and territorial position. On the contrary, this building has been the trigger to organise the urban system that currently develops around it.

It is formed by a rectangular block topped by a sawtooth roof that gives it an industrial appearance. The prism that defines its base stands out over the supporting structure that connects with the aforementioned roofing. The structure lightly overlaps the solid appearance of the enclosures. Despite this, the significance of the building is marked by the metallic aspect of the construction, given by the structural and constructive elements. The exposed structure reinforces the idea of a building conceived to generate industrial activity inside. The use of this resource has been repeated by the architect in other typologies of the island territory. It is a functional construction of moderate cost, without any formal display. Its formal characteristic mainly derives from the need to obtain optimal lighting inside. The arrangement of light elements between the enclosure and the structure emphasises the idea of formal, functional, and technical separation of both elements, while giving formal lightness to the whole ensemble. The organisation of the floor plan literally responds to the geometric delimitation constructed by the rectangle supporting the built envelope.

(Extracted from Fundación DOCOMOMO, Enrique Solana Suárez)

Las Palmas and the memory of tobacco. The needs to reorganise the use of buildings and the poetic chance, which connects everything with everything, led to the municipal archives and warehouses being relocated years ago to La Favorita, a solid building constructed in the 1960s by Manuel de la Peña on the hill between Barranco Seco and the La Matula ravine. In this case, besides the construction, a reference work of modern architecture, the tobacco factory gave rise to two neighbourhoods whose names also constitute important imprints of Las Palmas: La Matula itself — from matule, a package or block of tobacco leaves — and El Secadero — which recalls that in its clearings water was extracted from the plant exposed to the sun —.

(Extracted from the article Zona de fumadores by Mariano de Santa Ana [La Provincia, 19/08/2015])

28.085939, -15.435044