MUSAC was designed by Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tunon and is located in the city of Leon (Spain) at the entrance of the neighborhood of Eras of Renew, the Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y Leon was opened by the Prince and Princess of Asturias on April 1, 2005, with a firm purpose: to be a Museum of Present and become instrumental in the development of contemporary art, internationally.

This museum was founded with a broad sense of experimental design and develop projects with exhibitions at all levels

On a large urban plan, MUSAC draws the scenario for art with the same optimistic attitude to the Roman surveyors - to sketch their cities in the landscape.Against other spaces whose quality museum focuses on the exposure of historic collections, MUSAC is a living space that opens the door to a wide variety of contemporary art forms, an art center that constructs a set of game boards where actions are the protagonists of the space itself a structure that develops from an open system, consisting of fabric squares and diamonds, which enables building a secret geography of memory.

Situation

MUSAC is located in the city of Leon in the autonomous community of Castile and Leon, specifically on Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24.

The avant-garde museum has been built in the most modern area of the city with the intention of enhancing their growth towards an avant-garde cultural quarter within the art world, not only in Spain but also Europe.

Concept

It is a building with a peculiar plant, inherited from the geometry of some Roman mosaics, whose originality lies in using two polygons, a square and a rhombus-to display a continuous surface on the plane.

One of the hallmarks of this particular building is the facade of more than 3,000 stained glass, stained glass inspired 'The Falconer', one of the oldest of the Cathedral of Leon XIII century and whose image has been pixelated to color each of the glass covering the facade.

Inside, the white concrete is the protagonist of a place where spaces flow together.

Spaces

The surface of the five exhibition halls of the museum is 3,400 square meters. To these must be added the 180 square meters of the projection room and foyer 450, lit by two large skylights.

A set of independent showrooms and exhibitions chained allows different sizes and characteristics, each room, so broken and so creates a continuous, but differentiated area, which opens onto the other rooms and courtyards, providing longitudinal, transverse and diagonals. Five hundred prefab beams enclose a space characterized by systematic repetition and formal expressiveness.

Outside, public space takes on a concave shape to hold the activities and encounters, embraced by large stained glass, being the place where homage is paid to the city as a place of relationship between people.Inside, a large area of continuous, different spaces, dotted with courtyards and large skylights, shapes an expressive system that communicates the interests shared by architecture and art: the contemporary manifestation of the variable and the perennial, sameness and difference, of the universal and the transitory, like an echo of our own diversity and equality as individuals.

In its size, as a one-story building constructed with concrete walls and large white colored glass outside, MUSAC aims to be a space where art is comfortable and helps to erase the boundaries between private and public, between leisure and work and, ultimately, between art and life.

Materials

The predominant materials are definitely 3: The homigon, iron and glass. Concrete is the entire structure of the building while the walls define outdoor spaces in white.The iron creates a structure of more than five hundred base beams to support the spectacular facade of the building.

Glass is the image of the building and in 42 different shades covering the whole reminding edifio windows of the Cathedral of Leon.