Madrid’s industrial past gets a new look and purpose with FSC-certified wood

The Delicias neighbourhood in Madrid was home to two industrial sheds and a five-storey office block just ten minutes from the city’s main railway station. No longer functional, it would have been easy to simply demolish the buildings and redevelop the district. Instead, Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso chose a different path. Today the old buildings have been reborn as the home of the Building for Infinito Delicias, a 2,700-square-metre complex dedicated to civic experimentation.  

The project was conceived eight years ago by two architecture studios, Husos Arquitecturas and Elii Architecture Office, together with the strategic design consultancy Ultrazul.  

“Today we maybe have to stop building and see what is already there, use, reuse and rehabilitate,” says Camilo García, architect at Husos.  

In 2023, Infinito Delicias, the result of that vision, received a Gold Award for Europe from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, recognizing its approach to adaptive reuse and low-carbon materials. Since then,  Infinito Delicias has established itself as an international architectural benchmark in sustainability, receiving awards such as the 2026 FAD Award in the Architecture category and the 2026 La Casa de la Arquitectura Innovation Award, among others.  

Wood was the crucial structural and environmental choice for the Building for Infinito Delicias. It was light enough to reinforce the existing steel structure without adding excessive weight to the foundations, while carrying less embodied carbon and a smaller ecological footprint than steel or concrete.  

For García, these decisions about materials cannot be separated from the origins of the materials.  

“The location of a building is not just the property, or the neighbourhood, but the planet itself,” he says. “The construction sector is responsible for around half of the material extracted from the Earth. The decisions involved in the production of a building have to take into account the sources of the materials that are going to be used.” 

The project team found the timber they needed in Asturias in northern Spain. Siero Lam, an FSC Chain of Custody Certificate Holder, supplied solid chestnut for the project. “We started working with a wood producer who had a certification that gave us information about the quality of the process in relation to the wood,” García explains. “That is one of the ways we learned about FSC certification in more detail.” 

For the architects, certification was one of the central parts of the design brief. 

“It was super important to us that every material we used and implemented in the design would be certified, and that it would be part of the solution, not part of the problem. That it would come from certified forests. That it would be treated properly within the social context, with the right working conditions,” adds Eva Gil, architect at Elii.  

FSC Chain of Custody Certification allowed the Asturian chestnut used in Infinito Delicias to be traced from responsibly managed forests through the supply chain to its final application in the building.  

In addition to certified timber, the entire project was certified according to the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). Roberto Santiago, the BREEAM consultant who worked with INERIA Management to certify the project, explains further: “If those forests are not managed consciously, if you don’t replace the tree you remove, we are making a patch that creates a much larger hole on the other side.” 

The building is hard to miss when walking in the neighbourhood: a three-dimensional façade supports planters across its surface. Chestnut bracing elements reinforce the preserved steel structure of the original industrial building. Cork sprayed onto the interior walls improves insulation. Gardens grow on the façades and roofs. The energy systems make use of heat pumps and photovoltaic and geothermal sources. Every element was designed with future disassembly and reuse in mind. In the central patio, Spanish designer Lucas Muñoz installed indirect lamps made from repurposed photography reflectors. They move slowly in the natural air currents and cast a diffuse light that recalls the way sunlight filters through trees. 

For Eva Gil, awareness was a key part of the project. “We are pretty aware of which kind of planet we are leaving to future generations,” she says. “For us, any technical decision an architect, a designer, a technician makes has trans-scalar implications: where the material is coming from, how many people are involved in its production, in which conditions they are working. Now Infinito Delicias has proved that working with a pre-existing structure and adding value to it is possible.” 

Looking back, architect Camilo García is pleased with the result and all the recognition the building has achieved. “This project is the result of experimentation and thinking outside the box. Having an outside voice recognize that value felt like a strong support to our work.” 

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