Madrid's skyscrapers

Today was a bright and clear, but cold day in Madrid. Feeling a bit better, but still not good, I decided to take the metro ride up to the new business district sector of the city. I haven’t ventured out of the old city center since I’ve been here, and I wanted to get a better idea of how modern Madrid lives. The new “Cuatro Torres” (four towers) district looks like an American city. If not for the street signs, I wouldn’t have known that I wasn’t in the United States.

As American urban planners are trying to figure out how to make our cities more livable and intimate, it seems that here they’re going in the opposite direction. Maybe it’s their answer to Epcot: reproduce America in Europe! Not that they didn’t do a beautiful job on these buildings; on the contrary. But there’s nothing uniquely Spanish about them. And I didn’t expect to be in Dallas when I got out of the metro station.

The Cuatros Torres district is an annexation of the modern business district that was conceived in the late 40s, but not realized until the 1970s. One of the later additions to that original district was the twin towers called the “Torres de Castilla” that lean over the Paseo de la Castellana. I was shocked to read that Philip Johnson and John Burgee collaborated in the design of these buildings in 1996. They look like something from a decade or more prior, and not from such renowned architects as those two. When I stood in front of them, I thought: what’s the point? This is gimmickry, not architecture. And look at the photo of the entrances to the buildings; oy!

My visit to the business district showed me what I’ve read about from others. That is, that Madrid is a thoroughly world-class modern city. However my disappointment was that it was not uniquely Spanish. Spain has produced some great designs that are uniquely its own, but these buildings, while some are beautiful, look like they could have been built anywhere in the world. And three out of four of the Cuatro Torres were designed by foreigners. The one which was designed by a Spanish team looks like a copy of some design, I can't remember where, that I've seen before. Is Spain insecure about its own ability to create great designs? I can’t imagine why. Spain has a great style of its own! I was just hoping to have seen it today ...