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Arquitectura Viva 121 TORRES DE ESPAÑA

Towers of Spain. Optimistic icons of economic power, skyscrapers are acquiring new values in order to adapt to the ecological and social demands of vertical urban models. Four articles analyze the present and the future of the high-rise development of cities, the proliferation of towers designed by Spanish architects in their country and abroad, and comparatively examine the structures of two buildings in Barcelona and the facades of the four skyscrapers that have been recently inaugurated in the city of Madrid.

Ten National Projects. As much in the cold northern part of the Peninsula as in the warm south, Spanish cities are adopting vertical growth with residential or office projects that will change their skylines, if the financial circumstances so allow. This fertile reproduction of towers in the country is illustrated with a helical hotel in Gijón; a glass piece in Bilbao; a colossus of precise offices and a pair of opposites at the Fira of L’Hospitalet; a thin screen in Barcelona; an organic design in Madrid; a complex of orthogonal blocks in Málaga; two volumes in Seville – one with an elliptical floor plan and the other zigzagging – and a duet of epigraphic cylinders in Cádiz.

Heights of Madrid. The grounds formerly occupied by the Real Madrid Sports Complex, in the northern part of the capital, have provided the site for a recently inaugurated complex of skyscrapers that, under the name Cuatro Torres Business Area (CTBA), will become a new financial center of the city. It includes the tower of stacked boxes by the British studio, the slender black volume by the Spanish office, the faceted prism by the Argentinian architect and the sculptural aerospatial building by the American firm.