NowMadrid

Architecture

Architecture in Madrid

Madrid keeps its old centre low and dense and has pushed nearly everything tall to a single northern strip. Its recent architecture is mostly a question of what to do next to something already standing.

• Galería de las Colecciones Reales

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  Opened 2023

  Luis Moreno Mansilla · Emilio Tuñón

  A gallery for the royal collections, dug into the slope below the palace. Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón stacked three long halls inside the retaining wall, so the building is a section rather than a facade. Granite piers spaced to the rhythm of the palace above carry the floors and frame the view west. From the city it barely registers, and from the valley it reads as a new wall of the old escarpment.

• CaixaForum Madrid

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  Completed 2008

  Herzog & de Meuron

  An arts centre on the Paseo del Prado, made from a disused power station. Herzog & de Meuron removed the granite base entirely and left the brick shell standing on a recessed core, so the building appears to float above a covered plaza. A weathering steel extension repeats the roof profiles of the street. A vertical garden by Patrick Blanc covers the blank party wall opposite, which turns a leftover surface into the entrance.

• Museo del Prado extension

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  Completed 2007

  Rafael Moneo

  An addition behind the Prado, built around the cloister of a seventeenth century monastery. Rafael Moneo dismantled the cloister, kept the stones and rebuilt it inside a new brick volume that reads as a wall from the street. The new galleries sit below ground so the original Villanueva building keeps its silhouette. It is an extension that spends most of its effort on not being seen.

• Barajas Terminal 4

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  Completed 2006

  Richard Rogers · Estudio Lamela

  The main terminal at the city's airport, built as one section repeated the whole length. Richard Rogers ran a bamboo roof in continuous waves over it, carried on branching steel columns painted in a gradient that shifts as you move. Rooflights at each wave bring daylight the full depth of the plan. Repetition is what makes the building legible, which is unusual in a terminal.

• Palacio Real

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  Completed 1755

  Filippo Juvarra · Giovanni Battista Sacchetti

  The royal palace on the western edge of the old city, built after fire destroyed the Habsburg alcázar. Filippo Juvarra planned it as one square block around a courtyard, and Giovanni Battista Sacchetti built it after his death at reduced height. Stone and brick were used throughout because timber had been forbidden after the fire. The result is an Italian palace plan set on a Madrid cliff, facing gardens that drop away to the river.