Torres Blancas (Madrid)

The Torres Blancas building in Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain, is located at the intersection of number 2 Corazón de María Street and number 37 Avenida de América. It is an example of organicist and brutalist architecture, with the peculiarity that it is applied to a block of luxury housing instead of economic ones.

The project, signed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza as architect and the participation of engineers such as Leonardo Fernández Troyano and Carlos Fernández Casado, is from 1961, and the works lasted from 1964 to 1968. With this building, his first internationally known project, Sáenz de Oiza, who lived the rest of his life in the building, won the European Excellence Award in 1974.

Torres Blancas was an experiment promoted by a client, Juan Huarte Beaumont (owner of the construction company of the same name, Huarte), who became known in the 1960s for his support of the Spanish avant-garde, building some of the best buildings in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. It corresponds to the so-called organic stage of Madrid architecture with a marked Neo-expressionist tendency and surrealist suggestions, all of this added to his experimental character.

Torres Blancas brought Oíza’s image to the international scene through his dissemination in the specialized periodical publications of the time between 1960 and 1980, making him one of the Spanish architects with the greatest presence abroad.

The 81-metre-high building is a structure made up of cylinders surrounded by balconies with wooden lattices around their entire perimeter. It has twenty-three floors, for housing and offices, plus an additional floor at the top of the building, two basement floors and the entrance floor. There is a service floor reserved for general facilities between the 21st and 22nd floors, and on the roof there is a meandering swimming pool.