Water gardens in what up to recently were outlying waste lands; cast iron crests carved over an abandoned power plant; birds of steel over airport runways; a huge floating plane adjacent to an old hospital; an enormous window framing the distant mountain range rising over the monotonous and anonymous landscape of interminable new districts...

The images described above, with all their figurative or narrative allusions, are not chapters of a novel, nor scenes of a possible screenplay, but architectural projects currently being carried out in Madrid that stand out for being at once alien and pragmatic. The projects of Toyo Ito, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, Richard Rogers, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault, and MVRDV – objects of the metaphors, most of which have been formulated by the architects themselves – share something beyond mere coincidence in space and time. All take on surprising, strange, unusual, extraordinary forms that in turn claim for themselves a symbolic role, the only role that seems to be expected of architecture in this dawn of a century... [+]