Publication information

Madrid Vignettes

Architecture and urban planning in democratic Spain have had as many bright spells as dark ones, and this collection of articles tries to give a chronicle, in fragments, of several crucial decades. The first section comments on the new uses assigned to heritage buildings in the 1980s, as well as the protagonism of public housing and the impact of foreign investment; the second describes the political situation of the 1990s, a period of disenchantment despite the effort to improve the city’s cultural offer; the third documents the building heyday of the dawn of the 21st century, a feverish time that had its most tragic moment with the train bombings of 11 March 2004; and the fourth and last part looks at some episodes that marked the end of the boom with the culmination of the Four Towers business area and the Madrid Río riverside park, the latter a landscape-recovery and social-rebalancing operation that has resulted in a progressive pedestrianization of the urban core, a process accelerated by the pandemic experience.

Collection ‘Balances’, 2023
Language: Spanish
Soft cover
160 pages