The project is framed in the current preoccupation with the fast-growing material decay, outdated energetic performance, and redundant programmes in much late Modernist corporate architecture with 50+-year-old buildings, which require urgent updating. A reality common to cities all over developed countries, which acquire singular urgencies when this XXL compound clashes with the classical consolidated urban tissues behind it
This large single building occupies a whole urban block in the regular XIXth-century “Ensanche” or extension of Madrid. While at the same time, on its northern fringe, it participates in the high-speed entrance sequence that penetrates the city on its way in from the airport and the A2 highway leading towards Paseo de la Castellana. A sequence punctuated by big-scale local hits such as Torres Blancas, Bancaya Building, and Eurocís itself, all of them assuming an oversized scale
The confluence in time of the clearing of the 22-storey office tower (originally belonging to the Ministry of Finance), the chance to establish purpose-built student accommodation in the lower plinth-like levels (this PBSA participating in a now consolidated student residential area), and the municipal requirement calling for a complete renovation of the building’s outdated and decayed facades and insulation systems, have given place to an ambitious enterprise. One put together between high-profile private investors and the block’s residents' association, in agreement with the Madrid Municipality. Thus, the intervention is divided into a set of independent actions to be carried out semi-simultaneously over a 3-year period. These range from the complete transformation of the tower into 158 luxury flats, to the introduction of a new “student city” of 440 units in the building’s plinth, the renovation of the block’s ground floor open public areas, with the incorporation of several green pockets and extensive ecological paving, and finally the revamping of the two existing lower buildings, by concealing their worn-out prefabricated concrete facade modules. Other features such as interior and exterior swimming pools, gym, skybar and rooftop gardens, will insist in the values of shared facilities in a vertical metropolitan complex
On a strategical level, the project grasps the opportunity to exert a creative upgrading of a late Modernist average construction and its expected burdens: redundant multi-level pedestrian passages, prominence of car circulation inside the complex, sealed facades and facade lattices disconnected from urban interaction, extended shaded and gloomy outdoor areas, and a serious incapacity for the enhancing of public and urban life in a key area of central Madrid, will be redirected by means of its re-programming (still believing in the latent possibilities of a Koolhaasian vertical hibridation of functions, characters and types), and its re-materialising
Externally, the complex’s general greyish presence will be transformed through a reduced palette of recycled aluminium panels, whose use will decrease the carbon footprint of an equivalent extensive scale. This rematerialisation is openly critical of the harsh concrete poetics of yet another neo-brutalist construction, counteracted through the introduction of greenery, balconies and panoramic windows, selectively balanced as to produce a vertical stratification. These will be laid out in large horizontal bands, producing panoramic metropolitan views and emphasising the quasi-geological condition of the building’s presence
The project has obtained Breeam® Certificate and is developed along demanding sustainable requirements, incorporating multiple devices in its typological and material performance
Project: Torre Castelló
Status: Under construction (2026 - )
Client: Madby Investments SLU / Barnaby Investments SL / Comunidad de Propietarios Complejo Eurocis
Location: Distrito Salamanca, Madrid, Spain
Team: GGA-AN2 Arquitectura SLP (Jacobo García-Germán, Antonio L. González, Marta Roldán, Olga González, José Carlos González, Laura Pastor, Clara Corrales) + Martín de Lucio Arquitectos SLP (Alberto Martín de Lucio, Pablo Ferrer, Raúl Barragán)
Consultants: Aliva Ingenieros SL (structural engineer), Proinller SL (facade manufacturer)
Builder: Dragados SA
