Herzog & de Meuron · 2008 · Madrid
Contemporary culture on the traces of the past
CaixaForum Madrid, opened in 2008 on the Paseo del Prado, is Herzog & de Meuron's transformation of a disused early-twentieth-century power station into one of the city's most inventive cultural centres. The Swiss architects kept the original brick shell but stripped away its granite base, so the building appears to levitate above a shaded public plaza carved out beneath it - an act of urban generosity in the dense museum quarter. Above, a rusted cast-iron crown extends the volume upward, its weathered surface echoing the old industrial brick.
Alongside it, a 24-metre vertical garden by the botanist Patrick Blanc - some 15,000 plants of 250 species - climbs the blank party wall, turning a leftover surface into a living façade. Inside, galleries, an auditorium and public spaces unfold around a sculptural white staircase. At once an act of adaptive reuse and a landmark in its own right, CaixaForum has become one of the anchors of Madrid's "Golden Triangle of Art."