Buildings that architects love to hate

Between 1984 and 1985 Manolo Blanco, now a professor of architectural composition, wrote a section in La Luna, a well-known magazine of the era, called "My Favorite Horrors."

"Back then, Madrid was a grey place from an architectural point of view, so if I wanted to write about the here and now [...] the only thing I could do was to criticize things with a sense of humor," he recalls.

Sitting in his studio, Blanco laughs his head off as he takes a look back at the things that instilled horror in him back then, such as the remodeling of Madrid's Plaza de Colón. "I stand by everything I wrote!" he says, adding that these days, Madrid is a much more interesting city.

That may be, but which are the biggest modern mistakes? We asked several architects about their favorite horrors.

"I am horrified by the need to standardize, the triumph of the same old thing"

"The most the KIO Towers manage to do is to inspire awe among the ignorant"

These days, Manolo Blanco has a beef with the PAU, housing developments that create entire new suburbs on the outskirts of the city, complete with residential buildings, shopping centers, schools and other services. "I dislike commercial architecture with lots of sheen, which is nothing other than noise, and those suburban homes, so plain, boring and based on outdated standards. [...] The PAU include a few brilliant constructions, such as the work of Alejandro Zaera or Estudio Dosmasuno in Ensanche de Carabanchel, but they are surrounded by horrible, homogenous buildings that convey nothing. And it is precisely in those apartments, the ones across from the good ones, the ones made 'properly,' where people would rather live, because they're the kind of apartments that their sister-in-law bought. I am horrified by that alienation, that desire for standardization, that triumph of the same old thing over the good thing."

Award-winning architect Alberto Campo Baeza complains about the twin leaning towers in Plaza de Castilla, once the city's tallest buildings and now known as La Puerta de Europa. "The KIO towers sum up everything that architecture should never do," he says, using their old name. Developed in the 1990s by the firm Kuwait Investments Office (KIO), the towers were at the center of a major real estate scandal. "They are the symbol of a tacky period that is well summed up in the movie The Day of the Beast, by Alex de la Iglesia," Campo Baeza continues. "The towers are capriciously inclined, they go against nature, making the structure unnecessarily expensive. The most they manage to do is to inspire awe among the ignorant. But over time they've become small and ridiculous compared to the Real Madrid towers, which are taller, more logical and more airy."

Antonio Miranda calls the Cathedral of Santa María la Real de la Almudena, located next to the Royal Palace, "a pastiche of anachronistic styles." But the Polytechnic University professor goes even further in his contempt for the Catholic church, which was consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1993. "Eclectic and artificial, it is a repulsive building that mixes all possible styles with such little grace that you cannot even consider it ironic," he states. The cathedral is the result of work carried out between 1879 and 1993 by a number of architects, chiefly the Marquis of Cubas and Fernando Chueca Goitia. The duration of the project, its recurring problems, the changes in fashion and the changes in archbishops all contributed to the pastiche of Neo-Gothic, neoclassical and Neo-Romanesque styles. "The result is junk," Miranda concludes.

Luis Fernández Galiano, director of the magazine Arquitectura Viva, does not hesitate to point at the Hotel Puerta de América. Madrid Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón unveiled the multicolored façade in the company of Jean Nouvel, Arata Isozaki and a few more of the 19 architects and designers who participated in the project. The 12 different floors were designed by star names such as Zaha Hadid, Mariscal, Norman Foster and Victorio y Lucchino. The year was 2005, and the building summed up the promise of Madrid 2012: avant-garde design and substantial investment. Or so the mayor said. But 2012 is right around the corner and it is not exactly looking Olympic in nature. "I find this building especially unsettling because it degrades the function of architecture to mere spectacle, becoming a symbol of the moment when it was built, in the middle of a bubble of feigned prosperity and excess. It views architecture as something that is linked to fashion and glamour," says Fernández Galiano.

The Complutense University campus was due to be inaugurated when the Civil War broke out in 1936. The rationalist school buildings were used as trenches, and most of the project was rebuilt following the conflict. Between 1948 and 1952, José Luis Arrese erected a building for student housing called Colegio Mayor José Antonio, which now houses the university president's offices. "We used to call it the Arrese Wall because it cut off views of the mountains and because it was built by a Falangist architect who made it to secretary of Franco's movement," says Antonio Fernández Alba, winner of a national architecture award. "The building attempts to reproduce the architecture of the Hapsburgs and recover the essence of the empire. The national style has some good examples, like the Air Force Ministry by Gutiérrez Soto. But the Rectorado is a bad revival that has nothing in common with its setting. Besides being ugly, it destroys the landscape and the urban surroundings where it sits."

The architect Edgar González cannot stand Torre Titania, built over the ruins of the Windsor tower on Paseo de la Castellana, after the latter burnt down in 2005. "What hurts about the new tower is the lost opportunity," says González. "The Windsor was a very interesting building and this one lowers the standard in a very visible place." The new tower, designed by two of the 19 staff architects working for the department store El Corte Inglés (owner of the site), "is borderline anodyne. It is an autistic work that does not identify with its surroundings... it might as well be in Wichita. It would not be so bad in a new neighborhood, but I find it sad that the only new skyscraper in the Azca area should be this."

"A horrible building? Gerencia de Urbanismo [a city planning agency], especially because it is a nest of gangsters!" laughs Ricardo Aroca, the former dean of the School of Architects. The agency sits inside what used to be a bus depot. "It is an inadequate building, made for something radically different than what it does now. It is a chaos of hallways, a labyrinth of offices, that breaks every building rule that citizens must otherwise comply with... I have seen padlocked emergency exits there." The agency is moving next year, and the city plans to demolish the old building and sell the lot.

"Gerencia de Urbanismo decides the city of tomorrow, so the building that houses it should look like the vision that city planners have for the future," says Aroca.

Carlos Sambricio, a professor of history of architecture, blames King Fernando VI for the fact that, in his opinion, Madrid is architecturally worthless. "It has no monuments, no Eiffel Tower or Champs Elysées... It is endearing, but the way a cross-eyed child might be." The only thing he rates from that era is Prado de Villanueva, and what irritates him the most are the corralas, working-class residential buildings built chiefly in the 19th century, where all the apartments had front doors facing a courtyard rather than an inner hallway.

The corralas feature prominently in novels such as Fortunata y Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós and in the Spanish operettas known as zarzuelas. "The zarzuelas by Arniches did great damage. [...] The corralas were subpar housing with shared toilets, where people lived in crowded, unsanitary conditions. It was a speculative building model that does not even have the aesthetic punch of the Mietkasernen, the 19th-century rental blocks in Berlin," says Sambricio.