Rogers to Plan revised Distrito Castellano Norte in Madrid

Model and rendering from El País, May 22, 2017

Rogers Stirk Harbour+Partners will design the urban plan for a major new expansion of Madrid known as Distrito Castellana Norte.

There is still very little information on this move, the latest in the long history of the proposal to cover the tracks of the Chamartín Train Station with a massive development of housing and offices.  But El País interviews Richard Rogers and his associated Simon Smithson on their basic ideas for their plan, still in an early stage (Smithson is son of Peter and Alison Smithson, and Project Architect for Madrid's Terminal 4 at Barajas Airport).

An earlier plan for the area by urban designer José María Ezquiaga was commissioned by the city of Madrid under former mayors of the conservative Popular Party (PP). This plan was on hold for many years due in large part to the economic crisis of 2008. But now the Madrid real estate market is returning to life, particularly in the area of prime office space, and the city wants to position itself to cash in on the fallout of Brexit, and make itself attractive to London financial institutions looking to relocate business inside the European Union.

The current city government, under a coalition of new left-wing parties, rejected the high density of the Ezquiaga plan. But it is under considerable pressure to get the project moving, and it is now in negotiations with the regional government of Madrid (PP) and the BBVA Bank, which controls the development rights for the project, for its revision. And this is the point where Rogers comes in.

Pablo Guimón
"El arquitecto Richard Rogers y su socio Simon Smithson, al frente del plan Distrito Castellana Norte, dialogan sobre la ambiciosa intervención urbanística en la capital"
El País, May 22, 2017

Comments received

Juan Manuel Fernández Alonso
May 31 at 5:44pm
David Cohn, la historia es bastante más extensa y con más actores. La densidad cuestionada no proviene del plan parcial Ezquiaga 2011 sino de la modificación del plan general en 2002, definida tras un primer máster plan de Bofill, destinada a sufragar infraestructuras urbanas adicionales a cargo de la operación. Entre medias hubo otro plan parcial 2004 sin tramitar. En 2015 no llegó a termino el plan parcial elaborado por RH arquitectos. Los tres tienen la misma intensidad edificatoria: 3'2 millones de m2 edificables con cerca de 17.000 viviendas. Entre medias algunas sentencias judiciales. Hoy se debate la intensidad que puede soportar el ámbito; las cargas infraestructurales asociadas a aquella y las que deben asumir los presupuestos de las distintas administraciones - autonómica, estatal y local- no los tejidos urbanos; la inconveniencia de prolongar la Castellana en el borde del casco histórico de Fuencarral; la posición del nuevo CBD en torno a la estación de Chamartín; la cualidad del nuevo tejido urbano y el modelo de gestión para una actuación de esa envergadura y duración. Veremos.

David Cohn
May 31 at 9:15pm
Gracias por tu explicación tan extendida. La verdad es que la entrevista no explica nada de nada. ¡Había olvidadao del primer plan de Bofill! El asunto merece un seguimiento más serio en los medios.

Juan Manuel Fernández Alonso
May 31 at 9:20pm
Es cierto. Es una operación muy compleja, con fuertes intereses cruzados actuando sobre la definición de nuevos tejidos urbanos en un contexto difícil. El largo tiempo empleado por todos los agentes participantes hasta ahora impide una mirada abierta para encontrar una buena solución de largo alcance temporal y territorial.

Ground Zero Update

The One World Trade Center Tower by David Childs is already the tallest thing on the New York skyline, as I found on my visit last November.

Here's an update from the British journal BD (Feb. 1, 2012; free registration required):

"The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the cost of 1WTC – formerly known as the Freedom Tower – had soared to $3.8 billion, $700 million more than the last public estimate in 2008...."

"1WTC is already 90 stories high, 60% let, and on track to be completed by the end of the year."

"Foster and Partners’ 2WTC, which is intended to be the second-tallest building on the site, at 88 stories, is to be temporarily capped at ground level because of a lack of tenants."

"The same problem is also threatening to truncate Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners’ 80-story Three World Trade Centre at just seven stories. A Port Authority financing agreement means developer Silverstein Properties must stop building at podium level if it cannot find tenants for at least 10 floors."

Story filed by Elizabeth Hopkirk.
Snapshot by DC, November 2011.

Note portable police surveillance tower in foreground.
And note the tower's  bomb-proof solid concrete podium, still unclad.

The new towers rise around the empty site of the original towers. That's an important void. But it's hard to make much sense of the towers as an urban presence. They seems so far like a negative presence all the way, from the absence at street level due to bunkerization to the anonymous sheer glass facades. And their apparent detachment from the site; they could really be anywhere, or move around like chessmen. They don't make a case for being there.

Another void: the raised plaza of the former towers has disappeared, a whole artificial topography. The Memorial Park is set down at the level of West Street and Battery Park (Battery Park was reclaimed from the river by the excavation of the first project in the 1960s). So the Memorial Park's footprint of the twin towers, in the form of pools with fountains, bumps into this problem of where the ground plane actually is, in one's semi-conscious, bodily memory of the site. Will have to wait and see how this is finally resolved at the top of the site, along Church Street.

Here's a rather lame photo of the new Park seem from across West Street -- the gimlet-eyed can maybe make out one of the pools:

Photo added May 8, 2012, as the main tower surpasses the Empire State in height:

Source: Buzzfeed, found on the Arquitectura Viva web page. Photographer credit not found.

While I am on the subject of New York and detachment, here are a couple of snaps from the same trip.:

Subway Dude

On The Phone

High Line in the Rain

From the Hellgate Bridge

Winery Tour

On the newstands in Spain: in the February issue of Arquitectura y Diseño, I publish an article on six Spanish wineries. In addition to the well-known Chivite Winery in Navarra by Rafael Moneo and Richard Rogers' Protos Winery in Peñafiel, it includes RCR's underground Bell-lloc Winery in Girona (left), Paredes + Pedrososa's Bodegas Real near Valdepeñas (below) and Madridejos + Sancho's Bodegas Casalobos in Picón, Ciudad Real. It also introduces the new Portia Winery near Aranda del Duero by Foster and Partners, which opened last fall.

Bodegas: Los Nuevos Santuarios
Arquitectura y Diseño
February 2011, pages 72 - 82.

Above, Bodegas Bell-lloc. Photo © Eugeni Pons
Below, Bodegas Real. Photo © Roland Halbe