Caja Madrid Tower

This new headquarters building for Caja Madrid – the largest bank in Spain - continues investigations into the flexible workplace that can be traced through a family of recent office towers, most notably for Swiss Re and Commerzbank. With this new headquarters, Caja Madrid will be able for the first time to consolidate its large team in one location in a building that communicates the company’s core values. There will be a strong social focus and the opportunity to display the bank’s art collection. The thirty-four-storey building is located on the site of the former Real Madrid training grounds, where the city council has assigned sites for four new towers by international architects. It marks a curve in the wide boulevard of the Paseo de la Castellana - the ‘backbone’ of Madrid – and is carefully positioned to maximise the exceptional qualities of its site. Compositionally, the building can be thought of as a tall arch, the services and circulation cores framing the open office floors. At ground level, a 22-metre glazed atrium provides the transition from the street, and accommodates a ‘floating’ glass-walled auditorium set into a mezzanine. At the top of the building, the is a void space beneath the uppermost section of the ‘portal’ frame is designed to house wind turbines as a possible future innovation. Although the building is conceived as a corporate headquarters, it also has the flexibility to be partly sub-let, enabling Caja Madrid to expand or contract its accommodation easily in the future as required. This degree of flexibility results in part from pushing the service cores to the edges of the plan - a strategy first used in the design of the Hongkong Bank – to create uninterrupted 1200-square-metre floor plates. Vertical circulation routes occupy minimal space as a result of an intelligent lift system that requires fewer lift cars than conventional systems. The cores are strategically positioned so as to block west/east direct sunlight, a move that has the added benefit of framing spectacular views of the hills of Sierra de Guadarrama to the north and the centre of Madrid to the south.

Client: Caja Madrid, Repsol YPF
Consultants: Halvorson and Partners, SGS Tecnos S.A, Aguilera Ingenieros S.A, Años Luz, Emmer Pfenninger and Partner AG