Torres Blancas was designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza and completed in 1969 on the Avenida de América — a cylindrical concrete residential tower and one of the most distinctive pieces of Spanish architecture of its period. The building is 23 storeys of reinforced concrete organised around a circular plan: each apartment has a semicircular balcony that projects from the facade, giving the tower its distinctive silhouette of stacked curved volumes. The structural logic is entirely in concrete — exposed, poured, and shuttered — with no applied cladding or surface treatment. Sáenz de Oíza was working simultaneously with the organic expressionism of Hans Scharoun and the structural rigour of the Spanish concrete tradition; Torres Blancas holds these in tension without resolving them. The building is residential and not open to the public, but the exterior — best approached from the park immediately to the north — is the experience: a tower that refuses the orthogonal city around it and makes its case on its own terms.
Avenida de América, Madrid, Spain