One of Madrid’s most spectacular buildings may not have been built. The story of how the commission for the construction of the Princesa Building came about can be heard directly from the mouth of its architect, Fernando Higueras, in an interview with the architect conversation with Arturo Franco and Rosa Urbano at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in October 2002. It all started with a phone call that Higueras did not want to answer: “I get a call from a guy named Medrano. José Manuel Medrano. He is in his second year of architecture and wants to work in the studio. And I tell him I don’t feel like it.”
The boy insisted and called several times, with no answer: Higueras ordered his secretary, who was the one answering the phone, to tell him each and every one of them that he was not there. But the phone rang again. And one of those times was the definitive one: “The caller was General Medrano de Miguel. Fuck. This must be José Manuel’s father, who we are not!”. “Tell Mr. Higueras that it is to commission a very large military housing Bloc,” the General requested. The response was also definitive: “Well, look at what you say to tell you that it is a lie, that it is there but that you didn’t want to put it on. Now it gets“.
Medrano was the manager of the Patronato de Casas Militares de España and was looking for an architect he could not find: “I’m sick of military or famous architects or professors from the [Madrid School of Architecture, ETSAM]. I wanted a good architect who didn’t have any position, didn’t work anywhere and was good. I don’t know any like that, but a guy I have in Architecture, the youngest in the course, I asked him to look up and choose him by vote. You have been elected by the second-year students,” Higueras recalls in that audio, reproducing Medrano’s words.
There was one condition: “This kid [her son] has brilliant grades and I don’t understand it because he doesn’t hit, he gives more to trinki than to studying. I would like him to learn with you, but without me asking you any questions. He who takes a close look, who sweeps the studio. And of course not a bitch. Fernando Higueras, naturally, accepted.
In that conversation, many years after Medrano’s call took place, the architect acknowledges that he was wrong: “When this guy came he was a phenomenon, he worked more than me and Miro put together. We gained a lot of contests the jury, in order to demonstrate the difference, left the second and third prizes deserted. And we did the military work that is in San Bernardo. That work is due to the chivalry and generosity of a person who did not try to extract any favors in return for that wonderful deception.”
The modernity of the proposal for the time -the order was placed in 1967 and construction was completed in 1975-, together with the economic interests of the construction company (“Covimar was the company, and if they want to sue me they can sue me!”, said Higueras indignantly), led to the architects’ proposal to change the structure to make it metallic and cover it with exposed brick. “They also told Medrano that since we were going down five basements below grade and close by was the brick subway vault the thrust was going to throw a series of cars from a certain height, falling through the hole in the work. Deaths, injuries and a worldwide scandal“, he ironized.
When told, Higueras turned to Medrano: “My General, do I see you very calm or does fear dominate?”. “Something of both, but you telling me the truth will be definitive,” he replied. The architect, with the same forcefulness that can be seen in his works, was clear: “We call a notary right now and I take responsibility for all evils that may happen.” The outcome is well known: there was no evil and the birth of one of the most iconic works of brutalism in Madrid.
Fernando Higueras and “unavoidable” architecture
“The name Edificio Princesa is due to the fact that it was built on the site of the former Hospital de La Princesa,” explains José Antonio Sánchez Vaquero, the building’s current president, in front of the imposing façade. Although a sign at the ticket confirms this nomenclature, almost no one knows it by that name. The same happens with the traffic circle where it is located – of Ruiz Jiménez according to the street map of Madrid, of San Bernardo in the collective imagination -: consequently and popularly it is known as the houses of the military of San Bernardo.
“What Fernando Higueras wanted was to create a building that was free and open to the senses, where concrete and vegetation played a very important role,” explains Sánchez Vaquero. Pedro Torrijos, architect and disseminator, maintains that this concern for creating the most direct possible relationship between the work and the vegetation is common to all the great architects of the time: “There’s Secundino Zuazo, who builds the Casa de las Flores in Argüelles, José Antonio Cordech and the Ugalde House o Saénz de Oiza“.
In a thread on Twitter torrijos defined Higueras’ architecture as “impossible to avoid” and the Princesa Building as “one of the freest and most expressive in Spanish architecture”: “It is built of a single material, white concrete, moreover exposed concrete, and everything is entrusted to those huge horizontal lines of the terraces from which vegetation should always hang: creepers, ivy, hanging plants…. Higueras and Miró conceived it as a garden building,” he explains in a telephone conversation.
The Higueras Foundation adds that it is precisely the monumentality of the concrete that “gives it its forceful and definitive appearance. Higueras’ work is pure structure, the superfluous disappears”: that is what makes the Princesa Building, like the rest of his work, stand up as a resounding statement.
Higueras’ concern for vegetation is complemented by his concern for light, and perhaps one of the best examples of this is in the parking lot, which receives natural lighting and ventilation through three skylights. “It’s nice that they have light, that’s what Higueras was after,” says Sánchez Vaquero.
We spent a morning touring the building by his hand and one morning didn’t seem like enough. The Princesa Building is an infinite building, never ending to look at: time passes, the lighting changes, casts new shadows, plays with the edges of the terraces and constantly transforms the space.
During our visit Antonio Delgado, author of some of the photographs that illustrate this report, told me that he was surprised how the building, in addition, managed to isolate the noise coming from the street: it is a place where you feel like being. Stay. Architect Manuel Ocaña, in an interview with series of interviews the work of Higueras is a work with which one can empathize and that “this way of placing yourself in the landscape makes people much happier”, he said.
Asked what it is like to live or work in such a building – the first floor is commercial space – José Antonio replies: “Man, living in a building like this you don’t realize it until someone comes and tells you what’s in here. We often go unnoticed.”
Although it was the raison d’être of this building, the military has long since been the only tenants in the building: “The building when it is conceived is a Patronage of Military Houses and all the people here are military. Then they start selling out and private people start coming in.”
An “illustrious” neighbor, viscera and (paper) airplanes flying over a terrace
Among those individuals was the maternal grandfather of Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París, a native of Madrid, who bought an apartment in the building in the early 2000s. At that time, at the age of eighteen, Saldaña moved to the capital to study philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. After a stay in the apartment of his aunt and uncle in Malasaña her grandfather let her stay in the house that would become her home from 2003 to 2006.
His grandfather, who was exiled outside Spain during the Franco regime and never wanted to return, warned him that he would have a “very illustrious” neighbor: “I was on the sixth floor, in the penthouse, which were smaller floors but had a very spacious terrace. According to what my grandfather Tejero explained to me, he lived on the fifth floor, but I was never very clear about it and I don’t know if he was from the same staircase. Mine was center right. It would have been curious if in his case it was extreme right, of course,” he says in a video call from Mexico City, with the same sarcasm he recognized in his grandfather’s warning.
Saldaña is remembered coinciding with your neighbor the coup leader while waiting for the elevator or in one of the building’s courtyards, just as he remembers one of the nights he thought his grandfather would kick him out of the apartment. He had organized a party and at some point some friends -already drunk-, found out that Tejero was a neighbor of the Bloc: “They had the firm intention of going after him to tell him a thing or two or make bombastic statements.”
“I was actually terrified of the idea. Firstly because I didn’t think it would do any good at all, and secondly because they were going to run me out of the place,” she recalls. Fearing for his future in the building, he managed to convince his friends to send him messages with paper airplanes instead: “We tried to get him some little paper airplanes with I guess Republican messages. I don’t know if they must have gotten to Tejero or some other unsuspecting neighbor who had no idea what to do with them or where they had come from.”
From his years in the Princesa Building, memories of the teams of reporters waiting to get images or statements from Tejero every 23-F are mixed with personal episodes “quite turbulent because they were my student years, with a lot of emotional drama and girlfriends who left me and fights with friends”.
He also remembers not having much contact with the rest of the neighbors, although with one of the doormen -who had been a guitarist in Raphael’s tours- he became a curious friend. The doorman was also in charge of calling the police if any suspicious looking van parked in Santa Cruz de Marcenado: it was still the ETA years and every now and then there were threats and some tension around the fact that it was a retired military building and that Tejero lived there, as he explained to him.
“I was the only young tenant there, and as far as I remember, they were all old fascists and I was a little shy about being young and Mexican, I didn’t want to say a word because I was a little shy about living there,” he recalls. “The tenants and apartment owners looked at me with a lot of distrust, because although I didn’t look very Mexican, let’s say I looked young, I wore my hair long…. I have a feeling they never quite knew what to think of me.”
It was a long time before Saldaña returned to Madrid after that, and by the time she did, her grandfather had already sold the apartment. The last time she saw him was last year, in a tourist-like exercise through her own past. The Balcony of what was his terrace is seen from a corner of San Bernardo: “I walked by several times, took pictures of it and remembered that’s where the nefarious orgy party had happened.”
The anecdote to which he refers is contained in his novel Airplanes flying over a monster (Anagrama, 2021): “I wanted to share Mexican traditions with my girlfriend at the time and taught her how to make piñatas, but she who was a bit punky decided to fill hers with viscera. It was a disaster: a lot of people came to the party that I didn’t know where they had come from and everything ended up full of blood and people fucking in the corridors,” he says from the other side of the screen. After a brief pause, and with that kind of affection that only distance allows, he adds: “I keep good memories despite everything.”
The “boom” of brutalism in social networks
Interest in brutalist architecture has been growing in recent years and is evidenced by the proliferation of accounts like Madrid Brutalism. Journalist Analía Plaza, who dedicated to him a report to Fernando Higueras in Vanity Fair, blames this “boom” precisely on the Internet: “In the last few years it’s become fashionable, there’s been at best…. I don’t know whether to call it fandom, but a vindication on the Internet of this concrete aesthetic and buildings like the one you’re studying and the plants, or like the Crown of Thorns that I talk about in my report.”
Architect Pedro Torrijos corroborates this: “It’s from about 10 years ago, more or less, and it coincides precisely with social networks, with this profile called This Brutal House who later wrote a very nice book vindicating Brutalist architecture, especially in the United Kingdom. Visually it is very photogenic and is a very juicy object for the networks,” he explains.
“Not to be confused with mazacote architecture,” he points out. “Theoretically brutalism should be anything that was made with exposed concrete. The Princesa Building is both: it is an imposing architecture, very forceful, and it is made of exposed concrete“.
The future of the Princesa Building
On how this project is projected into the future residential building -which we could categorize as one of the most spectacular in Madrid, its president points out the following: “With the passage of time and due to the declining purchasing power of many neighbors the building has been losing vegetation. Let’s see if we can get help and do everything possible to return to what Higueras thought in his time, which was a building integrated into the city with a vertical garden and vegetation. What was the oasis of Higueras”.
It is not the only building by the architect that suffers from this loss of vegetation: the office building at Serrano, 69 built only four years after the Princesa Building, in 1979, is in a similar situation and what should be a roof full of Verde is reduced to a few plants languidly hanging from the roof facade. Meanwhile, on Paseo del Prado is the most paradigmatic example of a vertical garden in Madrid, which was also one of the first to be installed in Spain: the 460 m² large plant tapestry that covers the facade of CaixaForum by the French botanist Patrick Blanc.
The Princesa Building -as stated in the Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM) – has no protection, a situation that is in the process of being reversed, says Sánchez Vaquero: “It is right now within a plan of the Madrid City Council where there are 700 buildings and it is in the process of being cataloged and protected.”
“Heritage protection is something that depends on many factors such as age (although it shouldn’t) and, above all, it ends up needing a lot of filters and people behind it to give their approval,” Torrijos points out. “But it’s too distinctive, too historic, too paradigmatic, and any other of those spindly words you feel like throwing around that in the relatively near future won’t end up receiving heritage protection. It contributes too much to the image of the city of Madrid“.