Madrid's Architecture - Modernist, Brutalist & Contemporary

Madrid’s post-war and contemporary architecture has often been overlooked in favour of Barcelona’s cleaner narratives, yet for architects and critics the city has long offered a more complex, and arguably more interesting, field of study. Its modernist and later experiments are rarely picturesque. They are argumentative, infrastructural and deeply tied to questions of density, governance and daily use, which is precisely why they continue to attract serious architectural scrutiny.

One of Madrid’s most analysed twentieth-century buildings remains Torres Blancas, designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza and completed in 1969. Frequently cited in architectural journals for its radical departure from orthodox modernism, the tower combines organic form with exposed concrete in a way that feels closer to metabolic thinking than International Style discipline. Its cylindrical volumes and planted terraces have been dissected repeatedly in publications such as El Croquis and Arquitectura Viva, often framed as a uniquely Iberian response to high-density living rather than an imported ideology.

Madrid’s relationship with Brutalism is less codified but no less compelling. Large-scale housing projects, infrastructural buildings and civic complexes from the 1960s and 1970s favour mass, repetition and material honesty, shaped by a period where architecture was tasked with solving social and logistical problems rather than producing icons. Critics have frequently noted that Madrid’s Brutalist tendencies are pragmatic rather than doctrinal, driven by economy, climate and construction culture instead of manifesto.

Contemporary interventions have increasingly focused on reuse and urban repair. CaixaForum Madrid, by Herzog & de Meuron, has been widely reviewed for its theatrical structural gesture, lifting the brick volume to create a public void beneath. Architectural criticism often frames the project as a turning point in Madrid’s relationship with cultural architecture, signalling a shift towards buildings that engage the street as actively as their programmes.

Recent critical writing also tracks Madrid’s vertical expansion, particularly in the northern business districts, where glass towers signal economic ambition more than formal experimentation. While these projects rarely dominate architectural discourse individually, collectively they are read as indicators of Madrid’s evolving urban scale and its willingness to accommodate global typologies without forcing stylistic coherence.

What emerges from architectural reviews and publications is a portrait of a city uninterested in purity. Madrid absorbs movements, adapts them and allows time to finish the work. Its architecture is judged less by novelty and more by endurance, a quality that continues to reward close reading, repeat visits and long-form critique.

Madrid Architecture | Modernist, Brutalist & Contemporary City