Picasso tower

Night view.

Entrance arch to the building.

The Picasso Tower is a skyscraper located in Madrid, Spain, in Pablo Ruiz Picasso square, within the AZCA business and commercial complex, located next to Paseo de la Castellana in the financial heart of the Spanish capital. At the time, with its 43 floors and 157 meters high, it was the tallest skyscraper in Madrid and in Spain.

It was designed by the Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki (who also designed the now-defunct World Trade Center in New York City), in collaboration, for regulatory adaptation, with the Spanish team led by Jordi Mir Valls and Rafael Col Pujol. The works of construction management and final project were carried out by the study of Genaro Alas and Pedro Casariego Hernández-Vaquero, the first of them being responsible for the work. It had the collaboration of the engineer Fernando Cid García. In December 2011, it was acquired from FCC by Pontegadea Inmobiliaria (from businessman Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara) for 400 million euros.

It is the headquarters of companies such as Google or Deloitte, among others.

History

The tower was designed in 1974, commissioned by the Explosivos Río Tinto (ERT) group, which owned the plot of land on which the building was to be built. Its construction did not begin until January 1980, although it suffered several setbacks during the following years. In 1984 the works stopped due to the financial problems that Explosivos Río Tinto was going through at that time. Finally, the Torre Picasso was inaugurated in January 1989. Since then it has been the tallest building in Madrid, surpassing the Torre de Madrid; but it ceased to be during the construction of the four towers of the CTBA. It was also the highest in Spain until it was surpassed by the Gran Hotel Bali in Benidorm (Alicante).

Features

A notable feature of the Picasso Tower is its wide entrance arch, which supports the entire façade above it, with an underground steel structure as reinforcement. The gap under this arch is covered by a special type of security glass called STADIP (the same used in the Torre Agbar in Barcelona).

The Picasso Tower is a carbon copy of the Rainier Tower in Seattle, USA, also designed by Minoru Yamasaki. In the case of the American building, it has a shaft on which the rest of the body of the tower rises, which has the same slender lines and white finishes as the Madrid tower, built 11 years later.

The internal distribution of the general floors is completely open-plan, and in its central part is located the block with 18 elevators, 4 stairs, technical rooms, bathrooms and a 120 m² space for a chimney to raise gases coming from the ventilation network of the underground roads of AZCA. Likewise, on the roof, floor 44, are the cooling towers and distribution of the air conditioning hydraulic system. On the 45th floor is the machinery of one of the elevator blocks whose upper floor is used as a helipad. In the 1st basement there is a commercial area, as well as parking. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th basements only have parking use. The technical rooms for the tower's machinery are also distributed in these basements. The 5th basement is intended for service galleries. The plant is rectangular and measures 38 by 50 meters. The west face, however, presents an addition to house two additional sets of stairs and a hole for conduits and wiring. The total area of the property is 121,000 m², of which 71,700 m² are dedicated to offices.

In total there are 18 lifts to access the floors, 3 for the car park, two for connecting the basements and one panoramic lift for the disabled which connects level +1 with the ground floor. The 18 elevators are divided into three groups of six: the first group takes floors 1 to 18 at a speed of 2.5 m/s, the second takes floors 18 to 32 at a speed of 4 m/s and the last group to floors 32 to 43 at a speed of 6 m/s (the fastest in Spain). In addition, the elevators have a double cabin: the upper elevator is used to transport passengers and the lower elevator is used as a freight elevator. It has 837 parking spaces, and on a normal day some 6,000 people work plus 1,500 people visit daily.

Property

In December 2011, the construction company FCC sold its headquarters in Torre Picasso to Pontegadea, the real estate company of Amancio Ortega, founder and main shareholder of Inditex (Zara), for 400 million euros.

Threats

The terrorist group ETA confessed in 2002 that tearing down this skyscraper was the destination they had planned for the 1700 kg of explosives loaded in two bomb vans that were driving to Madrid, intercepted at the end of 1999 near Calatayud (Zaragoza) by the Guardia Civil (the first en route on December 21 and the second the next day abandoned not far from there), an event known as the "caravan of death".

Sogecable

Between the years 1990-2002, it was the headquarters of the Grupo PRISA subsidiary, Sogecable, which served as a newsroom and set for the news programs of Canal+ and CNN+, among others.

At the movies

The Picasso Tower served as the setting for the Spanish film Open your eyes (1997) by director Alejandro Amenábar.