Windsor tower

The Windsor Tower was an office tower in Madrid (Spain). It was 106 meters high and had 32 floors, and was located in the financial center of the city, in the AZCA area. Property of the company Asón Inmobiliaria de Arrendos controlled by El Corte Inglés; its name came from that of a famous auditorium-shaped nightclub located in its basement, Windsor. Deloitte's headquarters in Spain were located in the Windsor Tower, where its more than 1,200 employees and three departments of the Garrigues law firm worked. It was destroyed by fire on February 12, 2005.

History

In the summer of 2004, a tower crane was installed on the roof of the building for the renovation of the building. The crane, which resisted the fire and did not collapse, was withdrawn to tackle the demolition of the building.

Its construction began in 1975 and ended in 1979, being its authors the architects of the Del Río-Ferrero, Alas y Casariego studio: Pedro Casariego Hernández-Vaquero, Manuel del Río Martínez, Genaro Alas Rodríguez, Ignacio Ferrero Ruiz de la Prada, Luis Alemany Indarte, Rafael Alemany Indarte and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Torices Sanz. The initial project contemplated an office tower and a base that would have theaters, commercial premises and basements for parking. At the time it was the tallest building in the AZCA complex until the construction of the Picasso Tower.

The Windsor Tower was a mixed structure of concrete and iron, divided into 2 parts by the "technical plan" intermediate and, a floor without windows that housed structural elements. It had a reinforced concrete core that contained the elements of vertical communication, elevators and stairs. Large 3.40 m deep beams supported the weight of the facades and floors, resolved with lighter sections. Externally, it stood out for its elementary geometry, characterized on the façade by the presence of modular elements with a high light reflection index, entirely made of glass. This capacity for reflection made the building reduce its volumetric impact. The base of the complex, made up of three floors, was occupied by commercial premises. In the interior area were the entertainment venues on the AZCA pedestrian network, although they disappeared years ago^[when?] due to the expansion of the El Corte Inglés stores. The Titania Tower currently stands on the site.

Fire

The Windsor Tower on the morning of February 13, 2005.

Windsor Tower on 13 February 2005 at 12:06 hours.

ruinous state of skyscrapers after the end of the fire.

Shortly before midnight on Saturday, February 12, 2005, a fire broke out in an office on the 21st floor of the skyscraper that quickly spread to the upper floors. The firefighters needed some six million liters of water (the equivalent of approximately the capacity of three Olympic swimming pools) and 80 hours of work to extinguish the fire. The building came to withstand temperatures of 1,000 degrees. At the moment of greatest intensity, 205 firefighters and 40 vehicles worked. The flames charred 30,000 square meters of offices where more than 2,000 people worked.

At the time of the fire, the building had been under renovation for more than 2.5 years, with the tenants inside. It should be noted that the call to the firefighters took place after 11:00 p.m., taking them to reach the incident a mere 4 minutes, but the neighbors detected a strong smell of burning at least 2 hours before. Although the fire did not produce casualties, some firefighters had to be treated for smoke inhalation. After the fire was extinguished by the firefighters and the investigation by the scientific police, the dismantling of the building began, dismantling it floor by floor, using four heavy cranes and cutting machinery. During this clearing, it was only possible to point out that in April, a hydraulic support for one of the cranes fell to the ground. The technicians concluded that there was simply a security outage and the support lowered automatically to precisely prevent a fall or any other accident. Despite the spectacular nature of the incident and the loud noise it made when it collapsed to the ground, there were no personal injuries.

Despite the continuous problems, accidents and storms (the winter of 2005 was one of the harshest in Madrid, with a heavy snowfall on February 23 that endangered what was left of the Windsor Tower), the disassembly work they finished on August 13, 2005, four months ahead of schedule. At the end of the same month, the adjacent streets were opened to traffic (Raimundo Fernández Villaverde street and the overpass that connects with the Plaza de la República Argentina).

In the recordings made by a video amateur, two people can be seen from the outside walking inside the building during the fire, when it was closed. The scientific police determined that the images were not manipulated. A questioned report from the firefighters considered that they could be reflexes, although many unknowns remain open in this regard.

For weeks the El Corte Inglés department store that is adjacent to the tower (the largest that the company has) remained closed for security reasons, which caused great losses to the company, which even had to cancel thousands of orders for flowers on the occasion of Valentine's Day on February 14. The closure included the Bronze building, where the firm has the Home section, and also the offices of Seguros La Estrella located in the Trieste Tower.

Deloitte was the most affected company since it occupied 20 floors and had 1,200 employees working in the Windsor Building and had to temporarily relocate to the neighboring Picasso Tower. In fact, the fire caused the loss of the documentary supports of an audit carried out by Deloitte to the FG Valores Group (of the banker Francisco González Rodríguez), which had been requested by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor the day before the incident.

The Windsor Building in popular culture

Dismantling the debris of the building.

Titania Tower, built between 2007 and 2013 in the location of the Windsor Tower.

• The building fire is one of the main themes of the novels Cazar to the Capricorn (2009) by Francisco Castillo Arenas, Fire towers (2011) by Gabriela Cañas, No good work. (2013) by Yanet Acosta and "I burned the Windsor Building" by Pedro Fernández (Ediciones Atlantis, 2018), Comets no longer fly in the Wind Mountains (2018) by Eduardo Guibelalde del Castillo.
• It refers to him the Madrid rock group Pereza, in his song "Windsor", belonging to his fourth album, Fixed-wing aircraftIn saying in the refrain, "my heart burned like the Windsor."
• Melendi's "Caminando por la vida" video clip shows the burned building being replaced by the Chrysler building.
• The Camellos group refers to this building in its song "Things with Arroz", with the phrase "Let's leave your apartment as the Windsor building".
• The singer Christina Rosenvinge dedicated a song to her album The young Dolores (2011): "The Night of the Fire."
• The Spanish television series Sadness of love (surrounded in the 1980s) employs part of the tents and scenarios inside this building.
• The television series There's no one alive here. performs a gag on this event. In a chapter in which the character of Rafael Álvarez tries to provoke a fire in Desengaño 21, his bodyguard calls this action "Operation Windsor". Also in other episodes he mentions it, for example by calling a chicken burnt in the oven "polo a la Windsor", joking with that a storied storks had the nest in the Windsor building, or referring to the fact that insurance companies only investigated large cases of the Windsor or that these were not ruined with that building when neighbors planned to swindle the community insurance.
• The building can be seen in the final part of the movies City landscapes (1981) by José María Sánchez Alvaro. This film was premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival 1981.
• The building appears outside and inside in the movie The donor (1985) by Andrés Pajares.
• At the final scene of the film Open your eyes (1997) by Alejandro Amenábar, you can see the building from the top of the Picasso Tower moments before the character played by Eduardo Noriega kneels to the void.
• In the first minutes of the film Kronen Stories (1995) of Montxo Armendáriz you can see a panoramic plane of the AZCA complex in which the building appears.
• In a movie scene Barrio (1998) by Fernando León de Aranoa you can see the building illuminated at night from the bass of AZCA.
• His fire appears mentioned in Mitsuruggy's "The Most Beautiful" song.

Arson hypothesis

Although the official version remained that the trigger was a poorly extinguished cigarette butt, on February 12, 2019, evidence was found that could blame Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo of the National Police Force as the sole cause of the fire. According to the newspaper Moncloa.com, the objective was to destroy some documents that could harm the then president of BBVA, Francisco González.