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Madrid’s North
Telefonica’s headquarters in northern Madrid. Almost 500 m length, a monumental presence in a building by Rafael de la Hoz Arquitectos
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Maps 2014 (14) Planea
The ability to consult the urban planning documents that are legally binding is recognized as a citizen’s right by most national laws, but up to the advent of the internet the real application of that...
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Back of the envelope calculations (3) Amazon’s trails: wings vs knees
Taking as a starting point the previous post on the text about the future of employment by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, we can produce some ideas. Home delivery was until now one of those...
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1 sq m wrecks?
Starting where we left it on the last post, on how there are new ideas to deliver internet sales by physical means (drones and other contraptions…) we have in our streets things that, from an economic...
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Shapes and outlines (1) Levels
We can somehow agree on the fact that the figure-ground diagrams are a first approach to the description of the urban space. But this leads to the need to define at which level you cut the urban...
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Biblio (94) Vacant capacities
The Municipality of Madrid publishes every year a report on the building rights defined in the current General Plan that are still to be used (edificabilidad remanente). As a result of the current...
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Being up to it (1)
Cities are 3d realities, even in the flat Netherlands. So where you are is not just a matter of planar coordinates, as the landscape changes according to the relative height of every element: trees,...
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Being up to it (2) Altimetric Madrid
Overall hypsometry Any large city can have a complex setting, altough it is not compulsory (just think of the Randstat, Shanghai or New Orleans). Madrid has a certain terrain complexity, defined by the...
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Being up to it (3) Kings game
The area as seen from north. The Palace is the mass under the dome of La Almudena, on the left. The Royal Palace of Madrid stands on a platform 55 m higher than the Manzanares bank. I once heard that...
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Being up to it (4) Retiro
Retiro, at the edge of a plateau. 100 m grid The Retiro park appears as a peripheral hunting ground (not unlike other parks in many European royal capitals), east of the Prado creek, by then the urban...
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Starters of urban change (2) Taxes and the « casas a la malicia » in...
A plate of the 1749 map of Madrid Madrid becomes the Spanish capital in 1561, and this implies the institution of the the “regalia de aposento”, making mandatory for citizens to provide half their own...
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Starters of urban change (4) Wats, fridges and cows
An old urban dairy farm, image taken from the blog “le pieton de Paris” (http://pietondeparis.canalblog.com/archives/2013/05/31/27298307.html), with a good article on the issue The arrival of the...
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Starters of urban change (5) Bow windows
Imagine you are a city or any other public administration with urban planning powers. How to foster the use of a given architectural shape without paying for it? Reducing the cost for those producing...
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Blocks (2) Façades
A façade on the Calle de Alcalá, Madrid When you think about façades you think about buildings (one by one, taken as separate items) ; if you think in terms about bocks, the building façade is in a...
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Blocks (4) El Viso
El Viso as seen from the south, according to cadastral data El Viso is a residential area built in Madrid in 1933-1936 according to the 1925 Low Coast Housing Act. It never really was a worker’s...
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