CaixaForum: The Floating Power Station

Why is it significant?

Stop on the little plaza and look at the building in front of you: a heavy box of old red brick, crowned with rusty iron... and underneath it, nothing. The whole thing seems to hover above the ground, as if someone had forgotten to build the ground floor.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop on the little plaza and look at the building in front of you: a heavy box of old red brick, crowned with rusty iron... and underneath it, nothing. The whole thing seems to hover above the ground, as if someone had forgotten to build the ground floor.

That is the trick the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron played when they turned an old electrical power station into an arts centre, opened in 2008. The station had been built at the end of the nineteenth century to light this part of Madrid. The architects kept its brick shell, cut away the granite base, and hid the structure inside, so the plaza flows right under the building. On top they added new floors clad in cast iron, deliberately left to rust into that warm orange.

Now turn to the wall of the neighbouring building. It is alive. That vertical garden, more than twenty metres high, is the work of the French botanist Patrick Blanc, and it holds around fifteen thousand plants of some two hundred and fifty species. There is no soil, only layers of felt fed with water and nutrients, and the plants are arranged like brushstrokes, darker greens below, lighter ones above. It changes colour with the seasons, so you never see the same painting twice.

Here is something most people walk straight past. This garden and this plaza were made possible by tearing down a petrol station that used to stand on this corner. One of the ugliest corners of the boulevard became one of the most photographed walls in Madrid.

Inside, CaixaForum shows changing exhibitions, from ancient Egypt to cinema to contemporary design, which makes it the restless younger sibling of the grand museums around it. Now cross the Paseo del Prado and walk a little further north. You are heading for a stately iron gate, behind which King Charles III planted a scientific empire.