CaixaForum Madrid reconfigures a former power station on the Paseo del Prado into a public cultural venue by lifting its historic brick shell from the ground to form a shaded urban threshold. A new plaza, a vertical garden, and a sectional split between subterranean civic functions and elevated galleries orchestrate an entry sequence that ties the building to the street, the nearby Botanical Garden, and the surrounding roofscape.
CaixaForum Madrid Technical Information
- Architects: Herzog & de Meuron
- Location: Paseo del Prado 36, Madrid, Spain
- Gross Area: 11,000 m2 | 118,403 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2001 – 2008
- Photographs: © Christian Richters, © Iwan Baan
By lifting the brick shell from the ground, we made a covered public room for Madrid and a clear threshold between street and exhibition.
– Herzog & de Meuron
Urban Insertion and Public Realm
The project recalibrates a service-dominated frontage along the Paseo del Prado by removing a gas station and consolidating the site into a new plaza that mediates between the city and the building. This outdoor room aligns with the boulevard’s flow and creates a pause in the dense fabric, enabling safe dispersal and gathering before and after events. The plaza establishes a lateral connection to the promenade and foregrounds the brick volume as an object in the round rather than a flat facade.
Elevating the retained mass produces a four-sided, 1,200 m² covered entrance capable of receiving visitors from multiple directions while tempering the sharp urban edge. The undercroft operates as an accessible civic space independent of ticketed programs, offering shade and an address that faces the street without resorting to a singular front door. A 600 m² vertical garden completes the ensemble, extending the botanical presence of the nearby garden into the public domain and intensifying the site’s microclimate with evapotranspiration and filtered shade.
Surgical Transformation of an Industrial Shell
The intervention preserves the classified brick envelope of the former Mediodía Power Station while excising its base and nonessential partitions. This subtraction clarifies the historic fabric and removes the inert plinth that once locked the building to cramped streets, allowing the shell to be read as a suspended relic. The gap between ground and brick is both literal and interpretive, granting autonomy to the old structure and framing a new public void beneath it.
A reshaped roofline translates contextual massing into a contemporary profile. Rather than a neutral cap, the articulated roof acknowledges the adjacent cornices and the fractured skyline of the neighborhood, making the building’s top register an active urban elevation. The resulting silhouette is a product of contextual calibration rather than formal caprice, compressing and lifting where neighboring roofs rise or dip to maintain a dialogue with the city’s ridge line.
Sectional Strategy: Two Worlds Above and Below
The project divides the program into a subterranean underworld and an elevated sequence of public floors. Below the landscaped plaza, an auditorium of 333 seats, services, and limited parking occupy a compact footprint that benefits from acoustic isolation and stable environmental conditions. This lower realm takes advantage of the site’s topography to stage pre-function and back-of-house operations without compromising the plaza’s continuity.
Above, the lifted volume assembles lobby and galleries as flexible, loft-like floors totaling approximately 1,720 m². Clear spans and minimal columns support reconfigurable exhibitions while keeping the historic shell legible along the perimeter. The top level is treated as a more intricate spatial field for dining and administration, where changes in ceiling height, skylight placement, and perimeter views structure the plan. Entry occurs within the undercroft, compressing movement before releasing visitors upward through a vertical sequence that moves from shaded exterior to controlled gallery light.
Material and Environmental Tactics
A steel-supported intervention underpins the retained masonry, allowing the brick to read as a continuous, load-free envelope. Inserted floors and cores touch the shell selectively, preserving the tactile evidence of the industrial fabric. The underside of the lifted mass is finished to withstand urban exposure while signaling the building’s new structural logic, making the elevation of the shell both a spatial and tectonic statement.
The shaded undercroft and vertical planting operate as environmental devices as much as urban amenities. Shade, air movement, and vegetative cooling extend the plaza’s usability across the day, while the planted surface functions as a soft acoustic baffle along the street. Facade and lighting strategies balance conservation with contemporary performance: masonry openings and added apertures are coordinated to maintain the character of the brick elevations, galleries favor controlled artificial light with calibrated daylight where viable, and night lighting emphasizes the hovering volume and the public ground plane without saturating the boulevard.
About Herzog & de Meuron
Herzog & de Meuron is a Swiss architecture firm based in Basel, founded in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Known for a research-based approach rooted in material expression, contextual sensitivity, and formal innovation, their work spans cultural, civic, and commercial projects worldwide. The practice emphasizes transforming existing structures and sustainable urban integration.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: WGG Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure AG, Basel, Switzerland; NB35, Madrid, Spain
- MEP consultants: Ùrculo Ingenieros, Madrid, Spain
- Client: Obra Social Fundación “LaCaixa”, Madrid, Spain; Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
- Construction company: Ferrovial Agroman, Madrid, Spain
- Acoustics: Audioscan, Barcelona, Spain;
- Facade Engineering: ENAR, Madrid, Spain, and Emmer Pfenninger Partner AG, Basel, Switzerland;
- Exhibition & Staircase Floors: Terraconti, Madrid, Spain;
- Green Wall: Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with Patrick Blanc, Artist-Botanist, Paris, France;
- Green Wall Consultant: Benavides & Lapèrche, Madrid, Spain;
- Lighting: Arup Lighting, London, UK
