The Colon Towers: From Rumasa Towers to the Present Day

It is neither the tallest building, nor was it ever; nor will it now be two towers, but one. It wasn’t even originally intended to be an office building. And who would have imagined that it would lose its most recognizable feature—the art deco cap that once crowned it? Even more curious, that distinctive element had not been remotely envisioned in the original design. In short, with such a track record, it is easy to see that we are dealing with a truly exceptional project—surely one of the most changeable and controversial in Spain. Indeed, the debate began from the outset, when thousands of Madrid residents watched in astonishment as its 20 floors were built from top to bottom.

The beginnings

The Plaza de Colón as we know it today bears little resemblance to what stood there just a few years before the towers’ construction began. The current space has often been described as a disjointed ensemble of unrelated elements, a kind of totum revolutum where brutalist sculptures coexist with the neoclassical National Library, the neo-Gothic statue of Columbus, a colossal Spanish flag, and even a supposedly temporary sculpture by Plensa. And presiding over it all, the Towers: constant landmarks mastering the puzzle.

The landscape in the early 1960s was radically different. The old Mint stood where the plaza now opens, and the French-style palace of the Duke of Uceda, surrounded by its gardens, occupied the site of today’s Columbus Center. Just across the corner, where the towers would later rise, stood the stately home of Don Luis de Silva y Fernández de Córdoba—the same residence where the writer Benito Pérez Galdós once lived. It was a thoroughly nineteenth-century setting, very homogeneous and quite coherent as a whole.

The urban chaos began in 1964, when developer Ezequiel de Pablos and the real estate company Osinalde purchased both palaces and commissioned their respective projects from architects Antonio Perpiñá and Antonio Lamela. Instead of designing their buildings independently, the two architects decided to submit a joint proposal to the City Council. In 1966, their “Ordenación de la Plaza de Colón” project was approved. Lamela’s structure was described as “an architectural unit of pronounced verticality,” rising 40 stories high—a scale the architect found excessive and entirely out of place.

To resolve this, Lamela decided to divide those 40 floors into two towers. When told that two towers did not constitute a single architectural unit, he argued that they were not two towers, but a pair… A subtle nuance that earned project approval in 1968. The concept emphasized minimal ground occupation and maximum vertical development, freeing surface space for pedestrians and improving access to the lower levels.

Under these premises, suspended architecture emerged as the ideal solution. In the case of the Torres de Colón, however, the concept was taken to the extreme—an extreme extreme, if we consider that at the time, only fourteen buildings in the world had been constructed using this technique, none employing a prestressed concrete cable-stayed structure. So why was this method chosen?

The Build Process

As with everything related to the Torres de Colón, nothing turned out quite as it was originally conceived. Not even the planned structure. Once construction began, it quickly became evident that it was impossible to meet the number of parking spaces required by municipal regulations. With a plot of just over 1,700 square meters and the ambition to accommodate two 20story towers, the foundation area proved far too limited. A new design had to be submitted in 1969. The solution? Two concrete cores serving as the sole structural support, replacing the traditional column framework. This innovation freed up as much underground space as possible without reducing the usable area of the towers, which at the time were intended for residential use.

The concept involved crowning each core with a head from which the stays supporting and compressing the floors were suspended. Essentially, a reverse foundation system that pushed the slabs upward, transferring the thrust to the head, then through the core, and finally—now in favor of gravity—down to the ground. It sounds complex and indeed was a technical feat, yet Lamela managed to explain it with disarming simplicity, coffee cup in hand:

“Let's imagine the cup had a vertical stem as its base, like a wine glass. The loads travel upward through the prestressed cables along the façade (the bowl of the glass) and are compressed against the head of the tower (the napkin). They then descend through the central core (the stem). In other words, the building doesn’t hang down: it’s compressed upward against the head. It’s the reverse of traditional construction, allowing the three main commercial floors and the garage to remain open and free of columns.”

The problems began in 1970, once the cores were completed and the heads were under construction. On July 7, the mayor of Madrid, Carlos Arias Navarro, abruptly stopped the works and ordered the project’s immediate demolition “for failing to comply with the approved plan and for an inadmissible increase in height and number of dwellings.” Antonio Lamela would later attribute this decision to political motives and to Arias Navarro’s desire for notoriety, as he was already positioning himself for the presidency of the Government.

Ultimately, it was proven that the project did comply with regulations: the three additional levels cited by the City Council corresponded to the tower heads, not to habitable space. Yet in the meantime, the two bare concrete cores stood exposed to the astonished gaze of Madrid residents, who could scarcely imagine what would come of this strange project with its twin skeletal towers. The amazement only deepened three years later, when construction resumed and they watched as the floors were built in the opposite direction to any conventional building. Upon completion, Osinalde sold the property to one of the most prominent businessmen of the time—none other than José María Ruiz-Mateos, not yet in his Superman costume.

From Luxury Dream to Office Icon

If Ruiz-Mateos ultimately purchased an office building, it was thanks to the stoppage of construction. The project had been originally conceived as a luxury residential complex—”high standing,” as the fashionable term of the time had it—targeted at the social elite. Yet after the long judicial battle, the developers obtained a change of use. This brought not only a far greater financial return but also the opportunity to design a vertical façade uninterrupted by terraces that would have concealed or detracted the structural lines.

In fact, the early designs featured wide terraces that almost entirely hid the structure. Even during this residential phase, however, they were later pulled back to expose the suspension system, though without abandoning the idea of creating a single, expansive apartment per floor. The result was forty enormous, extraordinarily expensive dwellings.

So expensive and exclusive were they, that the developer decided to construct a full-scale show unit on an estate in Boadilla—a fragment of a tower replicating its exact dimensions, layout, and proportions.

Fully furnished and operational, it allowed prospective buyers to spend a night there before deciding on their purchase. Sadly, it no longer exists, though it served as a private residence until only a few years ago.

In 1989, new fire regulations came into effect. To comply, a structural beam was added and concealed beneath a massive rusted copper socket. Then a fire escape was hung from it, marking yet another chapter in the towers’ story. That strange new addition, together with a shimmering gold-colored curtain wall, transformed the building’s appearance, initially met with disapproval, but ultimately recognized as one of Madrid’s most distinctive architectural icons. When Rem Koolhaas visited Madrid, he reportedly stared impassively from his taxi until reaching Colón. Then he asked the driver to stop, leaned out the window, and inquired, “Whose work is this?”

The answer: Antonio Lamela himself. He designed the intervention so it could be reversed at any time—a radically different approach from the current renovation, perhaps because its execution no longer lies in the hands of Lamela's firm, now led by of his son Carlos, but of architect Luis Vidal, whose design is being carried out amid considerable controversy and thanks to an incomprehensible lack of protection for the building.

The positive side of this new phase lies in its sustainability: the redesigned Colón Towers aim to become Spain’s first zero-emission building, anticipated even before such standards became mandatory in 2022. Ten percent of its energy consumption will be self-generated, and other twenty percent supplied by renewables. Yet the cost of this progress has been high. The striking brutalist base volumes have disappeared, and, most regrettably, the building’s defining feature has been forsaken: the Torres de Colón will no longer stand as two separate towers, nor as a fully suspended structure. Once completed, they will merge into a single body, extending upward over their cores, stripped of the aesthetic continuity of the original design. Those new upper floors will no longer defy gravity, no longer perform the impossible feat of “weighing upward.” They will, quite literally, weigh down. The magic is gone.

Bonus track

In Vidal's defense, it is worth recalling the project that Carlos Lamela presented in 2017 to expand the towers. That proposal, approved by the City Council, also envisioned an increase in height supported by the existing cores. However, it must be said that Lamela’s design showed greater coherence in its external elements and, importantly, respected the powerful brutalist volumes at the base.

In any case, one reflection applies to any expansion project. Javier Manterola, one of the structural engineers who originally calculated the building, once remarked: “There is no other building like it, and it should be preserved exactly as it is and as it was conceived from the outset. That’s certain. Adding more weight, more wind load, would be dangerous. I don’t trust it”

Perhaps the only truth that endures is this: if there is one thing that does not contradict the original spirit of the Torres de Colón, it is transformation itself.

Bibliographical references: Torres Colón: su proceso constructivo. Arte e innovación by Manuel Haro Ramos (2014) / Antonio Lamela y Torres Colón by Concha Esteban (2017) / https://www.lamela.com/proyectos/torres-colon/

PHOTOS: Estudio Lamela, Plataforma Arquitectura, Pinterest, El País, Algargosarte, Wikipedia, Twitter.

TEXT: Nacho Carratalá.