The Gran Via and the Spanish contemporary architecture

The centenary of the Gran Via has become an opportunity to gain insight into the most significant elements from the point of view of architecture, which mark this street, product of the last major domestic reform that rushed into the city of Madrid. In just twenty years, stand the latest examples of historicist eclectic architecture, to go from a jump like few times in our architectural historiography, the construction of possibly better example of rationalist architecture, the Building Capitol, accompanied by flashes of modern architecture, after the traumatic break of the Civil War and the first postwor, will be accompanied by unique elements of an architecture in pursuit of a meaningless way, promoted by the end of a generation of architects. This sense of acceleration and brake is linked to some of the most prominent names of Spanish architecture of the first two thirds of the twentieth century: Palacios, Anasagasti, Gutierrez Soto, Fernandez-Shaw, Muguruza, Feduchi or Eced among others. This article analyzes the role played by the Gran Via as a stage of transformation of our contemporary architecture, and its role as a beacon to take off that occurs with the new architects whose talent is recognized since the late '50s to today. The new architectural language emerged in the decades of the twenties and thirties, and displayed as in a few settings on the Gran Via, is necessarily linked to elements of social transformation, economic and cultural development resulting in new needs and new building types in new uses and demands arising from transformations that change our contemporary History, accompanied by a new architectural language, which for a brief moment, we placed the new European currents.