The Wagon Lits Cook Building

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1965 · Authors: José Sánchez Murcia

Fresh, light, austere, bereft of any concession to anything anecdotal. It nestles perfectly in the city without making a song or dance. The image is the constructive expression of the section of the building; this is what makes it look so modern. The concrete channels stretch along with some slim slabs in a gallery style, between which the façade looms with a glass covering from top to bottom. The parapet along the galleries is also made of glass, looking out over the nearby sea.

This represents one of the first buildings to reestablish continuity of modern architecture following the historicist period of postwar Spain.

This a fine corner structure right next to the sea, marking out the border between the new extended postwar city area and the residential "ciudad jardín" district from the 1930s. Its interesting urban location marks out a new concept in city architecture, alternating free spaces with the bulky buildings occupying whole blocks.

It is a crystal clear image reflecting a period of renewed hope. It incorporates an expressionist idea on the island for the first time, offering a whole new vision for the city.

It concept takes in the vision of the enormous trees in the square opposite that give it the appearance of a shady blind in the purest of miesiana tradition.

Unlike the rationalist trend of the 1930s, it uses new materials considered quite risky, as is the case of other huge glass fronts of newer office buildings which in this case simulate a curtain wall adapted to the scarcity of materials of the time in Spain, and even further compounded in the Canaries, or the greyish silver colour that covers the stone slabs. A highlight is the rough calculation of the fine slabs on the balconies that further accentuate the feeling of lightness and the repition of horizontal wrought iron, as well as the use of large window panes stuck with narrow hidden fixings, broken up only by small airators and supporting doors.

Its elevated exposition to the sun so prevalent in the climate here is softened by its predominantly northern orientation, and the prolongation of the concrete channels forming a row of balconies which in turn form sun breakers.

Whilst Spanish architecture in Madrid and Barcelona around this time moved towards a so called new organicism, this building is more similar in appearance to European constructions such as in Germany, or in America where the modern movement follows directly on from the modernist style of the 1950s. 

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