Post and Telegraph Office. Plaza de los Patos

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 1973 · Authors: Luis Gamir Prieto, Manuel Valdez Gamir, Juan Salabert Sancho

This building, intended to house a branch of the Post and Telegraph Office in Santa Cruz, was designed in 1971 by architects Manuel Valdez Gamir, Luis Gamir Prieto and Juan Salabert Sancho. These technicians, officials residing in Madrid, did not take into account such a specific area as the Barrio de los Hoteles, with its modernist and eclectic houses, when inserting the new branch there. 

The building, framed within the architectural current of brutalism, is constructed in concrete and shows a façade of two differentiated sections. In the first, developed over two floors and set back from the rest of the building, we find supporting bases erected by square pillars along the entire front, allowing the intermediate panels to be organised with glass and aluminium panels. The second, which rises two floors above the first, is configured by means of a curtain façade of prefabricated concrete pieces that leave a small intermediate space through which the aluminium and glass screens behind can be glimpsed.

The interior of the building includes a semi-basement; ground floor for public service; first and second floors for postal offices; third for telegraph; and the top floor, which was originally intended to house three dwellings, was dedicated to storage and other service priorities.

Construction works for the new branch began in March 1972, with the building fully completed in November of the following year. After serving for more than four decades, the building has been out of use since 2018, when its closure was announced to undertake a major renovation that has not been carried out.

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