Buildings for the newspaper El Día

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Industrial architecture · Year: 1963 y 1976 · Authors: Javier Díaz-Llanos, Vicente Saavedra

We are faced with two similar and adjacent buildings that were designed, with a margin of approximately a decade between them, by architects Javier Díaz-Llanos and Vicente Saavedra for Editorial Leoncio Rodríguez, the company responsible for the newspaper El Día. 

The first building planned, today the headquarters of RTVE, is a moderate-scale building centred around an interior courtyard designed to house the printing press, the main mechanical work element of a newspaper. Around this central axis, different spaces of varied use were planned. This construction was completed in 1963.

A decade later, the newspaper owners commissioned the same architects to build another building, this time larger, to be located on a plot adjacent to the existing one. The aim was to accommodate the new demands of the media sector, which at that time was undergoing enormous evolution. It was proposed to maintain the same constructive characteristics as the previous one, but now on a larger scale. To mitigate the difference in scale between the new construction and the previous one, the height of the façade near the older building was reduced to one floor, proposing a setback or stepping that results in a curious volumetric variety, as well as favouring the lighting conditions of the interiors. The rest of the façade, further up the street, was built to three floors. This second building was completed in 1976.

The set of the two constructions shows us a formal unity based on the canons of industrial-style architecture: visible structural elements, beams, blocks, concrete and glass, all very structured and contained.

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