page_title: Architecture of Madrid
section_title: Francoist dictatorship
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of Madrid / Francoist dictatorship
caption_attribution_description: English: Façade of the Spanish Ministry of Health, in Madrid. Español: Fachada del Ministerio de Sanidad de España, en Madrid.
context_page_description: The architecture of Madrid has preserved the look and feel of many of its historic neighbourhoods and streets, even though Madrid possesses a modern infrastructure. Its landmarks include the Royal Palace of Madrid, the Royal Theatre with its restored 1850 Opera House, the Buen Retiro Park, the 19th-century National Library building containing some of Spain's historical archives, a large number of national museums, and the Golden Triangle of Art located along the Paseo del Prado and comprising three art museums: Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Museum, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which completes the shortcomings of the other two museums. Cibeles Palace and Fountain have become the monument symbol of the city.
  The architecture of Madrid reflects a number of styles from various historical periods.
context_section_description: Soon after the entry of the Francoist troops in Madrid signalling the end of the war, the new Mayor exhorted to the Madrilenians not to rest until Madrid became the "capital worthy of the New Spain, One, Great and Free, of the Imperial Spain forged by the Generalísimo, by the Armed Forces, by the militias, and by the rearguard, through the means of steel, through the means of blood, and through sacrifices.
  Already in June 1939, a meeting of the Assembly of Architects presided by prominent Falangist architect Pedro Muguruza convened in Madrid, and a document about the General ideas on the National Plan for Planning and Reconstruction was delivered later in the year, setting the lines of the immediate post-war architecture. According to Pedro Bidagor, the author of the 1941 urban planning for the city, in the new regime there was no more "freedom before the State to do the works according the anyone's humour; there is no freedom between good and evil. Is it mandatory to perform up to maximum effort and endure maximum discipline to do things right". A Directorate-General for Architecture was created in September 1939 following totalitarian lines.
  In the first years of the Francoist dictatorship, the regime adhered to some elements of the totalitarian architectural language, with a folkish mythification of the works of Juan de Herrera and Juan de Villanueva, captured in buildings such as the Luis Gutiérrez Soto's Ministry of the Air, reminiscent of El Escorial. During these years, in the Spanish case the reactionary and Catholic conservative matrix largely prevailed over a purely Fascist architecture in the sense of the Roger Griffin's established link between modernity and Fascism. The neo-herrerian style developed in the 1940s adapted in Spain the monumentality espoused by German and Italian fascist architectural styles, but it strayed from them in the sense that this style, very much looking to the past, remained far from the avant-garde. The Teatro Clara Eugenia, a building strikingly following the style of Nazi's official architect Albert Speer was nonetheless erected in 1943 on the current day district of Hortaleza.
  With the country ruined after the war, the Falange command had nonetheless high plans for the city and professionals sympathetic to the regime dreamed (based on an organicist conception) about the notion of building a body for the "Spanish Greatness" placing a great emphasis in Madrid, what they thought to be the imperial capital of the New State. In this sense, urban planners sought to highlight and symbolically put in value the façade the city offered to the Manzanares River, the "Imperial Cornice", bringing projects to accompany the Royal Palace such as the finishing of the unfinished cathedral (with the start of works postponed to 1950 and ultimately finished in the late 20th century), a never built "house of the Party" and many others. 
  Nonetheless these delusions of grandeur caught up with reality and the scarcity during the Post-War and most of the projects ended up either filed, unfinished or mutilated, with the single clear success being the Gutiérrez Soto's Cuartel del Ejército del Aire.
  A sense of modernity was nonetheless later introduced at some point, with buildings such as the Cabrero & Aburto's Casa Sindical or the headquarters for the Alto Estado Mayor de la Defensa, by Gutiérrez Soto, that, particularly in the first case, decidedly broke with traditionalist historicism.
caption: The Casa Sindical, often linked to the works of Giuseppe Terragni.[23]
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