Etching with aquatint
Approx 24x31cm
2019
Edition of 50
Handprinted on 220gsm Fabriano
Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza completed this massive concrete tower in Madrid in 1969. A residential block, its cylindrical volumes contrast heavily with the majority of reinforced concrete Brutalist buildings found at the time; the semicircular balconies creating a sense of of deeply interlocking forms. Today, the building has faded somewhat; the concrete grey and grimy, the wooden shuttering protecting the balconies flaking and rough - and yet it still seems like a building from an imagined future (albeit dystopic), rather than from an aspirational Modernist past.