In the guts of the 'Zidane Tower', the building of records: the tallest in Spain (with controversy), elevators at 40 km/h, 6 glass soccer fields, 4,500 workers...

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Javier Cid Madrid

Madrid

Updated Sunday, February 18, 2024-00:39

David Beckham tells a joke about his Iberian adventures, when he had just signed for Real Madrid and one morning, from Florentino Pérez's office, he asked the boss about

those four towers that were beginning to emerge

like a nonsense of sharp cranes and brutalist concrete on the plain of Castilian roofs of the city, only broken by a few bell towers. The four skyscrapers were straightened

at the frenetic pace of a daily floor

in the former Ciudad Deportiva of the white club after the reclassification of the land in 2001; a juicy urban operation that allowed the team to clear a debt of 280 million euros and pay for a good part of the galactic signings. Hence, Florentino responded to the English star: «It's you.

The Zidane Tower, the Figo Tower, the Ronaldo Tower and the Beckham Tower

.

They say that the Englishman was assigned the Espacio Tower, which with its 230 meters span at ground level is the smallest of the four. It was Zidane (Torre de Cristal) and Figo (Torre Cepsa) who competed for the honor of representing the tallest building in Spain. And this is where

a very close battle came into play that ended up being resolved by just a few centimeters

. And you don't play with height. In 2013, after several years of debates and bitter controversies, the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled that, at 249 meters high,

the Crystal Tower was the new giant in the country

(and ultimately the fourth tallest building in Europe and one of the top 100 in the world). It beat its neighbor, the Cepsa Tower, designed by Norman Foster, by just one meter. This dizzying race that began in 2009, the year of inauguration of both colossi, to touch the sky of Madrid was thus broken.

Robotic window cleaning gondola. ANTONIO HEREDIA

The Crystal Tower, owned by Mutua Madrileña, is currently an office building for rent. Some figures of this great little city north of Paseo de la Castellana, and

in whose bowels 4,500 people work

, are useful to understand its titanic proportions.

44,000 square meters of extra clear glass were used

to cover the façade

. The equivalent, to return to the king's sport simile, of six football fields. Robotic gondolas are responsible for cleaning it, and it takes 12 months to complete a complete tour of the exterior of the Tower.

To empty the area where the basements are located, 90,000 cubic meters of earth were removed, and 40,000 cubic meters of concrete were used in its construction,

an amount more than enough to fill 33 Olympic swimming pools

. And the electric cable that runs through its bowels exceeds 250 kilometers, the distance that connects Madrid and Zamora.

Works of the Crystal Tower. DIEGO SINOVA

More numbers, more vertigo, more records. A total of

26 elevators move at a speed of eight meters per second

(or 40 kilometers per hour), making them the fastest in Europe. With such speed, some of these shuttles make up to 400,000 trips a year. On the other hand, if you want to descend the emergency stairs on foot, it takes 25 minutes. And to top off this vademecum of virguerías,

a vertical garden of 600 square meters

(designed by Patrick Blanc, the planetary midas in these matters) crowns the interior of the top floor, behind the glass façade; It is, of course, the highest on the continent.

Placement of the vertical garden.ALBERTO DI LOLLI

The daily working of all the pieces of the Crystal Tower is a real daily challenge.

No less than 52 floors must be serviced

, divided into a ground floor for access, 46 for offices and 5 for technical installations - in addition to another 6 underground floors for parking with a capacity for 1,206 cars. "The main challenge of maintenance is making it seem invisible," explains

Juan Diego Carrasco, director of Real Estate at Mutua Madrileña

, which currently has a good part of the Crystal Tower leased to 21 companies - although there are still 6 floors available, the 15th. % of the building-. «There are about 80 people specialized in different maintenance and technical services, and their goal is for everything to work perfectly without interfering with the users' activities. We like to talk, for example, about 'friendly security', which consists of applying the highest standards in the matter with minimal invasion.

Among the technological tricks of the building, its

bioclimatic wall stands out, which integrates interior ventilation and automatically regulates the control of sunlight

with blinds placed between the glasses; In addition, a new sensorized LED lighting system has also just been installed - with heat maps, occupancy monitoring, historical data analysis, flexible programming... - and a shading element inside its façade, with the French name of

brise soleil

, which improves the air conditioning of the facilities. With all these wickers, the Crystal Tower once again breaks another record:

it is considered one of the most efficient offices in Spain

.

State-of-the-art gym.MUTUA MADRILEÑA

Designed by the Argentine César Pelli (who died in 2019 and father, among other jewels, of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur), the Crystal Tower also had important Spanish participation thanks to

Ortiz. León Arquitectos, whose presence in the project was fundamental

. "We entered the competition, and although César Pelli won it, we ended up forming a team with his office, something that was a wonderful experience, because when you work with international architects, unimaginable synergies are created," Íñigo Ortiz and Enrique León, founding partners, explain to GRAN MADRID from the desktop. "Making a building 249 meters high at that time, when

3D programs did not even exist

, was quite a challenge."

Ortiz. León Arquitectos defines one of his most special works as follows: «It was designed like an obelisk, a classic shape, a cut glass.

It is alive and breathing in every plant

. It was a pioneer in energy savings, in comfort, in the flexibility of spaces, with that active façade that leads to thermal balance and natural light inside, and which has since been widely copied around the world. These technologies have helped the design of buildings to be friendly, close, designed so that the viewer enjoys it and the user feels comfortable. The Crystal Tower was ahead of its time not only because of its holistic approach, but also

because it is resilient, because its image does not go out of style

.

Entrance hall, recently remodeled.MUTUA MADRILEÑA

Both architects speak of the building as if it were a living creature, which continues to beat like the first day 25 years after its inauguration. "On days with strong winds, it is expected that at the top it could move more than half a meter," they say. And the temperature outside the roof of the Tower

is five degrees lower than at ground level

, equal to that of the Sierra de Madrid. And one last piece of information revealed by his Spanish parents, which further enlarges the legend of this giant:

during its construction, its height was shortened by 10 centimeters due to its own weight

. A slip of 10 centimeters in the battle to touch the sky that, however, did not remove him from the

top 1

.