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With its shimmering silhouette (the gold of its dome is achieved with 24-carat gold leaf), the Metropolis Building has celebrated

111 years since its inauguration

this January .

Now an icon of Madrid architecture, it was conceived by the French Jules and Raymond Février for the insurance company La Unión y el Fénix.

Long before Federico Coullaut-Valera's

Winged Victory

crowned its structure -even before Gran Vía became the crowded avenue we know today-, a very different building occupied the site that existed

between the streets of Alcalá and of the Knight of Grace

.

The

House of the Coffin

, popularly known for the narrowness of its façade, barely reached five meters in length.

It was built in 1851 by order of Manuel Sainz de la Calleja and, if from Alcalá its façade measured 15 meters, from Caballero de Gracia it did not exceed 14.90.

The journalist and writer María Isabel Gea Ortigas tells in her

Visual Guide to the Disappeared Madrid

that this construction was made up of "a stone plinth. The rest of the brickwork on the facades, wooden frameworks; the facings of walls, partitions and ceilings trimmed and whitewashed, and some with wallpaper and stucco. The tile floors and the wooden staircase".

Conceived entirely for the rental of rooms, the Casa del Ataúd

was demolished when construction began on the Gran Vía

, conceived as one of the largest urban interventions in Madrid at the time.

Of the appearance of this building today there are hardly any clues in the newspaper archives and the memory of a city that was beginning to make its way.

According to the data that is preserved, the start-up of one of the busiest arteries of the capital meant

the demolition of a total of 312 houses

.

In addition, 44 plots of land were levelled, 8,856 meters of sidewalks were de-paved and more than 20,000 square meters of paving and cobblestone were removed.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

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  • Architecture

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