Let me invite you to a photographic travel to the Palacio de Cibeles; one of the most wonderful building of Madrid architecture. Just click here:

http://www.ipernity.com/doc/mdediego/album/236547/show







The most photographed building of Madrid, the Communications Palace is an emblematic city building, and since 2007 is the headquarters of its City Hall. Located in the Plaza de Cibeles, on a place formerly occupied by section of the “Jardines del Buen Retiro,” It was designed by Antonio Palacios and Joaquin Otamendi to host the Post and Telegraph Company in Spain.

The building shows a very personal style of the two architects, who subsequently developed in the Hospital Maudes Journal Laborers, and drinks from various sources that are integrated into a coherent whole: the Neo-Gothic, especially the work of Viollet-le-Duc, the structure findings of architects and engineers like Gustave Eiffel and Otto Wagner, and the Parker's passion for Spanish regional styles, specifically the late Gothic and the work of Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón.

One of the anecdotes most commented about this building happens when Leon Trotsky visited Madrid in the 30's, at the beginning of his exile. When he visited the center of Madrid and once he saw the Post Office building he was so overwhelmed by its monumentality very similar to a church or Cathedral and for that reason he renamed the Palace as “Our Lady of Communications.”

The building was designed as a "total artwork" (in German, Gesamtkunstwerk) in which every detail, from lighting up the desks in the operating room or the ventilation system, form part of an artistic whole unit to service its role as a post office building.