This museum project for Fundación Telefónica, the cultural institution of Spain’s largest telephone company, occupies four floors in the historic Telefónica Building at the top of Madrid’s most central street, the Gran Via. To address the difficult relationships between the reclaimed spaces of the old building, we designed a central, cohesive circulation path that connects all galleries and cultural spaces on the upper floors to one another and to the street.

Parts of five of the existing floor plates were demolished and a spiral staircase inserted in the void, weaving through an organic, sculptural form which serves simultaneously as a lateral brace for the building’s façade and structural support for the stair.

The galleries take their form from the shape of the building. Here, the floors were stripped of everything non-essential to the structure. Columns were left exposed and the ceilings covered with a suspended metal mesh. The spaces, left bare, reveal the beauty of the existing structure and allow for the maximum freedom for exhibit-specific installations.

On this project Moneo Brock Studio collaborated with Quanto Arquitectura.