Shopfronts. Madrid, 1925-1955

Abstract

Midway between the interior and the exterior, in direct contact with the ebb and flow of the modern metropolis, throughout the 20th century shopfronts have offered us a privileged perspective of the materialisation of avant-garde European architecture, anticipating concepts that would later be incorporated in architecture on a larger scale. The focus of the present analysis centres around Madrid, capital of Spain and city that during the decade of the 1920s found itself living a demographic and economic explosion. The flourishing commercial activity of its main avenues constituted the perfect foundations on which to import modernity from beyond Spain's borders. A modernity in gestational phase that would take commercial architecture as its test bed for the advances being made since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. A new Machine Age, one that hadn't yet found a style of its own through which to express the values of a new architecture, overcoming the prevailing historicism.