Madrid Noir

In 1957, the Spanish architect César Ortiz-Echagüe travels to USA, after being awarded in an International Competition of Architecture, with Mies Van der Rohe as a member of the Jury. In New York he learns from the “Manufacturers Trust Company Building”, a new building by architects Skidmore, Owens & Merrill; a commitment to transparency and immateriality of its enclosure, the use of lightweight materials, and the ability to be a lighthouse overnight. Months later, on his return to Madrid, Ortiz-Echagüe and his partner, the architect Rafael Echaide, they will be served by these three ideas (transparency, lightness and artificial light) to build “La Sucursal del Banco Popular”; a local corner as the dinner of “Nighthawks” painting (1942). Its author, Edward Hopper, was inspired by “The Matadors,” a short story that Ernst Hemingway wrote in a Madrid’s small hostel, in only one night in the spring of 1926. His stay in Madrid will coincide with the so-called “racionalismo arquitectónico” that makes a generation of architects who, in parallel with the poetic generation of 1927, attempt a renewal of Spanish Architecture. In 1946, director Robert Siodmak will take to the big screen “The Killers”, a film noir that develops the Hemingway’s Short Story and translate the Hopper’s Painting. The winter of 1959 Hemingway will be locked in a room of the “Hotel Suecia” in Madrid, to write “The Dangerous Summer”, essay about bullfighting rivalry of the two media figures of that time: Luis Miguel Dominguín and his brother in law, Antonio Ordoñez. Ava Gardner, actress who plays the femme fatale in the Siodmak film, is also in Madrid. She’s keeping a secret relationship with Dominguín. Hemingway will be found died the next year in USA. This thesis aims to reconstruct the story, characters and stages from the film “The Killers”, but in Madrid; one “Madrid Noir” about buildings and urban spaces have disappeared too early, like Hemingway. “La Sucursal del Banco Popular” will be the central act of the film: the heist.