La Casa de Suecia (Madrid, 1951-1956) : Afinidad nórdica en la arquitectura de Mariano Garrigues

The title of this thesis alludes both to the building constructed in Madrid between 1953 and 1957 by architect Mariano Garrigues, and to the presence within it of a Nordic sensibility that fundamentally relates to a silent adaptation to the site; the rigor of construction and the quality of materials; and an understanding of space and the fulfillment of function, in motion. The starting point for this research is Garrigues’s trip to the Scandinavian country in 1949. The temporal location of this work—during the architect’s mature professional period and at a time of debate in Spain between tradition and modernity—allows us to explore a way of designing that would advance a possible synthesis between absences and presences, between abstraction and nature, between the strict and the flexible, or between distance and proximity; a synthesis, perhaps, between the two greatest exponents of early 20th-century Swedish modernism: Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz.