La House of Flowers is the name given to a block in the Argüelles neighborhood, on Rodríguez San Pedro street. It is called that because its architect, the Bilbao native Secundino Zuazo, designed the building thinking that all its neighbors could place plant elements for their decoration. Pablo Neruda, who lived here for some time, said about it that they called it the House of Flowers and thus it was left with the name by which we know it today.

There is a fairly broad agreement that this building embodies the most outstanding example of the residential efforts of modern Madrid architecture in the first half of the 20th century to achieve a more useful and healthy urban planning for the people who will reside in those homes.

La II Republic He dedicated himself to creating schools and welfare and social centers; In the collective residential area, this is the most successful work. They wanted it to serve as a model for a new, hygienic city that would make light and good ventilation, the terrace and the garden, its hallmark.

In Civil War, suffered a lot of damage, but was rebuilt and today is preserved intact and protected for its artistic interest.

At the beginning of the 30s, when the House was built, Madrid's bourgeois architecture continued to build in what was called Ensanche (neighborhoods of Salamanca, Argüelles and Embajadores) houses that were ostentatious on their façade and unhygienic on the inside, with the greatest part of the rooms facing narrow and dark patios.

The large rectangular apples, which Castro had defined in his Madrid expansion plan of the year 1860, they were built by attaching buildings between party walls, which occupied narrow plots, with little façade and a lot of depth. The result was houses with long corridors with rooms that opened onto successive interior patios.

Zuazo's idea arrived loaded with the future. The intention was to change the city, assuming the most modern and transformative ideas of the architectural discipline that came from Amsterdam and Vienna.

For many, the House of Flowers transcends its character as a residential building and has become a monument to rationality and architectural ethics. An urban commitment, a new way of building the city, with gardens, hygienic homes, and that values ​​the street as a collective space. Ideas that remain innovative today, more than 80 years after their construction.

Also in the architectural and formal aspects, the commitment is towards simplicity. For the facades he uses a material like brick, at the same time cheap and aesthetic, anchored in popular architecture and also in the neo-Mudejar buildings so common in Madrid architecture.

A historical example that is still alive and showing that there are always other possibilities to create a city.

A abrazo.