The Roman Forum must not have seemed a very beautiful place to the Romans themselves, which is probably one of the reasons why each emperor wanted to have a separate site named after himself. A confusing place, with diverse and contradictory political implications, and dotted with pointed memorial bundles, the Forum was an unsuitable place for dictatorship. Contrary to what Camilo Sitte might think, who in the introduction to his book ‘La construcción de ciudades según principios artísticos’ imagines the construction of the Forum under a unified artistic conception, almost unconsciously following regulated principles, its planimetry seems rather the evident result of the historical accumulation of objects on a kind of political space.

 

For the people of Madrid, Colón is our Roman Forum. Or, at least, that is what it has been made out to be, in a somewhat shoddy translation of its essences. The humble monument to Jorge Juan that stands on one of its corners is a brief foretaste of the square's true character: the composition of a huddle of diverse objects. Like it, the curious sculpture consists of a series of elements piled up with almost no relation to each other in terms of colour, texture or message, forming an ensemble that at first glance it is difficult to know exactly what period it comes from or what it is doing there. And yet, the Plaza de Colón and its Latin predecessor differ in one fundamental aspect, for while everything faces the Forum, our poor esplanade is turned away from it with a certain disdain. Separated from the adjoining façades by the continuous car traffic and abandoned to its fate by every building of some relevance that opens up, in its place, to small flowerbeds or portions of pavement that act as a supplementary small square, Colón stands alone before its erratic historical future.

 

Due to its organisation as a compendium of elements with no greater relation to each other than their evident spatial juxtaposition, as an improvised and idle patchwork of urban and historical realities, I have not found the best way to apprehend the Plaza de Colón than as an index. Here is a list for Colón:

 

The aforementioned statue of Blas de Lezo, which together with the pedestal to Jorge Juan forms a sort of reduced pantheon of illustrious seafarers. For statues, being a pair is negative: it does not allow the individuality that highlights or the enumeration that extols those selected, only competition.

 

A marvellous colossal sculpture to the discovery of America, enveloping with its solemn silence and the shadow of its flights those who surround it.

 

A car park mouth with its characteristic depressing aura, located inconveniently between the two military monuments.

 

A monument to Columbus, recently rotated, which in its contrast with the one in Barcelona evokes that which sometimes exists between the two cities: the one in Madrid is less dreamy, more modest, but equally valid and probably less criticised.

 

The strange mixed building of the National Library and the Archaeological Museum, which offers the square its side without a door sifted by the succession of a moat, a fence, a narrow pavement, three lanes, a parking ramp and a garden up to the living area.

 

A somewhat gloomy set of umbrella-hexagons, between which one seems to venture into a world in which to stand under a heavy concrete shadow.

 

The occurrence of the largest Spanish flag in Spain, reigning over the whole square, but never quite carving out a niche for itself.

 

A gravel esplanade where events are sometimes held, but which most of the time is more of a wasteland.

 

A gigantic specimen of Jaume Plensa's elongated heads, to which access is kindly forbidden by a railing placed - and this is already an irony - on a stone bridge that crosses over the pond to it.

 

A pond over the entrance to the auditorium, between the Castellana and the pedestrian square, almost impossible to see from either of them.

 

One of Norman Foster's latest buildings, rather flimsy and listless in appearance, its corners deviating malevolently from the vertical just enough to be noticeable but not pleasant.

 

A 5-star Gran Meliá and an office building that seem to justify each other in their shared essence as the former headquarters of an insurance company, and which otherwise has created a kind of ‘vegetal barricade’ to enclose a terrace to which no one passing by is invited.

 

An adjacent square, with an incomprehensible bushy design and its monument to Madrid that transports us to a scene in which two violent snakes, an astral disc, and the rainbow pointing to a bust of a woman projected onto infinity coexist, with overtones that I personally find psychotropic. Flanked by the Meliá, the building formerly occupied by neo-Nazis, and adorned with this incomprehensible display of sculptural civility, none of the people lining it want to know about the skateboarding and midweek boozing that goes on there. In a touch of the finest irony, this little square is called Margaret Thatcher.

 

The former headquarters of Banco Madrid, until recently squatted by the neo-Nazi collective Hogar Social Madrid. Like any other ailing building, it now rests from view under a scaffolding that serves as a makeshift roadside advertisement.

 

The Platea shopping centre, a secluded place that is one of the few remaining strongholds in Madrid of underground shopping arcades, with its haberdashery, its groceries and its premises that can be sold, like those that populate the provincial cities.

 

Two curious advertising screens enclosed between four panes of glass and held up by three metal legs.

 

The discreet Emilia Pardo Bazán underground cultural centre, whose very existence, rather than that of a car park, is in itself a surprise.

 

A corner of the purest apology for overcrowding that leaves us with the always interesting dilemma of the chicken and the egg: was it first the wind sensor, the register boxes and the green stick, or the two laurels that coexist with them like actors playing robots?

 

The tallest hanging tower in the world, a work of the most optimistic modernity of Spain in the 1960s. Remodelled by the son of the original architect to add a fire escape and the famous art deco green plug that became an unlikely Madrid landmark. Now the same son has launched a smear campaign against a new refurbishment - commissioned to another studio - which, as well as restoring some of its original character, will add 4 floors of expensive square metres.

 

A sculpture by Botero of a woman, lying naked, looking back towards the rotunda.

 

The Colón complex, with its wax museum and its discotheques that rescue something of the original dystopian atmosphere of AZCA, the city of platforms and tunnels.

 

The Casino and its photogenic frog of fortune.

 

The end of one Castellana and the beginning of a very different one, asphalted, with the same lanes, but fewer fountains, trees and grass.

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