New shopping centers are springing up in all the cardinal points around Madrid, some completed and others still under construction, but all with a shared aesthetic line. They are large, white, curvilinear and with green areas that include water. Oasiz, the macro shopping center in Torrejón de Ardoz, opened four years ago and has set the tone for most of the new openings.
Valdebebas Shopping is one of the great exponents of this new architectural style, which also aspires to be the largest shopping center in the region, with its 400,000 square meters. Of course, aesthetically it complies with each of the precepts that Eric Harley, an expert in urban studies, has defined as “neutral-blandite”, and develops: “It tries to appear sophisticated through homogeneity, but in the background it hides a profoundly empty architecture, both in values and in urban function”.
In addition to appearance, at a business level it would also fall into what Harley has so successfully conceptualized as pormihuevismo:“It is a new stage of pormishuevismo. But a more bleached stage, literally and symbolically. A phase where the excess is no longer volumetric, but promotional: lots of noise, lots of renderings, lots of promises… and little real, economic or environmental sustainability”.
This definition, which the researcher has been working on since 2020 in his tours, will once again be the guiding thread of his routes through Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona starting in September.
Aspirational shopping centers
Perhaps the greatest example of this new wave is a shopping center that has been under construction for 7 years, but still has no concrete opening date. The Solia Madrid complex, in El Cañaveral, was announced in 2018 and intended to unite leisure, sport and commerce with a giant artificial wave beach in the center, but 2020 came and the developer stopped making communications, although some media such as Madrid Diario until a year ago reported that its opening would be at the end of 2025.
LaFinca Grand Café is the most careful, small and luxurious version, also taking into account the reality of the area, one of the richest in Madrid. In this shopping center, the focus was placed on restaurants and it was expected to house the next and renovated DiverXO, but finally Dabiz Muñoz announced that the change would not come. Finally, Dani García, another of the greats of Spanish cuisine with two Michelin stars, recently closed his restaurant Lobito de Mar in this complex.
Thus, between deflated openings, the end of works that do not arrive and a new obsession with introducing ponds or pools that look as natural as possible and that compensate for the omnipresent white of these buildings, it seems that a new urban style has been consolidated in Madrid.