NUEVO AZCANUEVO AZCA

The Nuevo Azca design reworks AZCA, a 19-hectare superblock that has served as Madrid’s financial center since the 1960s. Over time, the public space has been subject to divestment and subsequent urban decay. DS+R’s intervention introduces a forest and a river, reanimating this neglected site into a highly accessible living landscape that provides new outdoor venue spaces for diverse programmed activities and everyday use.

Located at the geographic and commercial center of Madrid, AZCA was conceived in the 1960s as a modern financial district, an elevated field of concrete plazas and oversized circulation corridors. Over time, these spaces have become inaccessible, fragmented, and largely void of public life. In a city defined by its bustling streets and plazas, AZCA is an exception in its detachment from the rhythms of daily use and has become inhospitable in Madrid’s increasingly hot climate.

In response, the design by DS+R, b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos, and Gustafson Porter + Bowman recast the AZCA superblock as ‘Nuevo Azca’ – a civically-minded green core that transforms Madrid’s financial district from a passing place into an ecosystem of habitation.

Rather than overwriting the site, the project cracks open its hard surfaces to welcome in a living landscape. The district’s former separations between towers and ground, infrastructure and experience are dissolved into a continuous civic terrain that is flexible, lively, and dynamic.

A hybrid Mediterranean forest ecosystem fringes the central green and extends throughout the site, forming the perimeter of 17 “urban rooms”, a constellation that includes an amphitheater, forum, sculpture garden, digital bosque, and culinary court. Movement follows the logic of the landscape rather than of the grid. Paths emerge as gradients of shade, density, and activity, reconnecting AZCA to the surrounding city and transforming it from a place of transit into a place of duration.

Flowing through Nuevo Azca is a stream of reused and recirculated water, turning infrastructure into an active part of the public realm that is ambient, legible, and shared, recalling old river channels that once crossed through the site. Ecology and public life merge, demonstrating how the natural and urban can exist in symbiosis.

‘Nuevo AZCA’ continues DS+R’s work to recalibrate urban health by merging social and ecological infrastructure. The landscape is not a background but is considered critical civic infrastructure, supporting biodiversity, mitigating climate change, and establishing a new and welcoming space that sets a precedent for the future of urban design.