Restoration of the Library's Reading Room
The Bank of Spain is the national central bank and the supervisor of the Spanish banking system together with the European Central Bank. Its main headquarters is located in the center of the city of Madrid, at the Cibeles square. It occupies a complete block and was built in several phases from the late 19th century till the beginning of the 21st century. The first building was built following the project of the architects Eduardo Adaro and Severiano Sainz de la Lastra. It is a linear building parallel to the Paseo del Prado, which twists diagonally, in Cibeles square corner. In the interior of the chamfer axis and next to it, is the old operations centre, nowadays the library’s reading room, object of the present restoration. It is a space that preserves the cast iron lattices and the intact ironwork structure that was executed in the town of Mieres by Bernardo Asins.
The Reading Room is a relevant element of the architecture of its time.
The object of the restoration was to recover the value of this space. The iron cast lattices were dirty due to the pass of time. The many coat paints generated unwanted thickening. And several interventions, carried out in order to improve the conditions of habitability, distorted the original perception of space.
