Plaza Carlos Trías Bertrán

The man who names this square drove, a few metres away, a piece of Manhattan into the middle of the Castellana. Carlos Trías Bertrán, born in Barcelona in 1918 and a lawyer by training, served as commissioner for Madrid’s urban planning between 1964 and 1969, the post from which he rewrote much of the modern city. His most visible work stands beside it: AZCA, the cluster of towers and offices raised over the old Castellana block with the declared ambition of matching the Rockefeller Center. Trías Bertrán headed that project, which he would not see finished: he died suddenly in September 1969. The square that honours him fits his biography with some irony: a patch of open ground among skyscrapers and car parks, noisy, cut through by the traffic that circles AZCA and the Nuevos Ministerios. He was also the father of the philosopher Eugenio Trías.