You know that feeling when you want to do multiple things at once and nothing ends up coming out of it all? When you have more ideas and don't know where to start? That's how my mind is today, blocked by too many ideas that ended up arguing with each other. Can you imagine that disaster?
I got up, left my thoughts and walked away, to a place that had more light. So I am standing now in front of the Glass Palace, in the park you saw about a week ago here. Let's see if this sunny place can illuminate the way how my mind works and my fingers type on the keyboards.
Oops, it says:
Temporarily closed due to installation maintenance. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Seems that I have no luck, and neither Palacio de Cristal - Glass Palace can help me now.
That's how it is. I will have to help myself then. Build up the ideas from iron and let the light come in through the glass, as is the case with this building itself.
A little research after my visit to this place gave me a better understanding of this beautiful building located in El Retiro Park in Madrid. It was built in 1887 for General Exposition of the Philippine Islands. I also saw some old photos of this place with exotic plants from the Philippines. The architect was Ricardo Velázquez Bosco.
He used iron and glass for its construction and achieved a very modern appearance for that time. The building itself was (and probably still is) one of the best examples of glass and iron architecture in Spain.
As we already saw, the palace was closed when I was there, because of maintenance. Since its construction, the building has gone through restoration work already two times. Although we can't see exotic plants in its interior anymore, as happened during the General Exposition of the Philippine Islands, the Glass Palace is one of the exhibition venues of the Reina Sofía Museum.
The day I was there I saw no exposition, but I witnessed a little concert that a street musician gave to the tourists. So many people were around; why everyone was looking at their phones, and not listening to the musician? 🎶
As the Glass Palace is located in the park, and it was a warm summer day, I could see people resting in the shade of the trees. I did the same, a bit earlier, before I arrived at this palace. That is another reason why one should visit this park in summer - it can be a much more enjoyable walk than in the city centre, surrounded by a lot of concrete.
There is also a little artificial lake in front of this building. It forms part of the whole composition. The staircase leads into the lake, but you better stay just outside of the water and not bother the ducks and swans, and the trees that actually have their roots under the water.
The structure of the building reminds a bit of a cathedral or a church. Well, its base does have the shape of a Greek cross, though a pity I could not enter and walk in its interior and see it - show it now.
I hope of bit of light came into my mind now, thanks to this luminous Glass Palace :))
