Habsburg Madrid
By the mid-16th century, Madrid was little more than a sleepy, provincial Castilian town with barely twenty thousand inhabitants. For its residents, the greatest challenge was finding ways to pass the time. The city’s political scene was nearly non-existent, save for the occasional sessions of the Cortes – a wandering royal court and parliament. When it did convene in Madrid, its proclamations and pompous decrees rarely carried any weight in shaping royal policy. The city’s approach to defence was equally unimpressive, relying more on bluff: Madrid was encircled by numerous towers and seemingly imposing walls, but these were primarily made of mud and had no genuine fortification value. The Habsburg kings, who ruled Spain from nearby Toledo, had a particular fondness for this town and visited it occasionally, drawn largely by the excellent hunting grounds in the surrounding countryside.
However, when King Philip II declared Madrid the new capital in 1561, the decision came as a huge surprise. The king moved to Madrid, and with him came an endless entourage of nobles, government officials, ambassadors, monks, ladies of the court, sycophants, and dwarfs – all the characters essential to the running of a vast maritime empire with possessions spanning four continents.
Naturally, the city faced an enormous housing crisis as it struggled to accommodate this influx of bureaucrats and dignitaries. The solution? To resurrect an old, makeshift practice traditionally employed during wartime campaigns or when the itinerant royal court came to town. The Regalia de aposento decree was enacted, stipulating that all homeowners with a second floor were required to surrender it to government officials, retaining only the ground floor for their own use.
At first, Madrileños accepted this imposition without much protest, despite the obvious loss of comfort, privacy, and material resources. However, attitudes quickly soured when it became apparent that this “temporary” measure was becoming a permanent solution out of sheer necessity. The city grew rapidly, attracting ever more people, and no matter how much new construction took place, the demand for housing government officials and royal bureaucrats continued to outstrip supply. The greatest burden fell on those building new homes, as they were obligated to surrender half of their newly constructed living space to unknown government functionaries – unless, of course, they could find a way to circumvent the law.
The ‘Houses of Malice’
As everyone in Spain knows, every law has its loophole – or, as they would say, its trap. The wealthy managed to escape the burden by offering generous donations to the state, which, thanks to some conveniently ambiguous clause, exempted them from having to surrender their living space. For the poorer majority, however, ingenuity and resourcefulness were their only way out. Their hope lay in building homes that could be officially declared “unsuitable” or “indivisible” for sharing with government officials. In the decades that followed, the art of designing such unsuitable, indivisible houses became the pinnacle of architectural skill in Madrid. Clever builders began constructing houses with vast “passageways,” “corridors,” “inner courtyards”, and similar spaces that, once the royal inspection commission had officially declared the house “unsuitable,” could swiftly be converted into living quarters.
The most prized skill of all was the ability to conceal entire floors. Architects designed houses that appeared to be single-storey from the outside but secretly contained two levels hidden behind their facades, with one or even two more tucked away beneath steep, sloping roofs. To disguise this deception, they installed bizarrely oversized doors and arranged windows in a chaotic, uneven pattern, so no one could guess the height or position of the floors within.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this period saw the rise of the picaresque novel in Spanish literature – a genre that celebrated the cunning ingenuity of the clever, ordinary man. Nothing in real life could be more picaresque than Madrid’s residential architecture of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Historians estimate that around a thousand of these enigmatic houses were built in Madrid during this time. Their number of floors, internal layouts, and total dimensions were almost impossible to determine. Officially, these buildings were referred to as casas de incómoda partición– “houses with inconvenient partitioning” – colloquially as “houses with traps,” but over time, the cheeky nickname casa a la malicia – the House of Malice – became the term of choice, a name that is still used to this day.
Eventually, the authorities wised up and introduced a tax for residents who did not host the royal entourage but could have, if their homes had been more “suitable.” The tax was calculated in an absurdly convoluted way, forcing the owners of casas a la malicia to take their ingenuity to even greater heights in order to avoid or reduce their dues. Official entrances were placed in one location, while additional hidden entryways – through courtyards, shared passages, or even neighbouring streets – became commonplace. The result was total urban chaos.
But everything must come to an end, and so did Spain’s Golden Age. By the 18th century, the empire’s heyday of conquering continents, fighting indigenous wars, embarking on pirate adventures, and staging public burnings of heretics had faded into a romanticised past. The empire had weakened, the royal court had shrunk, and the king’s retinue had built their own homes. What had once been an asset – these cunningly unsuitable houses – had now turned into a liability. Madrid was left in a state of urban disarray, with people living in homes deliberately designed to be impractical. It was only with great effort that these houses were eventually catalogued and given addresses, a process that dragged on for nearly eighty years. One of the figures most involved in this monumental task was Mesonero Romanos, a Madrid writer and chronicler, who took it upon himself to name the city’s scarcely recognisable streets after their historical significance. In the new era, casas a la malicia were no longer fit for purpose. Their impracticality for everyday living led to their demolition, making way for new, sensibly designed homes tailored to actual needs. These new constructions adhered, perhaps all too obediently, to the urban planning principles of the time – pragmatic, uniform, and thoroughly unremarkable.
The ‘House of Malice’ on Redondilla Street
How many casas a la malicia still exist in today’s Madrid? Given their intentionally deceptive design, they are neither easy to define nor to identify. Some claim there are only three left, others say just two, and some even dispute that. Yet, there is one house upon which everyone agrees – a surviving relic at the corner of Redondilla and Los Mancebos streets, in the La Latina district. Over the years, the house has undergone certain modifications, but its peculiar arrangement of windows and doors remains untouched, as enigmatic as it was in its most “malicious” days. Despite the fact that both of its street-facing facades are fully visible, it is impossible to discern where the floor division lies between the ground and first levels. Any imaginary horizontal line is abruptly interrupted by a door or a window, each placed at a bewilderingly inconsistent height. So how many floors does the house actually have? Are there interior staircases that alter the elevation of the first floor? The same chaotic arrangement extends to the roof windows, “dormers,”– buhardillas – which are scattered across the structure at seemingly random heights. A visit in person offers no answers to this architectural puzzle. Peeking through one of the windows reveals little more than an unexpectedly high ceiling, and the interior seems uninhabited, perhaps awaiting restoration. The mystery of this casa a la malicia endures.
However, let’s not forget that this house has undergone renovations before, and we cannot know what was altered in the process. How did it originally look? Did its first owner successfully outwit the diligent Habsburg tax officials?
The history of the casas a la malicia is far from obscure to Madrid’s scholarly circles. In fact, it is even a source of a certain national pride, embodying the picaresque ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Spanish people. However, despite the fact that only one such house remains standing, it has not, to my knowledge, been granted protected status. To be honest, it would be rather awkward to declare something intentionally designed as “anti-architecture” a cultural monument. In any case, it is likely that the last vestige of this architectural folly will soon disappear from Madrid. Of course, this will not mark the end of creative floor-count trickery in residential buildings across Europe, but nowhere else was it as successful and widespread as it was in Habsburg Madrid.
Darko Veselinović, July 2016
