Iranian green onyx, black Calatorao marble and red Almería travertine shape Shoe Store Gallery at Jorge Juan 55, two floors in Madrid that Francisco Alonso designed for one businessman's shoe collections.
On calle Jorge Juan in Madrid, at number 55 and within a few metres of the Retiro park, a set of commercial premises holds stone rooms made for showing shoes. In 1986 the businessman Manuel Losada commissioned the project from Francisco Alonso, also known as Paco Alonso, asking for a gallery where his shoe collections could be displayed.
The Spanish name keeps both parts of that request in one hyphenated word, zapatería-galería: shoe shop and gallery. Locally it goes by the shorter la zapatería, meaning the shoe shop. The English title, Shoe Store Gallery, holds the same two words in the same order. The premises are a retail unit on two floors, roughly two hundred square metres between them. Work on the design ran over three years, and the construction is dated 1987.
The material list is short, and most of it is stone. Large stones are part of it, and three more come with a place attached: the green onyx is from Iran, the black marble from Calatorao, the red travertine from Almería. Underfoot, the floor is laid in blocks of iroko wood. And then there is glass of extreme transparency, the one material on the list that is neither stone nor wood.
The shoe gallery never opened. For roughly a quarter of a century the premises stayed boarded up, with the green onyx, the black marble, the red travertine, the iroko floor and the glass behind the boards. Later, and only for a time, the rooms served as a hall for exhibitions. The work on show was by students, in a space that had been designed around one client's shoe collections.
