DC | Spanish Ambassador Residence in Washington D.C.

Image: Spanish Ambassador Residence

This program is at capacity. Please email dc@arttable.org to be added to the waitlist. 

Join ArtTable DC for a visit to the art collection at the Spanish Ambassador Residence followed by a seated lunch hosted by the Spanish Ambassador’s wife, Mrs. Sol Oyarzum de Cabanas.

Until the late 1990s, the residence of the Spanish Ambassador was the magnificent Beaux-Arts mansion located in the 16^th street and designed by renowned American architect George Oakley Totte. When built, in 1922, it was part of a project conceived to develop the surrounding area as the center of social and diplomatic life in Washington, DC.  The building is today the Cultural Center of the Spanish Embassy.

In 1996, the government of Spain commissioned Rafael Moneo, Spain’s most celebrated architect and winner of the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize (the profession’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize) to build a new residence in Foxhall road.

The addition of the Moneo building makes this stretch of Foxhall an architectural oddity, in a distinguished sort of way, for directly across the street is the Kreeger Museum, designed by Philip Johnson in 1963. Johnson was the first Pritzker laureate, back in 1979.

The embassy reflects some of Spain’s more characteristic architectural traits in the use of bricks for the external walls and in the colorful Andalusian tiles that decorate the greenhouse-like patio extension that sits on the house’s southern façade.

Inside, numerous paintings and works of art represent the best of the Spanish artistic tradition, from Royal portraits to Flemish tapestries as well as some paintings by today’s most recognized Spanish Contemporary artists.

This program is for ArtTable members only.

Who’s attending this event? Click here to see who’s registered!

Thank you to Mrs Sol Oyarzum de Cabanas and his excellency the Spanish Ambassador.