Santiago Calatrava’s creations include some of the world’s most recognised landmarks. The prolific Spanish architect is achieving legendary status, but is also attracting a growing army of critics. Sophie Grove reports
Santiago Calatrava is an architect, engineer and philosopher, but above all, an artist. While his structures employ complex feats of modern engineering, they start with swiftly penned sketches: a bird in flight, a bull, an anatomical eye, a primitive nude. His desire to draw is compulsive. Over the past two decades the Spanish-born polymath has amassed a staggering archive of more than 70,000 sketches. “It a necessity for him,” says Michael Levin, the author of Calatrava: Artworks and someone who has spent long hours in his company. “When the rest of us are sleeping, eating, Calatrava is occupied with drawing. He doesn’t drive and uses every moment of free time – boring meetings, airports, and long car journeys – to create. He’s building a bank of shapes he doesn’t know what he’ll use for.”
What started out as spontaneous scribbles on endless reams of parchment paper, have morphed into some of the most monumental structures of our age. The opera house in Santa Cruz, Tenerife (Auditorio de Tenerife), is a crest of sinuous concrete that sits like a shell on the seashore. The Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain, has been likened to a harp and a swan in flight. Technically, it is the first of its kind – its single concrete mast is cantilevered at an asymmetrical 58-degree angle to bear the weight of the entire deck. In Lisbon, Portugal, the roof of his Oriente Station is inspired by an orchard. The 25-metre-high, Escher-like mesh of metal looks like a vast Amazonian canopy.
Calatrava’s inspirations are often organic forms. Indeed, his biomorphic constructions appear to live and breathe. If Leonardo da Vinci considered the human foot to be a “masterpiece of engineering and a work of art”, Calatrava felt the same about the torso. His twisted residential tower in Malmö, Sweden, derived from a sketched and then sculpted study of the human upper body. The tower’s lyrical, swiveling structure has an uncanny, anthropomorphic lilt. But this is Calatrava’s intention. “You can channel all the impulses of free thinking, free feeling, shape, form, the natural [flow], and this goes from the sketches and the human body into the sculptures,” the architect explained in a recent interview.
Calatrava’s public commissions are more than just buildings. They’re like civic cathedrals and often touch on something profound. His plans for the multibillion-dollar transportation hub on the site of the World Trade Center in New York City incorporates a 36m-high retractable roof that will open up to the sky. Calatrava himself described the feature as representing “souls ascending to heaven”.
These poetic forms are only made possible by some serious technical prowess. After an initial flurry of artistic expression Calatrava assumes the rigor of an engineer. Unusually for a profession that enshrines specialism – where engineers and architects often view each other with mutual suspicion – he is trained in both disciplines. After he graduated with a degree in architecture and a master’s in urbanism from the Superior Technical School of Architecture in Valencia, he signed up for a PhD in civil engineering in Zurich. It’s this synergy between the organic, the fanciful and nuts-and-bolts knowledge that allow Calatrava to reach heady, architectural heights.
“Usually, building is a business of compromise,” explains Michael Levin. “It starts with the engineer. They’ll say, ‘It’s a nice shape, but it’s not buildable.’ The amazing thing about Calatrava is that he can realise his free sketches. What looks like a whimsy shape, is in fact entirely buildable.”
Sometimes whimsy doesn’t travel well. Recently, outside Europe where public money is scarce and expectations high, his work has infuriated critics.
“It’s almost as if he’s not that interested once he’s got his big shape. That’s really deadly for an architect,” warns Witold Rybczynski, the architect, critic and Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, who was distinctly under whelmed by his visit to the Twisting Torso tower in Malmö. “From far away it was certainly striking. But when you get up close you can see the twisting created a lot of problems. Really, there [is] no logic or reason that a building should be twisted.”
Even his bridges have come under scrutiny. “It strikes me that they are rather contrived,” adds Rybczynski. “Engineers are critical of them because they often rely on hidden counterweights and they are not always very logical. Of course, they’re very dramatic looking. They become instant landmarks. But I’m not sure as bridges they make a lot of sense.”
It’s true that what looks like an effortless piece of über-engineering often involves a lot of work behind the scenes. In northern California, his 213m-long Sundial pedestrian bridge that crosses Sacramento River is a seamless translucent walkway, a seemingly simple design. In fact, the 1,600-ton structure uses enough concrete in the foundations to build 43 homes and enough cable to span 14 football fields. It also functions as a giant sundial.
Calatrava’s most recent commission – an S-shaped railway bridge in Jerusalem – has received a damming reception by local residents. Known as the Bridge of Strings, the curved suspension bridge navigates its way through the rather mundane approach to the city, its cables strung like an enormous violin. But some locals have labelled Calatrava’s project ostentatious and overpriced. And while it’s good to remember that most big budgets don’t usually come without some controversy, it’s also true that there are often vast public subsidies and spiralling costs behind many Calatrava commissions. In Venice, the cost of his sleek pedestrian crossing over the Grand Canal has escalated to € 35 million, amid complaints about everything from disabled access to decoration.
Calatrava is recognised by many as one of the most dynamic, daring and successful architects of his day. He’s a maverick, a master of the ‘Bilbao effect’.
His projects provide a quick lift to run-down urban centres. But in the competitive contemporary real estate market – as construction lulls and the cranes disappear from the New York skyline – his flamboyant work has become contentious. Plans for the 150-storey tower in Chicago have caused a furore across America. Donald Trump was among the first to weigh in. “I don’t think this is a real project. It’s a total charade,” he told the New York Times. Certainly, Calatrava’s premise for the corkscrew-shaped spire is enigmatic enough; “I know that Chicago is an Indian name,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “And I can imagine in the oldest time the Native Americans arriving at the lake and making a fire, with a tiny column of smoke going up in the air. With this simple gesture of turning one floor a little past another, you achieve this form.” It’s important not to underestimate Calatrava, the salesman. The true polymath also has bucket loads of charisma and knows how to woo his public. He befriends and inspires his patrons. Reportedly, he seduced the Chicagoan magnate, Christopher Carley, by taking out his notebook, sketching a dove and handing it to him as a gift. A few weeks later, Carley went on to commission the multimillion dollar, 610m Chicago Spire. Even the notoriously steely civic establishment in Chicago has been won over by Calatrava’s daring design. The city that invented the skyscraper can’t wait to have his swirling addition to the skyline. “The spire is sculptural,” says Lynn Osmond, President and CEO of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “We say the city is our museum and this is a wonderful addition to our museum. We’re enjoying watching the progress.”
In a world of grey office blocks and generic design, Calatrava is a visionary. His work pulses with energy. Before presenting him with the prestigious American Institute of Architect’s Gold Medal, Edward Kodet compared his work to music, announcing: “His vision elevates the human spirit.”
While Calatrava’s work may be complex, quirky and extremely costly, it is also lyrical. His bridges and buildings speak of something sublime. The organic creations may be controversial but they are also works of art. They are swiftly sketched visions made concrete: monuments to the unbridled imagination of a modern day Renaissance man.