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Calatrava's work may require technical expertise, but he draws inspiration from nature in his use of water and animal shapes
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A polymath is a person adept at various arts and sciences. So it is appropriate that Santiago Calatrava should be the designer of the City of Arts and Sciences being built in his native Valencia, Spain's third-largest city. Calatrava is an architect, an engineer, a painter and a sculptor. And while fame and fortune usually come late to visionary builders — America's Frank Gehry is 71, Britain's Norman Foster 65 — Calatrava has won comparable international acclaim at a mere 49.
With architecture studios in Valencia, Paris and Zurich, where he lives, Calatrava has a peculiarly animal way with concrete and steel, his buildings evoking huge eyes, venus flytraps, giant birds about to take flight, delicate arrangements of human bones. Many have foldable parts; all rely on the eye of an artist and the calculation of an engineer. One of his admirers, Swiss art historian Stanislaus von Moos says some Calatrava works seem to aim "less to show forces in equipoise than to suggest their potential breaking apart."
Such organic fragility and tension is only visual, of course. Like the Romans who left such an architectural legacy in Spain — they founded Valencia in 138 B.C. — Calatrava says, "our constructions are also for our children and grandchildren." He is referring particularly to bridges, his specialty. Apart from airports, schools, churches, stadiums, railway stations, even bus shelters around the world, Calatrava has designed nearly 50 bridges, more than half of them outside Spain. His drawings and calculations are now being transformed into spans in Buenos Aires, Milwaukee, Redding, Calif., Tel Aviv and Dublin.
For Calatrava, bridges go literally to the heart of many of the cities of Europe. "Cities like London or Paris or Cologne or Valencia had Roman names once. The Romans arrived at a river and used it as a natural frontier. They put up a military camp, then they built a bridge, and a fortress on the other side of it to protect the bridge and to collect a toll. If you go to these cities now you can find where the center was. Today, bridges belong both to the art of construction and also to the art of cultural expression. We have a lot of resources and materials that did not exist 100 years ago. It is a flourishing period for bridging."
An example of these new possibilities is Calatrava's Alamillo Bridge, one of many crossing the Guadalquivir River in the southern Spanish city of Seville. Calatrava's span across the 200-m-wide river has no piers and is held by cables stretching out from just one unstayed pylon leaning back from it at an angle of nearly 60°. The concrete-filled steel pylon reaches 142 m above the roadway.
Some fellow engineers initially described the design as imprudent and impractical. Today, the raked pylon both holds the bridge and gives those who walk or drive across it the chance to discuss whether it brings to mind, as some Seville citizens say, a giant erection, or, as Calatrava himself thinks, more a harp or a bird. "It is phallic, but I was mainly concerned with the lightness of traversing the river," he says.
Like much of Calatrava's work, the Alamillo Bridge can be traced to a sculpture, in this case a work he called Running Torso, a stack of marble cubes balanced by a taut wire. He has more than 70 pieces of sculpture, but they are not for sale. "They provide the basis of my research as an architect," he explains. "I take the paradigm of the natural to generate my architecture. My approach to sculpture and to architecture is always watching examples of the behavior of the natural world."
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