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This approach is reflected in Calatrava's biggest project so far, Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, which had a budget of about $200 million, but is believed to be costing far more. Its first building, opened in 1998, is an eye-shaped hemisphere set in a huge pond. Its "pupil" is a planetarium, also containing an IMAX cinema and a laserium. In November the Science Museum opened, a building of white concrete and cascades of glass that from some angles conjures a 220-m-long dinosaur's spine caught in an ice floe. From another standpoint, it's a soaring forest of petrified trees. Like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, container tends to compete with content, in Valencia's case a brilliant series of scientific "edutainment" displays where the main rule imposed by director Manuel Toharia is that "it is prohibited not to touch the exhibits."
There are also areas devoted to natural science, and to two Nobel winners — both for medicine — Spain's Severo Ochoa and France's Jean Dausset. Still under way at the city are Calatrava's 1,800-seat opera house, with an open-air auditorium for another 2,500 people, and a vast underground oceanographic park, its wave-like roof designed by another Spanish architect, Félix Candela.
The City of Arts and Sciences was commissioned by the government of Valencia, the Generalitat. "In our language," says Calatrava, "generalitat means 'everybody.' It is a beautiful, very old word. So the client is not a single person, it is everybody."
The city he designed for that client has been compared to Moorish or Mogul styles, even to the Taj Mahal for its extensive use of water. "You can't avoid what people write," sighs Calatrava. "What I have tried to create is a city that is within Valencia, but lives by itself. I wanted to give it the character of a park. I am proud of the fact that people can walk through and around the main buildings without paying. It is a city to be discovered by promenading. There are more than 7 km of promenade. This is very Mediterranean, very adequate for the climate of Valencia. So is the water, which offers freshness and also mirrors and duplicates the buildings."
Binding this "city" to the rest of Valencia is critical. "When using public money on big architectural projects you have to see that it generates synergy. If you stand in the middle of the City of Arts and Sciences today you will see more than 40 cranes around it. If a project is beautiful and well thought out, it draws people, a previously depressed area becomes one of the most attractive places to live and to stay."
But aren't many vast exhibition projects becoming white elephants — the Millennium Dome in London, Expo 2000 in Hanover? "Hanover may be a fiasco now, but, like Lisbon or Seville, it will be left with an unbelievable infrastructure. You have to look at Expos as an investment, as with the Olympics. In Valencia, one of Europe's biggest container ports, the whole idea was to link the harbor to the city, particularly a depressed area next to the harbor."
Despite nine honorary doctorates and dozens of awards — the latest the Meadows Arts Prize presented in Dallas, Texas — Calatrava's success does not sit well with some critics at home. Architecture writer Luis Fernández-Galiano wrote in the Spanish daily El País after the announcement of the Meadows prize that he has sat on many architecture competition juries "and never have I encountered animosity like that provoked by the projects and works of the Valenciano." Fernández-Galiano himself says Calatrava's work is "among the most important and representative of our time," but in the same breath refers to the "colosalismo" of the Alamillo Bridge, "with its useless harp, monumentalizing nothing."
It is never easy to be a prophet, or a polymath, in your own land. Perhaps more so if you were born at sea level in Spain and choose to live in the mountains of Switzerland. Santiago Calatrava does not appear to place much store by the views of many Spanish critics, Fernández-Galiano's included, but he insists that both architecture and engineering "are art as much as painting, sculpture, theater and literature."
Which means he will probably have to die before he wins over some people. Meanwhile, he can make do with the pleasure of the majority, if not the generalitat, of those who promenade around and across his works of art.
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