The many arts of Santiago Calatrava

The bridges and buildings of Santiago Calatrava can be found on four continents, from Qatar to Valencia to Sacramento to Buenos Aires, and many more are under construction. Qatar commissioned Calatrava to build a photography museum to house the government’s 15,000 photos and he responded by creating a smart building that adjusts the amount of light it allows. In California, the Sundial footbridge serves pedestrians crossing the Sacramento River and provides accurate time one day each year. In Argentina, the Bridge of the Woman represents a couple dancing the tango and connects foot traffic in an area where streets are named primarily after women.
Architect, engineer, and sculptor Santiago Calatrava literally marks the world with his designs, which serve their designated purpose but offer viewers and users a much larger experience. Born in Valencia in 1951, the Spanish architect’s opus and reputation have grown steadily since he completed his first small projects in Switzerland 25 years ago.
Calatrava spent his childhood in Valencia but at the age of eight, because of his early interest in art, his parents enrolled him in the Arts and Crafts School there for formal training in both drawing and painting. In the early 1960s when Santiago was thirteen, his parents took advantage of the recently opened borders to send him to Paris as an exchange student where he continued his study of art. He also spent time in Switzerland for additional art instruction.
After completing high school, he headed to Paris planning to enroll in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but it was June 1968. Paris was picking up the pieces of a revolt and strike that had lasted all spring and involved millions of students and workers. Although the rebellion was ended in late May, pockets of resistance held out here and there for a few more weeks. Students at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts had been actively involved in the riots, printing thousands of flyers to be plastered around the city. It was a time of chaos, and Calatrava returned to Spain where he enrolled in the recently opened Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, (Technical School of Architecture) in Valencia. There he earned a degree in architecture and added a post-graduate course in urbanism.
During his college years, he and fellow students undertook projects that led to two books about vernacular architecture in Valencia and Ibiza. Nevertheless, he graduated from the school without a clear sense of direction about his professional ambitions. Because he was fascinated with the mathematical precision of many historical buildings, he decided to follow that interest, and he enrolled in the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, to study civil engineering. It was during his time as a graduate student that he met and married a Swedish-Italian woman, Robertina, who was enrolled in law school.
He received his PhD in 1979 and was hired as an assistant at the Institute, from where he began receiving assignments. During that year and the next, he contributed designs for modifications to several buildings in Switzerland, including a school in Wohlen. His revised entryway for the school uses the fan effect that has been a recurring theme in Calatrava’s work, inviting boundless metaphors and similes. The modified ceiling he created for the library is a curved shallow concave form with recessed lighting between its perimeter and the right angles of the room’s original angles. Some people have said the addition reminds them of open pages of a book; its apparent lightness completely counters the concrete used for its construction. This early project foreshadowed strong themes in Calatrava’s later work.
During this period of gaining small assignments for improvements on buildings, he realized that in order to become established in his field, and attract the kinds of commissions he desired, he needed to enter competitions. He won his first competition in 1983 and designed the Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, where he had established an office. The station needed to accommodate a third track, which Calatrava achieved by removing part of the hillside, and then rebuilding it with a promenade and reconstructing the bank of the hill above. He used steel beams to create a pergola that acts as a canopy for waiting passengers and where ivy might flourish.
Once Calatrava began receiving commissions, his acclaim grew quickly. In 1984, he designed and built his first bridge: the Bach de Roda in Barcelona, which was installed in one of the city’s poorer sections as part of the revitalization in the run-up to the 1992 Olympics. The bridge was followed by a concert hall in Suhr, Switzerland, transformation of the Tabourettli Cabaret in Berne, and both the Alamillo Bridge in Seville for Expo ‘92, and the Lusitania Bridge in Merida.
These early designs have a direct line to the work that Calatrava is doing today – parabolas, canopies, pinnacles and spars. He opens space at the same time it is being defined.
Barely four years into his career, in 1987, Calatrava received the Auguste Perret Prize from the Union of International Architects, an association of well over a million members representing 116 countries. The prize, awarded triennially, honors applied technology in architecture, and the event was a grand achievement in both honoring and promoting the work of the 36-year-old architect.
The energy that spurred on the young architect continues. Calatrava works from 4:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then again late in the afternoon so that he can have time with his family, which includes four children. With active projects in several countries, he travels a great deal.
One of the plums in his very busy 1990s was a call home. He received the commission to design a Valencia project called the City of Arts and Sciences, a large complex composed of several structures. Valencia wanted both to create a cultural center in the city and enjoy the renewal that accompanies such a project. The city within the city was built on the edge of the dry beds of the diverted River Turia, and the structures that comprise it take your breath away. One design after the other competes for attention with unexpected shapes and angles and elements. There are no boxes with square corners, no tidy towers that rise straight.
Visitors might begin with the shiny wedge-shaped building that seems to rise from the water like a giant alligator eye. This structure, it turns out, has a great deal to do with vision, since it houses a planetarium, an I-Max theater, and a laserium. A second building in the city is an opera house, which appears to sit on a raised platter with a tulip-split lid about to be lifted above its delicious contents. The Museum of Science also wears exterior layers. The structure resembles a long hall composed of two walls – one straight and one angled, Pythagorean-style. From the ridge of the roof a full row of regular curved teeth offer visual protection to the science that blooms indoors. If the sun-white spikes are sun-bleached bones – and skeletons resonate in Calatrava’s work – from past ages, so much the better.
It is impossible to understand all of the influences that form an artist’s vision, but some of the elements that contributed to Calatrava’s art and craft are strongly suggested by his chosen activities and by the history he was born into. His fascination with bodies in motion and with their skeletons comes partly from his many years in art classes, but there’s also the issue of Fifi. When Calatrava was a student in Zurich, he and his veterinary student friend agreed to swap some drawings for a dog’s skeleton. The bones were dubbed Fifi and apparently still inhabit Calatrava’s study. There’s also the matter of his heritage.
Valencia, Spain’s third largest city, contains a personal history for Calatrava that includes Franco’s imprisonment in the 1930s of the Senors Calatrava, including Santiago’s father and uncles and his grandfather. In addition, his mother traces her lineage to Raphael Valls, a prominent rabbi who was burned at the stake in 1691. The family history includes their forebearers having been “chuetas,” Jewish people who ate pork in public during the Inquisition in order to prove they were not Jews and thus save their lives. It is not surprising that a talented, polyglot artist with seemingly boundless energy and ambitions might ponder these dark times from the past and relish his talent to create object after object to bring joy and light and wonder to the world.