Calatrava wins the Gold

By Alexander Tzonis



Less than a generation ago, the split between construction technology and cultural expression in architecture appeared to be irreversible. With the exception of a few "high-tech” buildings, mostly of limited appeal to the broader public, the humanistic unity of art and science in design looked as if it was irrevocably lost. It is remarkable how fast and unexpectedly the situation has changed. Many factors and people played a role in this reversal; without a doubt, one of the most significant contributors was Santiago Calatrava.

Calatrava’s buildings, engineering projects, and furniture taken together with his drawings, sculpture, and scientific research, manifested that a genuine unity of rational intelligence with poetry is still possible; a very rare synthesis in our time. His built projects succeeded in overcoming the barriers between pragmatism, infrastructure service, and intellectual expression. They restored a general enthusiasm for the art of construction, bringing back an excitement about it long gone since the 1950s. They dispelled the bias against technology as something by definition dull. Most important, they demonstrated that utilitarian artifacts do not have to be oppressive and disruptive but can evoke delight and a sense of identity.

At first glance, Calatrava's designs look complicated and perplexing. The complexity of their configuration and the "strangeness" of their shape are born out of a commitment to facing hard design problems without compromise, without conforming to the beaten track of reductive solutions. As the Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich (1983–90) shows, his structures operate on two levels. On a first level, they are intelligent technological solutions to programmatic functional demands. As a result, the kernel of the form of his projects appears direct and plain. Yet on a second level, they go beyond the limited and static problem-solving kind of design. They meet head-on economic, technological, environmental, social, and cultural challenges, acquiring intricate and rich forms.

The commitment to targets beyond narrow problem-solving objectives accounts for the primacy given to motion and movement in Calatrava's projects, and as a result their manifest dynamic spatial organization. In the Milwaukee Art Museum (2001), for example, key structures contain mobile parts and articulate streamline-shaped conduits to accommodate systems of circulation. But they also imply movement appearing to have been designed to the "critical point": in engineering, the state beyond which, if a certain variable in a structure is exceeded, the interatomic bonds of its body will be broken and the structure will fly in all directions at once. Yet, there are more profound cultural, epistemological, and moral reasons explaining the perplexity raised by Calatrava's structures. In aesthetic terms, the idea of the "critical point" is translated into the idea of the "pregnant moment," the figure that represents through its form both past and future states of a body. We can see that clearly in most of his bridges: in the bent arch of the Volantin Footbridge in Bilbao (1990–97) or the leaning pylon of the Alamillo (1987–92) or the Light Rail Train Bridge in Jerusalem (begun in 2002). In other words, the structure appears to capture the moment as if falling, but it is not; it seems to be rising, but it is not. Almost all of Calatrava's projects combine into one figure these two apparently contradictory states of a structure, leaning on the brink of imminent collapse and on the verge of standing up.

After having gone to so much effort to reach the satisfactory technological ends to make the structure optimally lasting and durable, Calatrava appears to enjoy and exploit, like an acrobat or a dancer, this state of suspense. One can also claim that he wants the user of his works equally to enjoy it. The question is how, and perhaps more important why, so many people experience the same enjoyment. The answer seems to be that Calatrava in these dynamic structures constructs a metaphor that alerts us that optimal technological solutions are necessary. The sense of perplexity and wonder embedded in his designs has to do with the very human creative yearning for remaking one's life, for repairing wrong: the never-ending search for a meaning and a definition of the good life.

It is these principles that make Calatrava's structures so appealing and so uniquely engaging, that give them coherence and rigor at all scales, from their general configuration to their individual details. A series of five new bridges over the Trinity River and future lakes in Dallas, Texas (1998), and a group of three bridges over the Hoofdvaart in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands (1999–2004), demonstrate that it is these principles that account for the felicitous fit of the new structures into the landscape, the excitement they generate, despite the fact that they stand conspicuously in full view. Similarly, within historic urban settings, Calatrava's projects do not simulate forms of the past, nor do they hide or sink. Yet they do not offend, as one can see in his Lusitania Bridge (1988–91) in Spain standing next to a famous Roman bridge. In their cutting-edge technology and strangeness of appearance, these structures make their users or viewers reengage with the present while honoring the past. Finally, situated in socially challenging areas like Ground Zero, neighborhoods undergoing economic decline, or obsolescent industrial sites, Calatrava's works do not disrupt existing human ties, as most architectural interventions have since the 1960s. Without the rhetoric or demagogy of populism, they bring hope.

To be effective, the poetics of movement requires rigor and control; and to operate on the two levels mentioned above demands knowledge that participates in multiple domains. This cornucopia of knowledge was accumulated by Calatrava through continuous, intense "patient research," as Le Corbusier once said. He studied at an arts and crafts academy in Valencia, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Valencia, and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, in addition to countless years of self-instruction on vernacular and international architecture. The subsequent method Calatrava has chosen for much of his research over the years has been envisioning possible schemes within existing precedents rather than counting and computation; and the technique to carry this out was sketching. The precedents Calatrava used to recruit by analogy and drawing were flying birds, bulls, and in particular, the human body, all having structural similarities with the new artifacts to be conceived. Calatrava produced an endless series of sketches of real-life objects offering a variety of configurations filling up an endless series of notebooks. All humans are endowed with these two contradictory, yet complementary intelligences: analysis and analogy. Few cultivate them to develop their complementary potential further. Calatrava did. In this respect, as mentioned in the beginning, Calatrava succeeded not only in delivering good architecture, but also in changing the way people think about architecture, bringing science and technology closer to art. Perhaps less known is that, reciprocally, he is also influencing engineering, bringing design— thinking through vision and envisioning—back to technology.

Perhaps where Calatrava exerted the most important influence and where his impact will be more decisive is with the generation of architects to come and their attitude toward technology. Clearly, Calatrava's spirit of experimentation combined with genuine enthusiasm, but also solid realism, has helped dispel a climate of indifference if not suspicion for things technical that was building up in a large number of academic institutions for the past three decades.

~taken from architectural record online