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Buildings that breathe

Santiago Calatrava, the architect chosen for lower Manhattan's transit hub, engineers landmarks for life

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON | STAFF WRITER

June 22, 2004

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is designing the much-praised, bird-like dome of the World Tracde Center PATH station, as well as a stacked box condo on the East River. (Newsday Photo / Bruce Gilbert)

In the sunny showroom of Santiago Calatrava's Park Avenue town house, all museum-white walls and bleached wood floors, geometric sculptures seem frozen in mid-pirouette. Towers of black cubes separated by tiny steel cones, tethered by slender wires, stand in breathless equilibrium, as if the momentum of an instant ago were still trying to hurl them into the air.

The man who made these things - who has peppered the Western Hemisphere with buildings that appear to have slipped through loopholes in the laws of gravity - enters the room, looking surprisingly earthbound. An architect and engineer by trade, a sculptor and painter by avocation, the 52-year-old Calatrava has bestowed on the Spanish island of Tenerife a concert hall surmounted by a cresting wave. He has designed a bird-like transportation hub with movable wings for the World Trade Center site, and slung swooping bridges across rivers in Europe and California.

But as he pads into his home gallery dressed in a sober suit, he has the demeanor not of a showman or a visionary or a poet - all words that have been used to describe him - but of an affluent Mediterranean intellectual.

Speaking erudite Castilian Spanish that occasionally swerves into English, French, Italian and the odd Latin phrase, he extemporizes elaborate paragraphs filled with references to august historical precedents. Lacking the pad and marking pen that usually accompany his conversations, he illustrates his points by molding the air with his fingers. Once or twice, his Swedish wife, Tina, pops in and they have a brief exchange in German.

Architecture and engineering

"Until the 18th century, the figure of the architect and the figure of the engineer are completely mixed together," he says. "Look at Michelangelo, for example, who planned the fortifications of Florence and also designed the staircase for the Laurentian Library in Florence. Or Leonardo, the same. The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape."

In Calatrava's case, those objects assert themselves over the landscape with a kind of surrealistic confidence. Passengers headed for the airport in Lyon, France, board a bus in a terminal that resembles an aerodynamic cockroach. The Alamillo Bridge in Seville, and a similar new one across the Sacramento River in Redding, Calif., consists of a single tilted mast, supporting the span by cables.

His structures tend to resolve into metaphors, often several at once. The bridge is a man, leaning away from his load and tugging on a rope. Or it is a harp, its cables singing in the breeze. Or it represents speed itself, a mast blown back like the world experienced at high velocity.

Calatrava's buildings often evoke movement. They are best described in verbs: They soar, they lunge, crane, twist and arc. Rather than wading into metaphysical explanations of why this is true, Calatrava offers an engineer's rationale for designing dynamic structures.

"We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration. In force, you have the crystallization of movement. If I lean on this table, the moment in which the support disappears, my elbow will make a downward movement." Calatrava's buildings express the ineluctable fact that a structure will always want to collapse.

This might in theory have made him an odd choice to design a train station at the World Trade Center, a site defined by the literal collapse of two towers. What made Calatrava perfect for that task is the sacramental quality of even his most pragmatic projects. His stations and bridges look less like utilitarian public works than like pantheistic temples. Even BCE Place, an enclosed shopping street in Toronto, has the high, rhythmic vaults of a Gothic cathedral. The memorial aura of his winged design for the World Trade Center Transit Hub was instantly obvious.

Throughout his career, he has been hired by bureaucrats and elected officials because he ennobles infrastructure and supplies a sublime, humanistic rhetoric to go with every project. He can make a compelling connection between a subway platform and ancient Greece.

It seems somehow apt that on Sept. 11, 2001, he happened to be in Athens, working on the Olympic Stadium, which is now struggling toward completion in time for this summer's games. The next day, he went for a walk in the Plaka, the neighborhood at the foot of the Acropolis, and meditated on temples.

"From there, you can see columns embedded in the wall that supports the Acropolis," he says. "That's the old Parthenon, which was destroyed. But the city was reconstructed and a new Parthenon was built, bequeathing to us our great classical legacy. The attitude of that time is the same as ours: We believe in our own culture and in what those buildings meant. So reconstructing in a more brilliant way, and if possible in a more human way, in a way that is more usable, more transparent, more full of light - this is what we have to do."

He was born outside Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and the upbringing he describes is one of studious privilege: art school, long summer travels and a university life that continued until he was 30. He considered himself a painter until the day, at age 17, when he picked up a book on the French architect Le Corbusier, and the graceful masses of the master's buildings, the counterpoint of sumptuous curves and implacable angles, seduced him on the spot.

Yet he never abandoned his early crafts. Even today he develops ideas by filling artists' pads with figurative line drawings and watercolors and by working out the balance of forces in intricate arrangements of simple shapes. When he was invited to lecture at MIT, he began by showing slides of sculptures he had made out of children's blocks, a stone and lengths of string. In some cases, the link to the figurative idea remains clear, as in "Turning Torso," a high-rise in Malm", Sweden, that evolved from an anatomical study into a tower that twists around its central spine.

When Calatrava traces his aesthetic heritage back through the 20th century, he mentions artists and sculptors most: Picasso, Rodin, Calder, Henry Moore. Just as he sees no solid line between architecture and engineering, so he believes deeply in the continuity of the plastic arts: An idea worked out on a tabletop in clay, or in two dimensions, eventually can be adapted to the intricacies of an urban site: Architecture is useful sculpture, and a building that has lost its function can revert to sculpture, too.

"Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins," he says. "All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful. The Parthenon is now a great sculpture."

Stoking his clients

While he is involved in the long and laborious process of designing a building, Calatrava keeps his clients stoked with keepsakes of the process. His design for a new concert hall for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has yet to be made public, but he shows up in Atlanta monthly, bearing stacks of watercolors, bound into volumes.