Is Santiago Calatrava "the world's most hated architect", as the design mag Co.Design wondered aloud in December 2014? Well, maybe to the legions of rival architects who have lost a prize commission or two to the flamboyant pen of the Spanish architectural maestro from Valencia.
The list of the disappointed grew even longer this week with the news that a Calatrava design had been selected for the UAE’s national pavilion for Dubai’s Expo 2020, the second high-profile project in the city bagged by the Spaniard this year.
Eight other architectural firms fell by the wayside during the seven-month Expo design competition. Another six went home empty-handed in February, when Calatrava was named as the designer of the vast observation tower planned for Dubai Creek.
One doesn't have to imagine what the disgruntled losers might be muttering right now, because back in 2014, Co.Design eavesdropped on a symposium featuring two of America's biggest architectural names, and the term "catty" doesn't do justice to their comments about Calatrava.
At the time, Calatrava was under fire for his design for the new railway station at New York’s World Trade Center, replacing the one destroyed during the 9/11 attacks. Rather like his design for Expo 2020, the station relies on the imagery of bird flight – in the case of New York, a dove being released from a child’s hands.
Back in 2014, Michael Graves, a celebrated US architect who died last year, described the appointment of Calatrava to design the World Trade Center station as "a waste". Graves dismissed the Spaniard as "arrogant", then, according to the Co.Design writer Karrie Jacobs, launched into "his best Calatrava impression: 'I will make wings for you, and this subway station will cost $4 billion'." It was, noted Jacobs, "rare to hear important figures in architecture publicly attack a colleague with such undisguised venom".
There has been something of a witch-hunt for Calatrava in the United States, personified by a catalogue of his supposed failures published by The New York Times in September 2013. The "star architect", sniffed the newspaper, "collects critics as well as fans". It then rounded up those critics for a tour of previous Calatrava projects, pointing out supposed flaws and cost overruns.
"What you see over and over again is that rather than searching for functionality or customer satisfaction, he aims for singularity," the president of Bilbao's architects' association told The New York Times. "The problem is that Calatrava is above and beyond the client."
But his defenders say cost overruns, delays and litigation are par for the course on major projects, and can rarely be laid at the door of the architect. Besides, as Jacobs pointed out in Co.Design, "the real problem may have … more to do with who and what Calatrava is. He's an architect whose reputation is based on form, not function [and] in this era, the grand aesthetic gesture is deeply suspect."
Calatrava shrugged off the sniping: “There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.”
Yes, the World Trade Center station ran over time, and over budget (from US$2bn in 2004 to $4bn today). But after the station opened last month, something extraordinary happened. Walk through the soaring, cathedral-like main hall outside of rush hours, and you could be forgiven for thinking that dozens of travellers had been swept off their feet by a subterranean hurricane. As the Tribeca Trib reported, they are being swept off their feet by the sheer beauty of the place.
"Sprawled out on the sleek, white marble floor of the main hall," reported the Trib, "they stare skyward, like stargazers on a summer night, awed by the sight and selfie potential of the building's soaring, 160-feet-high steel-ribbed walls."
As Architectural Record noted in 2013: "Calatrava's buildings have the power to inspire".
Santiago Calatrava Valls was born in Valencia on July 28, 1951. After secondary school, he attended art school, before graduating from Valencia’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, followed by postgraduate studies in urbanism.
Moving to Zurich, in 1979 he graduated as a qualified civil engineer from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, before setting up his first architectural and engineering practice in the city in 1981.
He continues to base himself in the city, alternating between there and his practice in New York, and has another office in Doha, where his stunning design for the US$12bn Sharq Crossing bridge and tunnel complex is reportedly on hold.
Calatrava, who always describes himself as “an architect and an engineer”, also considers himself an artist, and connections can be found between his art and architecture. Concepts first devised as sculptures have emerged again and again, re-expressed as the inspiration for buildings.
"I consider architecture as an art, like painting, sculpture, dance and music, and the most abstract of all of them, simply because it nourishes itself from all the disciplines," Calatrava told ArchDaily in September.
Certain motifs are repeated throughout his work – the dominant use of white; the interspersing of glass and steel to form sinuous, organic forms reminiscent of ribs or the spines of feathers – that there seems to be a contradiction when he adds: “It is almost a sin to repeat yourself.”
But to note only the commonality of Calatrava’s vocabulary is akin to criticising Picasso for having used blue too much during his blue period. Absorb each building in context – the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia; Florida Polytechnic University; Milwaukee Art Museum; Gare do Oriente station in Lisbon – and it’s clear that though part of a distinct oeuvre, each structure stands alone, powerful and elegant in the space for which it was created.
Calatrava is now bringing his inimitable style to the UAE. Last month, shortly before the announcement that he had won the competition to design the Expo 2020 pavilion, his design for a monumental observation tower for the heart of Emaar Properties’ Creek Harbor development in Dubai was unveiled.
Not for the first time, Dubai has shown it knows what it’s doing when it comes to commissioning eye-catching buildings that will bring the world to its door. Not satisfied with having the world’s tallest building, if rumours are true it may be planning to rival it with another, due to open in 2020 – Expo year.
There’s a twist; whereas the Burj Khalifa is to be gazed at, Calatrava’s observation tower at Creek Harbour is to be gazed from – out across the city and its ever-growing collection of architectural marvels.
“With the tower, we are delivering a compelling destination that will add long-term economic value to Dubai and the Emirates,” said Mohamed Alabbar, the chairman of Emaar Properties, when details were released last month.
Like all globetrotting architects – during the past 30 years, he has worked in 70 countries – Calatrava knows how to synchronise his vision with local imperatives. His design for Expo 2020, inspired by a falcon in flight, “captures the story we want to tell the world about our nation”, said the National Media Council chairman Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber when the winning design was announced.
Once, he said, Sheikh Zayed had used falconry expeditions “to forge connections between tribes and to create a distinct national identity which ultimately led to the founding of the United Arab Emirates”. Now, the falcon would symbolise “how we are connecting the UAE to the minds of the world and how as a global community we can soar to new heights through partnership and cooperation”.
Across town, to be built on a site from which it will distract the eye even from the Burj Khalifa, the graceful sweep of the shimmering observation tower “is rooted in classical art and the culture of Dubai itself”, says Calatrava.
Throughout his career, he said at the launch, “I have used technology and engineering as a vehicle for beauty and art. This project is an artistic achievement, inspired by the goal of making this space a meeting point for citizens, not only from Dubai and the UAE but all across the world. It is a symbol of belief in progress.”
As the visitors to Calatrava's World Trade Center station are affirming, all the carping about arrogance and favouring form over function is forgotten in the presence of his work. The station, concluded Co.Design's Karrie Jacobs, is "absolutely gorgeous … I'm wowed by Calatrava's aesthetic virtuosity … largely missing elsewhere on the World Trade Center site".
Standing on Dallas’s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge at its opening in 2012, she had “a visceral understanding of what Calatrava, the ultimate practitioner of architecture as an art form, brings to the table”. The bridge was “an object of startling beauty in a city not known for having any.”
The same cannot be said for the architectural cookie jar that is Dubai, where Calatrava’s twin projects will be right at home.
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