Tag Archives: Calatrava

calatrava shows his colours

Posted on by
Reply

Calatrava’s modern design of the Peace Bridge (current construction in Calgary, Canada) marks a departure from the architect/engineer’s favoured white and neutral colour schemes. This gives us pause to consider the importance of colour as an element in the modern design of architecture.

Historically, the Western taste has been culturally influenced by the Renaissance copying of ancient Greek and Roman stone architecture. These buildings, temples lying in bleached ruin however – no longer bare the brash blues and yellows archaeologists have since discovered were their main exterior colours. Statues, beautifully carved from the purest white marble (as for example, on the Parthenon) were in fact painted bright red, increasing their visibility from long distances under the Athenian sun. It would be interesting to speculate what sense and profound uses of colour we would have culturally inherited by these eye-popping schemes had they survived the ravages of Time.

An aspect of white is the way in which through light it captures a form’s sculptural, rather than linear quality, a factor that Santiago Calatrava, a trained artist and sculptor –  aswell as architect and engineer –  is keenly aware.

Gerret Reitveld’s 1923 ‘De Stijl’ Red Blue Chair serves a clear example, famous for its bright planar colour scheme. Colour’s impact can be appreciated when compared to its earlier and lesser-known all-white and natural ply versions created from 1918. Our perception of the form is significantly altered.

Colour serves to separate elements, drawing attention to abstract planes and lines. White instead tends to focus the eye on form’s integration. Calatrava’s neutral schemes from his most recognised complex bridge and building spaces appear unified, overtly sculptural, as if carved from a single body.

In recent work however, it appears Calatrava is exploring the possibilities and effects of bright infusions of colour. The City of Calgary’s proposed footbridge is one such project - its extreme design integration allowing for greater articulation through colour. As with the bright infusion purple with teh addition of ‘The Agora’ to his all-white City of Arts and Sciences, (Valencia Spain) Caltrava’s bright red schemes points to an exciting new stage in the architect’s career.

The looping coils of the Peace Bridge design disperses structural load more evenly than a typical post and span construction, increasing material efficiency while serving as a design element to support the tread of the span, reaching above to glass-shelter pedestrians from snow and wind. It is a masterfully integrated and woven structural form no less coherent for its distinctly ‘Canadian’ red.

This stunning animation (approx. 3 mins) captures the project through Calgary’s dramatic seasonal changes, and points to the creative evolution in the designs of one of the world’s most ‘colourful’ architects ♦

bridging a chord: calatrava in jerusalem

Posted on by
Reply

 Jerusalem’s Chords Bridge by architect Calatrava marks an important moment of emotional and urban renewal for the ancient city. The Chords Bridge’s 118m-canted pylon and asymmetric cable-stayed span is its highest structure, crossing a nexus of major road routes. It is a pedestrian and (beginning August 2011) light rail link that connects the city with Jerusalem’s outskirts.

Its defiant posture and unique engineering, set against an historic neighbourhood, has also connected along the span of its construction- beginning to end- with fierce criticism.

Nir Alon, freelance journalist, has pointed to cost overruns, and delays in linking Jerusalem’s first light rail systems which the bridge carries. In ‘Jerusalem’s Calatrava Bridge: Beauty or Egocentric Monstrosity?’ Alon leaves the reader in no doubt that he faults its design for problems and delays, referring to its long period of unveiling as “a bridge to nowhere”. “Jerusalem,” he writes,

“has just joined Valencia, Seville, Lisbon, Lyon and other cities in the world proudly displaying Calatrava’s monumental designs.”

A more important question lies however in whether civil projects should invite opportunities for the creation of landmarks and individual creativity. Do Valencia, Seville, and Lyon share the distinction of ‘egocentric monstrosities’ or, do they share- as with Jerusalem’s Chords Bridge-  a truly distinctive landmark, a bridge creative of geographic moments literally and spiritually transporting reattachment to ‘place’? Do they carry more than just a load span? Structures such as Seville’s Alamillo Bridge (also by Calatrava) have become sources of civic pride and urban regeneration. Could a “conventional concrete bridge” costing half the Chords Bridge $70M price tag?

During construction, Architectural Record critic Esther Hecht noted arguments that Jerusalem is a ‘poor city’, with “enough monuments to attract tourists and cannot afford another”. Both parts of this statement would seem to contradict one another here.

Is it ‘enough’ that many of Jerusalem’s historic landmarks are also recognized sites of contemporary discord as well as history?

Has it enough of another kind, so many that the Chords Bridge need not have gained international attention as modern, secular, an engineering marvel in the heart of Jerusalem that links light rail commuters and pedestrians, alleviates hourly peak traffic by up to 23000 cars, and is shared by all the city’s inhabitants? That reaches heavenwards and across town, linking tourists to the city’s ancient wonders while attracting its own?

The Chords Bridge, coming as it does during the 60th anniversary of Israel, may mark a unique and majestic site of re-attachment, an engineering feat, a cause for wonder and celebration in a city in need of new journeys ♦[Photos sourced and attributed from Flickr Commons]

building a masterpiece: calatrava in milwaukee

Posted on by
1

 Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion, Milwaukee Art Museum,  (Photo by mjuzenas)

News  services and online media are reporting on the excitement leading up to next month’s ‘Building a Masterpiece: Santiago Calatrava and The Milwaukee Art Museum’ exhibit (Sept 8-Jan 1). The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) is celebrating the anniversary of the building with a self-exhibit of the Quadracci Pavilion- now a world famous architectural icon for the city.

The exhibit marks 10 years since 2001, when the art museum’s opening saw its distinctive robot wings first machine into life, their movements beckoning visitors into the facility.

Exhibiting the ‘masterpiece’ – locals refer to the building simply as ‘The Calatrava’- signals the long-term gains, to the museum and the city, of a bold, imaginative architectural statement, and the creative courage on behalf of its architect and Museum board.

Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the futuristic exhibition space was the Spanish-born architect’s first completed work built in the US. Submitting to the building’s design competition, Calatrava conceded the relatively new city had given the designer pause after a lifetime career designing  modern bridges and stations against the backdrop of Europe’s more historic centers. The year of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s new pavilion completed however, TIME Magazine hailed the architecture ‘Top Design of 2001’.

Quadracci Pavilion, Interior by Santiago Calatrava (Photo by O. Palsson)

Despite critics’ initially railing against its ‘exhibitionist’ design and construction continuing amid reports of cost over-runs the art museum building’s daring originality, strong lines, and bridges to the surrounding landscape have proven itself a true exhibit, a financially repayed landmark and tourist destination.

‘Building a Masterpiece’ also displays the architect’s watercolors and models, “works of art in themselves—that track the evolution of the building’s design” reports Chief Art Museum Curator Brady Roberts to the Chicago Tribune. He says,

Calatrava’s “models reveal the complex development of the moving wings … one of the most spectacular architectural elements in the world.”

Viewers will witness through Calatrava’s drawings his search for design sources in Nature and the body, rather than architectural precedents.

Calatrava has trained as artist, engineer and architect. Rare in an age of specialization it has perhaps allowed a celebrated blending of function, dizzying mechanical feat and pure fantasy. ‘Building a Masterpiece’-  housing and forming an exhibit- builds on this blend and offers insight into Calatrava’s art.

If only more of our civic structures could repay as much ♦

(Photos sourced and attributed from Flickr Commons]

introducing calatrava

Posted on by
2

I once read that, Calatrava, one of the world’s most acclaimed modern architects, keeps a skeleton in his studio. A skeleton of a dog…

Through the years of my college degree in architecture, I’d also admired early modern architect Louis Sullivan for his principle that, Form follows function. Sullivan, believer in studying natural forms, not just referred to them in his buildings, but studied the processes Nature refined plants and other living things; the way bodies and forms efficiently and capably suit a function, their means of survival.

Window detail of Carson Pirie Scott Building, Chicago. (Photo by Terence Faircloth)

In Sullivan’s 1890’s, this challenged the many architects of his time who borrowed from classical styles of Greece and Rome, building skyscrapers and modern American institutions that mimicked forms from ancient temples, or revivalists building in the gothic styles of medieval Europe.

Millenium Park, Chicago, simulating the Doric construction of Ancient Greece (Photo by Patrick Malon)

This ‘borrowing’– we notice some variants today- sees a building as for appearance, with little heed to the function these buildings serve or their true construction.

Sullivan, and a great many of my favourite modern architects to follow, instead set out to create their own individual styles, many as I discovered in Santiago Calatrava holding the notion that buildings’ form must suit the purpose for which they are built.

In Calatrava’s works, I see today’s Louis Sullivan. Admiring his buildings, I can’t help but notice Calatrava’s incorporation of natural forms and ideas striving both practical purpose and to delight us in their ‘fitness’ to perform.

I’d like to share with you in following posts how, importantly, Calatrava harnesses this principle in designing exciting, dazzling architecture, reviving  form following function.

Looking up through the ceiling of Calatrava's Allen Lambert Galleria, Toronto (Photo by A. Schoeberlein)

1) Individuality. Calatrava has a unique and recognizable style, yet no two of his buildings or bridges appear the same, but designed as a reference to a problem solved, the individual nature of each setting.

2) Movement. Many of Calatrava’s buildings incorporate machined movement, so his dynamism becomes literal. Themes and designs of his buildings are enhanced by ornamentation, and living action, creating new language in architecture.

3) Optimisation.† What this term means can be best illustrated by looking at the body. Carrying a heavy load, our arm flexes its muscles, broadening along the line of force.

Calatrava's Leige Station, Leige. (Photo by Bert Kaufmann)

The bones of the arm are also thicker at the points of stress, the joints of connection. To ascertain what makes Calatrava’s style, I’ve noticed how Calatrava designs supports and beams of his buildings to taper and lean into the line of force, so we viewers see  the weight load of a building’s shelter actively supported. The result? His buildings don’t appear to stand, so much as more efficiently shoulder and thrust, creating the dynamic emphases we find in Nature.

It explains why for Calatrava, even a canine skeleton can be an important model for study. ♦

† see Tzonis, A. (1999) Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics of Movement Thames & Hudson: London.

[images sourced and attributed from Flickr Commons]

buildings that wave to us?

Posted on by
2

When we think of stone and concrete buildings the words movement, flow and waving don’t come readily as descriptors. For centuries, architecture has exploited inert stability to create feelings of permanence from these favoured materials. The Parthenon, its stone base atop the Acropolis, the stone buttresses that guard like giant sentinels around gothic cathedrals. These buildings ‘move’ us, yet stand quite still.

Now these feelings may change- change being the ‘operative’ style of architect Santiago Calatrava.

The Spanish-born designer/engineer is the purveyor of a revolution in architecture, devoted to displaying Nature’s constant ability to move and shift.

Montjuic Tele-Comm. Tower, Barcelona (Photo by Christopher Michel)

Famous for his dramatic bridges which often feature tensioned masts suspending huge spans across rivers, there are also buildings such as his Lyon TGV station, where sweeping organic forms depict the sense of speed and excitement of travel.

His Montjuic Tower, Barcelona, leans and counterbalances, supported like a dancer in ballet, limbs outstretched at the most dramatic moment of equipoise.

These buildings have an easy imagination of movement, of physics diagrams – all pressing forces – drawn large and imposing. Instead they form and function as telecommunications towers and town halls.

Calatrava’s latest projects however, literally move, machines gesturing for our closer attention. With Calatrava, his robot buildings can unfold, rotate and undulate, acting as we act, describing movements as living sculpture. Calatrava’s work- often bare, white, and sharing many of the forms of the body, are not decorative in any traditional sense. Instead, moving parts provoke our own movement and function.

This is Calatrava’s most astounding achievement. Consider the widespread sense that we approach buildings only as passive viewers, leading to buildings decorated or ornamented as something primarily of appearance. Yet buildings critically house our active movement, and shape them.

Milwaukee Art Museum (Photo by Ken Ilio)

Consider his Milwaukee Art Museum, describing its lakeside connection to the water with mechanical arms, symbolising the wing motions of birds in the surrounding landscape. When the museum closes, so do these arms, or change according to other movements in Nature- wind and solar conditions in an architecture that is responsive.

In his birthplace Valencia, Calatrava designed its planetarium, a spherical planet form, with its opening and shutting roof acting like an observing, moving eye.

These forms and motions do not simply adorn these buildings- they are the buildings themselves. Rather than functioning as signs for the building- they are the buildings signalling. Not only are they important visual elements, but kinetic ones also- occupying and defining space, but also moving and describing it. They symbolise what buildings seemingly never do- change.

This literally moving architecture challenges us to imagine not only changing Nature to live in it, but living in a changing Nature. A ‘future written in stone’ now waves to us instead with the hand of Calatrava.♦

City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia (Photo by Victor Abellon)

[images sourced and attributed from Flickr Commons]