Contemporary Bridges
Santiago Calatrava Valls (1951-)
Upon entering Calatrava´s website (12) the visitor is greeted by an artist drawing an eye. The camera zooms in to first reveal Santiago Calatrava drawing and then a couple of images of his City of Arts and Sciences planetarium in Valencia (Spain, 1995-98). After, geometrical forms in various of his building moving to end up with an image of the Athens Olympic Sports Complex (Greece, 2004). This is the perfect synthesis of who he is and the kind of work he does.
Santiago Calatrava is not only one of the world's most notorious, innovative and talented architects but also and engineer and an artist. He is able to beautifully combine technology and architecture, art and science, structure and movement in projects that would seem impossible on paper. He successfully represents and generates novel and complex kinds of curved surfaces, which are all derived from nature and human forms.
Born in Benimamet, near Valencia, Spain, on July 28 th, 1951. He went to school in Valencia. He started his artistic inclination early, when he was only 8 years old, he enrolled the School of Arts and Crafts to learn drawing and painting. Years later, when he was 13, his mother sent him to Paris as an exchange student, so he could learn French and also be more exposed to art. Four years later he went to Zurich to learn German. He went back to Paris to study at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in June 1968, when he finished high school to find himself in the middle of the famous students protests and strikes that caused the eventual collapse of the Charles De Gaulle government. Not wanting to loose time, he went back to Valencia to reenter the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Crafts), studying there for the rest of the academic year.
In 1969, he entered the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valencia, in time to experience the repercussions of the Parisian revolt to the extent that the regular program of education was interrupted. Calatrava, unhappy by the situation, decided to develop with some other students, a course that involved visiting and documenting Iberian vernacular structures as opposed to official or mainstream architecture; somewhat an act of defiance for a young architect. Not only that, but also the prospective of self-education fitted his self propelled temperament as it had for Le Corbusier, the great rebel of the old avant-garde, who was in a great extent, and autodidact (13).
In 1974, after graduating and after taking a postgraduate course in urbanism, Santiago decided to go back to Zurich, this time as a student in the department of civil engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), from which he graduated five years later. He then started to work in his doctoral thesis titled On the Foldability of Space Frames, as well as working as an assistant at the Institute for Building Statics and Construction.
The dissertation raised the importance of analysis in creative design. Calatrava investigated how to design complex structures that could move and/or be transformed, without changing how the pieces were joined together. This was a new concept for most architects who, at the time, were devoted to immobile, stable structures. He also studied how to represent and generate complex and novel kinds of curved surfaces. This is what Tzonis (13) refers to as the analysis part of Calatrava´s work, to immediately talk about the analogy between figures represented in his sketchbooks, where the human body resembles folding structures. These analogies to the human body are a powerful tool to confront scientific and technological problems. The combination of both -analogy and analysis- added to Calatrava´s genius make him one of the best contemporary architects.
Calatrava´s Bridges (appendix 1)
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