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A
Clue to What's to Come at Ground Zero
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October
26, 2003 By FRED A. BERNSTEIN |
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Walking
around Santiago Calatrava's Park Avenue town
house is like helicoptering over some of the
world's most
striking buildings. On one pedestal is a
bronze sculpture that resembles the
architect's birdlike addition to the
Milwaukee Art Museum. In another room, an
assemblage of steel cables and ebony cubes
echoes his twisting apartment
tower in Malmo, Sweden. And upstairs is a
bronze sculpture in the form of a long, curved
wing. "This one," he says, "is
Tenerife."
Mr. Calatrava is just back from Santa Cruz de
Tenerife, the largest city on the largest of
the seven Canary Islands.
There, off the northwest coast of Africa, he
has produced an astonishingly photogenic opera
house. Above its main
space a 1,600-seat auditorium in the shape
of a tilted cone a winglike canopy rises
almost 200 feet before
swooping back to earth. The building can look
like a turtle, a crescent moon, an eyelid, a
cresting wave, a helmet, a
palm frond or an erotic Georgia O'Keeffe
flower.
That representational quality everyone who
sees the opera house wants to compare it to
something helps explain
Mr. Calatrava's success. (At 52, he has
completed 60 buildings, including train
stations and airports throughout Europe,
and has dozens more in the works.)
"People need symbols, and Calatrava's
buildings provide them," says David
Marks,
the London architect who with his wife
designed the Eye that city's sleek,
popular Ferris wheel.
And now Mr. Calatrava has a chance to create a
symbol for New York. Last summer, he was
commissioned to design a
$2 billion transportation hub at the World
Trade Center site. In The New York Times,
Herbert Muschamp called that
commission "the clearest sign yet that
the rebuilding of ground zero will be an
achievement of cosmopolitan
dimensions."
For the moment, Mr. Calatrava is speaking
about the project only in general terms, under
the watchful eye of his client,
the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
But clearly he has grand ambitions for the
station. "It has to feel as
important as Grand Central, or the old Penn
Station," he says. It is also likely to
have echoes of two other important
New York structures: Eero Saarinen's T.W.A.
terminal at Kennedy Airport and Pier Luigi
Nervi's bus terminal at the
George Washington Bridge (which Mr. Calatrava
says he has investigated from every angle).
Both make startling use of
poured concrete, the material Mr. Calatrava
has formed into buildings and bridges as if it
were Silly Putty.
Like Nervi, Mr. Calatrava is an engineer by
training, and that makes it possible for him
to construct the ambitious
buildings he calls "penetrable
sculptures." When his addition to the
Milwaukee Art Museum was in trouble a couple
of
years ago no one could figure out how to
build the movable "sunshades" that
Mr. Calatrava insisted on he became
a licensed engineer in Wisconsin, then
arranged to have the pieces made in Spain and
flown over on a Soviet transport
plane.
Mr. Calatrava's current projects include
bridges in Jerusalem, Dallas and Venice; a new
hall for the Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra; an 86-acre cultural center in
Spain; and a series of projects for the 2004
Olympics in Athens. As a result, he
is away more than he's home, often sleeping on
airplanes. His Swedish-Italian wife, Robertina,
runs the firm's three
offices (in Valencia, Mr. Calatrava's hometown
in Spain, Paris and Zurich) from their
Manhattan residence, while keeping
tabs on the couple's four children.
On a rare morning in New York, just before
leaving for a meeting with the Port Authority,
Mr. Calatrava bounds up and
down the stairs of his town house like an
eager graduate student. His conversations
conducted in seven languages,
sometimes three or four per sentence are
laden with references to poetry, philosophy
and music. When he says
Mendelssohn, does he mean the composer, Felix,
or the architect Erich Mendelsohn? No matter
he has ideas about
both. Equally fluent with a pencil, he
sketches constantly, more often to illustrate
points than to record ideas (of which
he appears to have a surplus).
A new book by Franklin Toker about Frank Lloyd
Wright's Fallingwater suggests that the
anti-Semitism of Pittsburgh
society is what motivated Wright's patron,
Edgar Kaufmann, to build what he hoped would
be one of the world's great
houses. In that case, just imagine what Mr.
Calatrava's background might produce: in 1691,
Raphael Valls, a prominent
rabbi, was burned at the stake in Palma de
Majorca, Spain. Mr. Calatrava's mother (still
living in Valencia) believes she
is descended from the rabbi; Santiago grew up
knowing that his family had been chuetas, from
the Spanish word for
pig: Jews who "proved" they weren't
Jews by eating pork in public. (While many
Spanish Jews became Catholics during
the Inquisition, Mr. Calatrava says his family
"never really" converted.)
On the other side of the family, Mr.
Calatrava's father, grandfather and uncles,
who were in the export business, were
imprisoned by Francisco Franco in the 1930's.
"The war marked them in a tragic
way," Mr. Calatrava says. Wanting to
escape the stifling atmosphere in his home
country, Mr. Calatrava moved to Zurich to
study engineering; he was
particularly interested in the streamlined
concrete bridges of the Swiss engineer Robert
Maillart. He would have gone on
to Princeton to study with the Maillart
devotee David Billington had he not met
Robertina, then a law student in
Zurich.
While living in a Zurich dormitory, he helped
a veterinary student with drawings for his
dissertation. In exchange, the
veterinarian gave him the skeleton of a dog,
which the Calatravas' oldest son, Rafael, now
23, named Fifi. Mr. Calatrava
hung the skeleton in his Zurich office.
It proved a fitting gift. After receiving his
Ph.D. in 1980, he quickly won a commission to
design a train station in
Zurich. That building introduced the
skeletonlike forms that became his trademark.
Studying spinal columns, birds in
flight and even fluttering eyelids, Mr.
Calatrava had found a way to create buildings
that suggested movement
perfect for airports, train stations and
bridges. (Mr. Muschamp has since called Mr.
Calatrava "the world's leading poet
of transportation architecture.") Then,
in the 1980's, he began working on the $350
million City of Arts and Sciences in
Valencia (where the last structure, an opera
house, will be completed in 2005).
In the 1990's, Mr. Calatrava arrived in New
York with a plan for completing the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine, a show
at the Museum of Modern Art and a millennial
time capsule a project for The New York
Times Magazine and now on
view outside the American Museum of Natural
History.
Gambling that the city would embrace him, Mr.
Calatrava reportedly spent $7 million for the
town house, its interior now
stripped down as a backdrop for his sculptures
and watercolors. (He also bought the house
next door, reportedly for
another $7 million.) Then came 9/11, the date
on which he said New York joined Jerusalem,
Rome and Athens on his
list of "heroic cities." By
beginning the ground zero project just as the
cultural center in his hometown wraps up, Mr.
Calatrava is literally moving from the old
world to the new. And that's where Tenerife
comes in, because as Mr.
Calatrava said in a series of conversations
during a weekend of inaugural festivities
the Canary Islands have been a
bridge between civilizations: the place
Columbus stopped to provision his ships on his
way west.
Mr. Calatrava had that history, and the
island's dramatic topography, in mind when he
designed the $80 million opera
house. Without the wing, he said, the building
would have been "too small a
gesture" for its site: the base of the
volcano Teide, the tallest mountain in Spanish
territory. And so the concert hall, largely
completed in 2000, wasn't
opened until the 3,500-ton wing could be
constructed which added three years and
millions of dollars to the cost. As
in Milwaukee, he stuck it out.
Even now, the wing isn't perfect, with what
looks like a white pipe connecting it to the
roof of the concert hall below.
The pipe was a compromise, Mr. Calatrava says
later over coffee in Manhattan. Immediately he
begins sketching a more
elegant version of the connector, which he
says he will take up with the Tenerife
contractors.
The imperfection may be the inevitable result
of his extravagant ambitions. Until now, Mr.
Calatrava's curves were
mostly the curves of individual structural
elements, which, one could choose to believe,
were the product of an
engineer's calculations, looking the way they
did because they had to. But in Tenerife, the
spectacular arc is the end,
not the means. Mr. Calatrava has defied the
key precept of modernist architecture, that
form must follow function.
Instead he is following his own aesthetic
predilections. For that he owes one debt to
Antonio Gaudν, the Catalan master
of undulating forms, and with his
turtle-helmet-eyelid dominating the Tenerife
coast another to Salvador Dalν.
OF course there are detractors. The British
architecture writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams
said, "architects sneer that
Calatrava is an engineer, while engineers
dismiss him as a sculptor." David Cohn,
an American architecture critic living
in Madrid, says of the Tenerife auditorium:
"What is this large tongue or tentacle
looming over the whole work? Is it an
orchid? A sea monster? Calatrava doesn't take
artistic control of the subliminal suggestions
these works provoke." He
adds that giving the wing a purpose would have
improved it. "Function," he says,
"disciplines expression."
Peter Reed, curator of architecture and design
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
disagrees. "If you're going to
criticize Calatrava," he said, "you
need to criticize a lot of other people,
including Frank Gehry, on the same
grounds."
Mr. Calatrava's buildings "make you aware
you're someplace special," he added, and
praised Mr. Calatrava for bringing
inspiring architecture to the civic realm.
"It's refreshing that his buildings
aren't Prada boutiques, but places for the
public," he said.
And if the public loves them, Mr. Calatrava
always sees something he could have done
better. "Buildings," he says,
joking, "never look as good as Fifi."
But his buildings may come closer than
anyone's; they are the stars of
"Zoomorphic," a current exhibition
at London's
Victoria and Albert Museum that focuses on a
supposed "new wave" of
animal-inspired buildings. In the show's
catalog,
Mr. Aldersey-Williams compares the Milwaukee
museum to a "shark's gill basket"
and Mr. Calatrava's Lyon station to an
anteater's snout.
Asked about the comparisons, Mr. Calatrava
steers the conversation to Picasso. "Even
at his most abstract he was a
figurative painter," he says. "But
the objects he painted were a means to an end.
The paintings were really about his
feelings. I'm doing the same with architecture
making it an abstract figurative
art."
Picasso has particular meaning for him.
"The artists of my parents'
generation" he cites Picasso, Mirσ
and the poet
Antonio Machado "had to build a Spain
outside Spain. My generation is making up for
lost time." He says the
exuberance of the opera house, then, is a
direct response to the repression of the
Franco era. Not to mention the the
Inquisition.
But Mr. Calatrava is also working outside
Spain on a global scale. Even Saarinen
didn't have the success that Mr.
Calatrava is having, and Nervi (whom Mr.
Calatrava calls "the father of us
all") is hardly known to the public. Over
lunch
at the restaurant La Cazuela in Santa Cruz,
Mr. Calatrava begins naming great architects
who died ignominiously
(Gaudi, hit by a streetcar and taken,
unrecognized, to a hospital for indigents;
Louis Kahn, who collapsed in
Pennsylvania Station in New York).
What does it mean that he has achieved so much
recognition in his lifetime, when many of his
idols struggled?
"It's a bad sign," says Mr.
Calatrava, while signing autographs for the
restaurant's owner. He adds, eyes twinkling:
"It
makes you grateful for your detractors."
Fred A. Bernstein contributes to Oculus,
Blueprint and Metropolitan Home.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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