Santiago Calatrava tilted a Seville bridge pylon at the Great Pyramid's angle
The Alamillo bridge in Seville hangs from a single concrete pylon 142 metres high, leaning at 58 degrees, the same slope as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Its own weight balances the deck, so no cables are needed behind it. That mix of engineering and sculpture made Santiago Calatrava famous.
Benimàmet, an old municipality now absorbed into Valencia, is where Calatrava was born on 28 July 1951; he studied drawing and painting from 1957. He set off for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1968 but landed amid the student uprisings and went home, where a book on Le Corbusier convinced him he could be both artist and architect. After qualifying in Valencia he enrolled in 1975 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich for civil engineering, earning a doctorate in 1981 on the pliability of three-dimensional structures. The Swiss engineer Robert Maillart taught him that force and mass, properly combined, can stir emotion.
His Zurich office struggled at first: a library, a factory and two bridges were designed and never built. From 1983 commissions grew, culminating in Zürich Stadelhofen station, finished in 1990, with curving platforms, leaning columns and teardrop skylights. The Bac de Roda Bridge in Barcelona (1984 to 1987), whose twin arches lean at thirty degrees, brought his first international attention, and the Alamillo followed for Expo 92.
For the 1992 Olympics he built the Montjuïc Communications Tower in Barcelona, a 136 m concrete spire said to suggest a javelin thrower, with ceramic tiles that nod to Gaudí's Park Güell. Railway work continued at Lyon's airport station, a steel-and-glass shell compared to a prehistoric creature, and at Lisbon's Gare do Oriente, where tree-like white columns carry the roof. Bilbao's airport terminal earned the nickname The Dove.
His first American building, the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum, won a competition among seventy-seven architects and opened in 2001. Its 115-tonne sunscreen opens like a pair of wings and folds shut when lake winds pass 65 kilometres per hour. Later works include the twisting Turning Torso tower in Malmö, the wave-crested Auditorio de Tenerife, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, and, biggest of all, Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences.
Source: Santiago Calatrava
