Calatrava Santiago (Santiago Calatrava)

Santiago Calatrava Valls is a Spanish architect and sculptor, author of many futuristic buildings in different countries of the world. His aesthetics are sometimes defined as "bio-tech."

Biography

Kalatrava was born on July 28, 1951 in Valencia. He studied at the School of Architecture and at the School of Arts and Crafts in his hometown. After graduating in 1975, he got a job at the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich (also known as ETH, or ETHZ) in Zurich, where he received an engineering degree.

In 1981, Kalatrava opened his workshop in Zurich, and worked both as an architect and as an engineer. His first project was the hangar of the Jakem plant in Swiss Munhwillen (1983 - 1985). In 1989, he opened a branch of his bureau in Paris.

Calatrava was simultaneously influenced by architects Le Corbusier and Antonio Gaudi. He is called the successor to the traditions of Spanish modernism Felix Candela and the new expressionism of Eero Saarinen.

Creativity

• 1983-1984, Jakem Steel Warehouse, Munchwilen, Switzerland
• 1983-1985, Ernsting Warehouse, Kösfeld, Germany
• 1983-1988, Wohlen High School, Wolen, Switzerland
• 1983-1990, Stadelhofen Railway Station, Zurich, Switzerland

• 1983-1989, Lucerne Station Hall, Lucerne, Switzerland
• 1984-1987, Bac de Roda Bridge, Barcelona , Spain
• 1984-1988, Barenmatte Community Center, Zur, Switzerland,
• 1986-1987, Tabourettli Theater, Basel, Switzerland,
• 1987-1992, Atrium Allan Lambert Galleria (Brookfield Place Office Center), Toronto, Canada (more, English),

• 1989-1994, Satolas TGV Station, Lyon, France
• 1992, Puente del Alamillo, Seville, Spain,

• 1992, Montjuic TV Tower at the Olympic Ring, Barcelona, Spain
• 1992, World Exhibition, Kuwait Pavilion, Seville, Spain
• 1992-1995, restoration of the Berlin Oberbaumbrücke bridge
• 1994-1997, Campo Volantine pedestrian bridge, Bilbao, Spain
• 1996, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain - a modern entertainment complex with an aquarium, an IMAX cinema, a museum of science and a botanical garden, which Calatrava designed back in the mid-1990s for the glory of his native Valencia.

The complex, standing at the bottom of the drained Turia River, really attracts tourists and local residents. As Calatrava himself says, he not only "put Valencia on the map," but also created the second most visited Spanish architectural complex after the Alhambra. However, the theater, opened in 2005 and completed the construction of the City, was three times more expensive than the original budget of 300 million euros. The crisis Spanish region did not have such money. As of 2013, a debt of 700 million for the Palace of Arts was still listed in Valencia.

• 1998, Estação do Oriente or (Gare do Oriente), Lisbon, Portugal

• 1998, Puente de la Mujer, in the Puerto Madero region of Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 2000, New terminal of Bilbao Airport, Bilbao, Spain
• 2000, Bodegas Ysios, Rioja Isios Winery, Rioja, Spain,
• 2001, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

• 2003, James Joyce Bridge, Liffey River Bridge, Dublin, Ireland
• 2003, Auditorio Tenerife, Tenerife, Spain

• 2004, Athens Olympic Sports Complex, Athens, Greece

• 2004, Sundial Bridge at Turtle Bay, Redding, CA, USA
• 2004, Three bridges (Harp, Cittern and Lute) spanning the main canal of the Haarlemmermeer, Netherlands,
• 2004, University of Zurich, "Bibliothekseinbau" library remodelling, Zurich, Switzerland
• 2005, Turning Torso, Malmö, Sweden
• 2006, String pedestrian bridge in Petah Tikva, Israel

• 2008, Bridge of the Constitution, Venice
• 2008, Harp David String Bridge, Jerusalem
• 2009, Kinetic Composition at Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel,

• 2009, Samuel Beckett Bridge, Liffey River Bridge, Dublin, Ireland
• 2009, Liège-Guillemins railway station]}} in Liège, Belgium.
• 2011, Palacio de Congresos de Oviedo, Oviedo, Asturias, Испания
• 2012, Peace Bridge, Calgary, Canada
• 2013, Railway station Medio Padana TAV Station, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Criticism

The work of Kalatrava is very recognizable, very expensive and very popular. However, in recent years (2014), another one was added to these constant attributes: very scandalous. Almost every new building is accompanied by the same story: it surrenders much later than the deadline, many times the estimate, and then requires completion or immediately - repair.

Criticism of Bilbao Airport and Bridge

Calatrava immediately created two large buildings in Bilbao: this is a new airport terminal, opened in 2000, and the Subisuri bridge over the Nervion River, along which it is convenient to reach the Guggenheim Museum. The airport, which has the shape of a bird and nicknamed behind it a dove - La Paloma, had to be redone in the middle of zero.

It, among other things, lacked space not only for stores, but even for passengers who, after passing customs, were forced to freeze in the open air. Subisuri managed to be called the broken leg bridge: in rainy weather, glass tiles become dangerously slippery^[1].

2011: Collapse of the Oviedo Conference Centre

The conference centre under construction in Oviedo (Spanish region of Asturias) simply collapsed on one difficult day in 2011. In the summer of 2013, the court found Kalatrava responsible for the incident and ordered him to pay three million euros.

2013: Venice sues Calatrava

In January 2014, it became known that Calatrava was going to sue Venice - for his bridge of the Constitution. The fourth bridge over the Big Canal was conceived in 1999. The city authorities wanted him to connect the Santa Lucia railway station with the piazzale Roma, an area with a bus station through which cars enter the city. Thus, the bridge was supposed to designate a kind of gate to the city. Calatrava designed a futuristic and pompous 95-meter bridge of glass and stone and illuminated it with fluorescent lamps. The bridge, as conceived by the architect, was first completely assembled, and then installed.

The construction became scandalous even before the Venetians saw it. Residents said that the city simply does not need a fourth bridge - especially in the immediate vicinity of the third, Scalzi bridge, and four million euros can be spent more rationally. The project itself caused indignation - the modern type of structure hardly harmonized with the Venetian Baroque. The construction of the bridge was delayed: the first pedestrians had to pass through it in 2004, but opened the bridge only four years later; due to protests, the authorities decided to abandon the ceremony. In the 1990s, when the project was conceived, the budget of Venice assumed 4 million expenses, as a result, the bridge cost the city more than 11 million euros.

The last straw was that the project of the Spanish architect did not take into account the needs of citizens and tourists moving in wheelchairs, and the steep rise was difficult for the elderly. The city authorities demanded access to the bridge for people with disabilities from Kalatrava back in 2003, but the mobile platform for wheelchairs on the Constitution Bridge was launched only in the fall of 2013 - five years after opening. Like the bridge itself, the mechanism cost twice as much as the originally planned amount - in the end they paid 1.8 million euros. However, the bridge was a source of trouble for ordinary pedestrians: tourists stumbled due to the different distance between the steps (beautiful Venetian views around prevented them from looking under their feet). True, it was also difficult for those who still watched: they were disoriented by the alternation of glass and stone fragments on the surface of the bridge.

As a result, in 2013, the city authorities began to sue the architect: the first meeting was held in November. For the failure of the construction period and the excess of the estimate, Kalatrava requires 3.8 million euros. He replies that he was not to blame for anything: they say that those who considered the budget at the first stage of planning were mistaken, and he himself was more a consultant than a controller during the construction of the bridge. In January 2014, Venice came up with a new reason to sue Calatrava: the authorities say that in five years the bridge has already required repair for 464 thousand euros, and experts at the Polytechnic University of Turin prepared a report according to which the reason for this was the shortcomings laid down in the bridge design initially.

The city authorities, tired of receiving lawsuits from residents and tourists injured by the bridge, in 2018 they partially covered the span with trachyte tiles - the city streets were paved with this stone. Apparently, officials were satisfied with the result and in 2022 decided to dismantle the remaining glass panels in order to replace them with a stone "path." 500,000 euros were allocated for reconstruction.

Curbed writes that Santiago Calatrava supported the decision of the Venetian authorities, although he is not ready to take responsibility for all the troubles that occurred during the almost 14 years of operation of the structure. According to the "star" architect, his project provided for a coating of non-slipping glass, but "the improper use of heavy objects [apparently, it is about suitcases that are rolled by numerous tourists. The bridge of the Constitution connects the railway and bus stations - approx. Author] or even acts of vandalism "led to the fact that part of the panels was damaged and they were replaced with a poor-quality analogue.

2013: Court with Domecq

In 2013, Domecq, a wine trading company, sued Kalatrava, for which the architect designed the Isis winery in Basque Alava. It turned out that the roof flows in the extraordinary beauty of the building, which, of course, is critical for winemaking.

According to the customer, the architect did not take into account the sharp temperature differences and rainy climate of the Basque Country.

Since the workers of the construction company, which originally collaborated with Kalatrava, could not fix the roof made of wood and aluminum in any way, the owner said that he wanted to get two million euros from the architect. With this money, it was planned to hire other architects and builders - those who could cope with leaks.

2014

Criticism of the project in the City of Arts in Valencia

In January 2014, the imperfections of the structures of Calatrava were indicated by the authorities of Venice and his native Valencia. On January 12, it became known that the builders began to remove the mosaic from the facade of the building of the Queen Sofia Palace of Art, an opera house in Valencia. The building has been closed since December 2013, when, due to strong winds, the cladding began to crumble. It was necessary to cancel not only Christmas performances, but also the January premiere of Puccini's opera Manon Largo, staged by the patron saint of the Placido Domingo Theater. After negotiations, Kalatrava and construction companies agreed not only to remove fragile tiles from the facade, but also to cover the cost of repair work - three million euros. The representative of the architect said that the reasons for the fall of the mosaic are unclear. Calatrava decorated the facade of the theater with thousands of small fragments of mosaics, imitating the Barcelona Antonio Gaudi. Now they will all be pulled away, and the walls will be painted with white paint, at least until they figure out how to fix the mosaic intentionally.

Queen's Palace of Art_Sofia (part of the city of art in Valencia)

In his homeland, Calatrava has long combined popularity with notoriety: for example, the local politician Ignacio Blanco opened the Calatravatelaclava website, which can be translated roughly as "Calatrava will rip you off like sticky." Blanco notes that 94 million euros were paid for working on the building of the Calatrava Theater - and this despite the fact that 150 places were in it, from which the scene is not visible. The Museum of Science was originally built without emergency exits and elevators for the disabled, Blanco complains.

Criticism of the railway station in New York

In New York, Calatrava is rebuilding the PATH underground high-speed railway station, located under the World Trade Center and destroyed by the September 11 attacks. The temporary station was opened in 2003, the new one will open at the end of 2015 - six years later than the plan. It will cost, like everything at Kalatrava, twice as much as the estimate - $4 billion.

Sources of The New York Times claimed that the architect, for the sake of his creative ambitions, deliberately complicated the design of the station, and at the same time demanded that some necessary elements be placed in nearby buildings - for example, ventilation. In 2012, the organization that ordered this difficult project to Kalatrava was audited and was recognized as torn by conflicts and incapacitated.

Any publication that writes about the controversial structures of Kalatrava is certainly stipulated: all of them are very beautiful. The architect himself does not recognize the underdog, but he hardly speaks to journalists who are looking for the truth. In a brief written statement to The New York Times in early 2014, Calatrava said that the task of its buildings is to make cities unique and enrich human experience. All these projects were carried out to the highest standards, the architect says - silent about the overpriced and, obviously, writing off quick breakdowns to engineers and builders. The Guardian, reviewing the scandals surrounding Calatrava's work, seems to have felt that it is easier to name those with which nothing wrong happened (the newspaper mentions bridges in Dublin and Manchester, stations in Lisbon, Liege and Lyon, buildings in New York and Milwaukee).

Nevertheless, it does not seem that scandals stop customers: there are more than 10 points in the list of Kalatrava buildings preparing for completion at the beginning of 2014.

Witness in the Valencia Business Centre case

In August 2014, the Castellon court summoned Santiago Calatrava as a witness in the case of the construction of a business center in Valencia. The regional government has already spent 2.7 million euros on the implementation of the project in question^[2].

Calatrava was subpoenaed along with former Regional Secretary for Taxes and Budget, Eusebio Monzo, former technical director of the regional planning department Javier de Diego and head of the architectural bureau Fernando Benzo. The Castellon court is investigating alleged violations in the drafting of contracts for the construction of the center.

The architect visited Castellon in December 2007 and signed an agreement on work on the project of the building with the mayor of Castellon. After a year and a half, Kalatrava presented his plan for the building, the construction of which he estimated at 100 million euros, which is 40 million more than planned by the regional government.

Bibliography

• Tzonis, Alexander (1999). Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics Of Movement. Universe. ISBN 0-7893-0360-4.

• Tzonis, Alexander (2004). Santiago Calatrava: The Complete Works. Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-2641-4.

See also

• Spain

Notes