In his native Valencia, an architect sets his imagination free
 
Dale Fuchs IHT
Monday, August 16, 2004
VALENCIA, Spain It has not generated as much buzz as Santiago Calatrava's other razzle-dazzle buildings and bridges, with their all-white curves, spurs and spines.
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It does not have the emotional resonance, for instance, of the planned World Trade Center transportation hub in Manhattan. Calatrava, the renowned Spanish architect, intends to cover the hub with 45-meter, or 150-foot, glass-and-steel wings, allowing sunlight to graze the platform, "like a lamp of hope," as he said in a statement for the January unveiling of his design.
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Nor has it generated the beat-the-clock suspense of his translucent, leaf-shaped covering for the Olympic Stadium in Athens, which was completed just in time for the Summer Games.
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It is not even all that practical, really, like the three of bridges that opened in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands, this July and already earned local nicknames because of their fantastic angles: the Harp, the Lute and the Lyre.
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But slowly, and with relatively scant attention outside Spain, the City of Arts and Sciences in Calatrava's native Valencia is shaping up to be the largest concentration of his work to date. It is arguably one of his most imaginative, too.
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"For the first time, it's not just a building solo on the landscape but a whole environment," said Terence Riley, chief curator of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, now showing an exhibit on skyscrapers including Calatrava's twisting high-rise in Malmo, Sweden.
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"One structure builds on the other, and the space between them becomes another design."
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Calatrava, 54, has been working on this futuristic array of buildings - a museum, an opera house, a planetarium and an esplanade-cum-parking lot - since 1991.
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The E400 million, or $490 million, complex, whose final phase will be completed in 2005, includes an aquarium with a space-age look designed by the Spanish architect Félix Candela.
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But the City is dominated by some of Calatrava's greatest hits: movable pieces, suggestions of sun-bleached animal skeletons and sweeping sheaths that seem to defy gravity beneath the hot, blue Valencia sky.
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"The long-term project gave him the opportunity to concentrate all that he has studied up to now and the freedom to open up new avenues of experimentation," says María Jesús Folch, the curator of the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, who helped organize an exhibit of Calatrava's sculptures, the testing ground, she says, for his architectural work.
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Indeed, rather than buildings per se, Calatrava's works are often described as "permeable sculptures," said Ascensión Gil, in-house architect for the City of Arts and Sciences. A row of white concrete trees, for instance, supports one of the Valencia structures. Two feathers seem to float above another. Reflections in flat, blue pools transform the planetarium dome, which looks like an eye half submerged in water, into a globe.
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Local officials hope that this surreal landscape will help transform a depressed area of the city and raise Valencia's cultural profile, often overshadowed by its vanguard northern neighbor, Barcelona.
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Set into a dried-up river bed, the complex links industrialized coastal neighborhoods to the medieval city center, where Calatrava as a boy was first inspired by the Gothic civic architecture of the Lonja merchants' exchange, built in the 15th century when Valencia was an international but landlocked commercial power.
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The maritime motifs of the arts complex echo its hope of one day regaining access to the Mediterranean, key to its former glory.
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Calatrava's Valencia project is one of many architectural endeavors that politicians have recently embraced in an attempt to repeat urban renewal successes such as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Tate Modern by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on London's gritty South Bank.
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Calatrava, moreover, is only one of many brand-name architects, like Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas, who are seducing cities with designs that lend dignity and a sense of place to impersonal spaces.
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"People think they are building the cathedrals of the 21st century," said Ángel Borrego, a professor of architecture at Madrid's Polytechnic University. "Like the great pavilions and train stations of the 19th and 20th centuries, today airports, subways and museums are the places that bring people together."
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But even among the many star architects in orbit, Calatrava is known to have the flair that draws crowds.
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"I call it 'look ma, no hands' architecture," said Aaron Betsky, design critic and director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. "That is the success or failure of his work: it's the bravura, like a bullfight, the potential for violence, or a kind of closeness to the impossible."
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If Gehry is the "tortured, self-examining" Bob Dylan of architecture, Betsky said, then Calatrava is its Luciano Pavarotti.
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The Prince Felipe Science Museum, which opened in 2000, is the centerpiece of the City of Arts and Sciences and it is as dramatic as the Italian tenor. On one face, 220 meters of white concrete prongs resemble the ribs of a dinosaur or the spine of a giant fish, while an exterior husk divided into narrow, 55-meter glass panels is meant to suggest a waterfall, the in-house architect says. Inside, a colorful double helix of DNA twists toward the vaulted, ribbed ceiling.
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Next door, a shell-like structure seems to float, like a tortoise, in the turquoise water, kicking up a pair of triangular panels for flippers. The tortoise is, in reality, L'Hemisfèric a planetarium and Imax theater opened 1998.
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Calatrava, known to be fond of metaphors, apparently could not let that suggestive function escape. And so viewed from another angle, the building also resembles a giant, free-floating eyeball. It even seems to blink as a steel-and-glass shade opens and closes. Salvador Dalí would be proud.
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After the eyeball theater and fish-bone museum sits the Palau de la Música, a performing arts center and 1,888-seat opera house still under construction. It resembles a ship with round portals, or the cracked shell of an egg in which the main auditorium itself is the yolk.
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The building's most striking features are two narrow sheaths that seem to billow atop the oval base like an abstract feather or ribbon blown upward by the wind. It is an example of one of Calatrava's signature "engineering feats" as Betsky says, jokingly comparing him to Steven Spielberg for those crowd-pleasing special effects.
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In another popular gesture, Calatrava's design will allow spectators to watch rehearsals through glass panels and enjoy the view from the seaworthy opera house's "decks."
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Luckily, the parking lot has been disguised with a garden walkway that looks like a Slinky, the coil toy.
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To make the whole complex a lively area for locals, he designed the three buildings so that their ground floors may be traversed - and his work appreciated- without paying an entrance fee.
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Each building is done entirely in white concrete, steel and glass, giving them a clean, cool feel in a hot Mediterranean city. Parts of the complex are also dressed in a mosaic of fractured ceramic tile. The technique, known here as trencadís, was used most famously by the Catalonian modernist architect Antoni Gaudí.
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Some architects sneer at Calatrava's whimsical organic forms with their "space age" edge, as Borrego of Madrid's Polytechnic puts it. They lack depth, some assert, and they will become tiresome quickly. Others tip their hats and call him an artist.
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Residents in Valencia say they take pride in the unique creations of their hometown star.
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Eugenio Mallol, 30, says he has visited the complex "at least a hundred times" without ever stepping inside an exhibit. He even posed for his wedding pictures there, as did several of his friends. "When you walk in, you get a strange feeling," he said. "It's like entering a dream world."
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International Herald Tribune



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