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 Santiago Calatrava's first two American commissions are in cities starved for conspicuous greatness. June 2001
Now his fame has reached the United States. Last year he won the competition to design the Christ the Light Cathedral in Oakland, California, beating out finalists Ricardo Legorreta, Norman Foster, Kevin Roche, and SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill). "It will be an overwhelming space," Calatrava predicts. "There will be nothing like it in the whole Bay Area." His extension to Eero Saarinen's Milwaukee Art Museum--a cantilevered, wired, strutted, mobile work of engineering virtuosity--is scheduled to open this year. "I have always admired the U.S. as the country of technological achievement, of the space shuttle," he says, but because technology is taken for granted there, "it's often understated. It doesn't give satisfaction to the spirit." In Milwaukee the technology is anything but understated. "I am showing the Americans something about themselves," he says. "I like that." Of the European architects now peppering the States with cultural projects--Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, UN Studio, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid--Calatrava, from Spain, is the one most likely to win the hearts and minds of the American public, if his popularity in Europe is anything to go by. People who work with him scatter the G-word liberally. "I think Santiago is a true genius," says Jack Pelisek, president of the Milwaukee Art Museum's board of trustees. "It's fun for us lesser lights to be in the presence of him." "My colleagues keep saying he's a genius," says Brother Mel Anderson of the Diocese of Oakland's building committee. Allan Temko, the critic who advised the church on the competition, says Calatrava's design "has all the attributes of a great medieval cathedral." Most remarkable is the testimony of David Kahler of Kahler Slater, architect of record for the Milwaukee Art Museum. "I am 64, and working with Santiago has helped rejuvenate me," he says. "He taught me how to make the impossible possible." Kahler was the architect of a 1975 extension to the original building that, as he puts it, "is now the meat in the sandwich between Saarinen and Calatrava." Kahler might have hoped to design this latest addition himself; and many architects would object to being thoroughly upstaged, as his quiet extension is by Calatrava's. Many also might have found it difficult to be in an "arranged marriage" with an architect they didn't know based thousands of miles away, or resented the fact that the complex project was "very taxing on the staff--it's as if we were doing working drawings for a 747 and no one had done one before." Not Kahler. Calatrava is now a friend, and they're collaborating on future projects. The lawyer, the monk, the critic, and the architect speak of Calatrava's quick grasp of a wide range of subjects, his seriousness, and his dedication. (For the Oakland competition Foster didn't show up in person. Calatrava wandered about the site for two days and sketched.) They talk of his lack of grandstanding and his willingness to adapt to a site change for the cathedral project after a property developer poached one earmarked for the diocese. "He could have been a real prima donna," Kahler says, "but he's not. He will not look down on anyone." What excites people most of all are his buildings--leaping, heroic constructions of wire, steel, and sinewy concrete. Performances in geometry and engineering, they are almost always done in white and are devoid of cladding or disguise, offering no hiding places for imprecision. They're like trapeze acts without a safety net--combining the grandeur of nature and the authority of science with the suppleness of art. But above all Calatrava's buildings are instantly recognizable. This is a time when the stamp of the great architect is more highly prized than ever, when mayors and museum directors across the developed world compete for the favors of perhaps 20 celebrated practices. The right architect can raise self-esteem and sooth urban inferiority complexes. "New York and Chicago are surprised Milwaukee took the stage," Kahler says. "Oakland has always been considered the bedroom community of San Francisco," Brother Mel notes. "The cathedral will be a dazzling signature for the city." Cities want from architects something unique but authoritative, distinctive but bankable. At best this phenomenon is the authentic desire to raise and intensify the urban experience; at worst it's the label-frenzy of mall-rats writ large. Calatrava has prospered on this hunger for conspicuous greatness, and his Milwaukee project in particular is a composite of his most spectacular devices. It has a leaping bridge, a hovering roof, and an almost total lack of straight lines or simple curves. Its culmination, on which the museum's logo is based, is an incredible 200-foot-wide carbon-fiber brise-soleil that opens and closes like a bird's wings over the distorted glass cone of the building's entry pavilion. Calatrava compares this composition to Victor Hugo's description of St. Peter's in Rome as being part Parthenon, part Pantheon, part Colosseum. A fax arrives: "The Milwaukee Art Museum has announced that, due to the desire to complete further testing of the wing-like Burke brise-soleil... the completion of that element of the Museum's $100 million expansion is delayed." It concludes: "To that end we have made strategic decisions to expand the project's scope and, consequently, to increase our budget and extend the time frame for its completion. We have one chance to get this right." The space shuttle is grounded; the wings won't fly until next year. Unquestionably, this is bad news. The project had already overshot its hoped-for opening in 2000, and--as those involved will concede--the total project cost of more than $800 per square foot is expensive. Prototypes for the brise-soleil have not worked; and seven years after Calatrava first put pen to paper, no one yet knows for certain how the effect will be achieved, or even if carbon fiber is the best material to use. "We're looking for alternatives," Pelisek says. "He's not licensed in Wisconsin, so that element had to be turned over to another practice, and there's a learning curve," Calatrava's American spokesperson says. "He wasn't responsible for making that one object work. The materials were not his suggestion. In previous cases [involving moving elements] he has always been on target and on track." In his European projects Calatrava is in control of both architecture and engineering. The problem here is one of translation between the in-house expertise of his Swiss office and American companies thousands of miles away. Except that few people in Milwaukee want to see it as a problem. Board members are not ordinarily noted for their leniency toward unruly budgets or misbehaving engineering structures, but Pelisek is forgiving. "Costs have gone up dramatically," he acknowledges. "But this will be Milwaukee's most famous building--one of the most famous in the United States. It's unique and very difficult to estimate. If we had got fixed-price contracts the contractors would have gone broke. There was a lot more work than we anticipated, more concrete, more rebars than anyone imagined." Kahler adds: "There was no way to put a cap on the time or the budget. The design is not complete until the door opens. You're working with a lot of double curvatures, and sometimes you can't draw it until after it's complete. Architects learn about the project in the course of building it, much as they did on medieval cathedrals." So if the project architect can't quantify the building in advance, how can the contractors? "Less costs more," Kahler says, meaning that Calatrava's rejection of cladding makes it impossible to hide loose or rough work; precision and perfection come at a steep price. "His approach brings everything down to its essence," Kahler says, such that great concrete arches have to land on two-inch-thick hexagonal steel plates. "As the building nears completion, it's looking simpler and simpler. The question is, 'Where did all the money go?'" The price of genius, in other words, includes risk--the risk that things won't go according to plan. In Engineering News-Record, consultants and contractors were unanimous in saying that, however difficult the design may make their jobs, it was worth it to achieve a marvel. "Everybody is patient," Kahler says, "because a community that is normally very conservative has embraced the project." Perhaps they have good reason to: if the building makes Milwaukee famous for something other than beer, if it does its job as a logo for the city, if it attracts tourists, it will be cheap at the price. After all, corporate identity makeovers have been known to cost as much, and they don't have the additional benefit of creating space for viewing art. Plus a boring building wouldn't attract donors the way a spectacular one does. But the museum's phantom wings dramatize another question raised by signature landmarks in general--and Calatrava's work in particular. "If you didn't know there was to going to be a brise-soleil, you'd think the building as it stands was terrific," Pelisek says. Well, yes, comes the skeptical thought, but then why build it at all? Why all the other paraphernalia? Why the agony of reinventing a 747? Museums don't need cantilevers and struts and flapping wings, thinks the puritan lurking in the critic. They need square rooms with light coming from the top. The opening of the wingless but fully functioning Milwaukee Art Museum could be a defining moment in architectural history, one where the statement/signature/three-dimensional logo is so detached from practical use that the building can exist--functionally and artistically--without it. It's as if the wings had taken flight and flapped away over the level horizon of Lake Michigan, to a land where virtual monuments live. Calatrava works, in an atmosphere of deep serenity, in a Zurich villa that is both his main office and main home. (He has other homes, in his native Valencia and in Paris and New York.) The air and light have Swiss clarity. Across the way is the elegant Centre Le Corbusier, the last work of Switzerland's most famous architect, and a museum honoring him. Lake Zurich is at the end of the street, and Calatrava's lunchtime stroll to an excellent restaurant is bound by breathtaking views of water and mountains. Inside the villa you can hear nothing but his pen scratch as he turns out another of his fluent sketches. The house is furnished with evidence of his creativity--structurally daring tables, clever geometrical models constructed for a student thesis, abstract sculptures with something of Brancusi about them. There are framed examples of the 60,000 drawings he has produced to date. These rapid watercolors show nudes, mostly ecstatic and female, and bulls--the recognized subject matter of genius from the ancient Greeks to Picasso and Matisse. In the attic work 18 of his total staff of 64; in the basement sit shelf upon shelf of sketchbooks. Calatrava is on the cusp of 50, and his adult career splits neatly into a learning half and a doing half. First there were 14 years in higher education, from the age of 16 to 30, studying art, engineering, architecture, and math. Then, after two or three years finding his professional way, he won the competition to design the Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich. In this project all the traits of Calatrava's personal style emerged fully formed--the dynamic geometries, the expressive structural elements. You might trace his inspirations to Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK, Oscar Niemeyer, Felix Candela, and Antoni Gaudí--but it owes absolutely nothing to the movements, styles, and debates of the early 1980s, when it was designed. "My formation has been very autodidactic," he says. The station made his name, and plunged him into 17 years of phenomenal and still-increasing creative production, in which the devices of Stadelhofen multiplied in landmark-hungry cities across Europe. Not for Calatrava the years of struggle, the slow creep from humble to grand projects. In this period he built bridges at a rate of one every four months. He has designed railway stations in Lyon, Lisbon, Lucerne, and (as yet unbuilt) Berlin that, to use a well-worn but unavoidable image, are like cathedrals. He is completing the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia--the biggest, most lavish cultural project in Europe. The complex consists of a science museum, a planetarium containing an IMAX theater, an opera house, a huge concrete pergola, and extensive landscaping. With few exceptions his constructions are white, skeletal, and consciously inspired by natural forms like plants, bird wings, and, especially, animal bones. They tend to be symmetrical about a single axis and eschew straight lines. Struts, wires, and their shadows generate rhythmic flutterings of repeated lines--like the hairs of an eyelash, the strands of a feather, the bones of a fish. If possible, the structures move. Bridges turn, shutters lift, roofs open. Yet the parallel with animals stops with Calatrava's rejection of skin. His buildings achieve their power through exposed structure. They're also singularities that do not integrate with their context. A Calatrava object is an event, occupying its own clearly demarcated space, marked out by its distinctive white forms. They do not invite addition, subtraction, or adaptation. It's true that his designs are modified by their surroundings--a particular curve in a bridge echoes those of nearby hills, and the Milwaukee complex is organized around the progression from city to lake--but that is the limit of their engagement. His buildings are, he admits, "autonomous." "If you take a quartz crystal," he says, "and you break it, you get quartz inside. If you break that you get quartz inside. There is always an order. Nothing is casual; everything is controlled. The universe works in a very precise geometrical pattern." Clearly his architecture aspires to this crystalline condition, but he says that "if you are a painter you are unbelievably free" and that his reason for designing bridges is they "give freedom. If you are just doing a pedestrian walkway over a river in Bilbao, who cares?" In other words, Calatrava attempts to please himself. But at a certain point this autonomy, this disengagement, becomes troubling. My first twinge of doubt came contemplating some of his sketches, which seemed fundamentally identical, with no sense of development or discovery. "Do you draw your nudes from life?" I asked him. "Not since I was sixteen and an art student," he answered. "Now it's in my head. But I look at my wife, you know." Another moment of doubt came at the recent Calatrava exhibition in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence. It was partly that his prominently displayed sculptures are no more than good amateur standard; and the city of Donatello, Ghiberti, and Michelangelo is not the place to show amateur sculpture. But more than that, as room followed room, each full of white skeletal models, this ossuary of brilliance started giving me the creeps. I had to remind myself that in the real world Calatrava structures are relieved by areas of thankfully ordinary architecture. Strangest and most unsettling of all is the Valencia planetarium. This is a hemispheric structure set beneath a semi-elliptical hood that, when reflected in an adjoining pool, looks like a giant eye, complete with opening and closing lid. It was inspired by Luis Buñuel's film Un Chien Andalou: the plane of water resembles the razor blade that's drawn across the eye in close-up. It's an oddly savage note, although consistent with undercurrents in some of his work--the bleached rib cages, the beaky avian form of the Lyon Airport Station. He acknowledges the influence of Buñuel, Goya, and Thomas Mann and talks about the "dream aspect of architecture." Genius of course deals in darkness. What's hard to comprehend in Calatrava is the lack of connection between these murky imaginings and his building's amiable attractions. Sliced eyes, school parties, giant skeletons, IMAX cinemas, total whiteness, athletic engineering--there's no sense to this coming together, except that Calatrava is an artist and can therefore put together whatever he likes. And yet the first reaction on seeing almost any Calatrava structure is to be impressed, and I imagine this will be true in Milwaukee too. When the building opens--wingless but fundamentally intact--it will seem like the logical extension of a lifetime spent reducing his art form to a formula: functional building + spectacular sculptural and engineering element = architecture. When his fans in Oakland sincerely tell me that he is a genius, I agree--but I want to know at what, exactly? Is he a genius at architecture, or a genius at being a genius? |
