With two major New York City projects in the works: a $2 billion transportation hub for ground zero and a residential tower of stacked cubes overlooking the East River, Calatrava cements his celebrity status in his hometown. NYT


April 23, 2005
An Architect Embraces New York
By ROBIN POGREBIN

He got off to a slow start in New York. Though he won the 1992 competition to complete the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, financing problems stymied the project. In 1998, he was part of a team that lost a bid to build a new concourse and ticketing area for Pennsylvania Station within the General Post Office.

Now the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has two major New York City projects: the $2 billion transportation hub for ground zero and a residential tower comprising 12 cantilevered cubes on South Street, overlooking the East River. In October, his sculpture, watercolors, drawings and architectural designs are to be shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"I have been seeking New York for many years," said Mr. Calatrava, who has made New York City his family's home base after 14 years of living in both Paris and Zurich. "I was looking without knowing it for a place like New York."

Mr. Calatrava has also recently become more ubiquitous worldwide. In February, he was awarded the American Institute of Architects' 2005 gold medal. That same month, he unveiled his design of curving concrete shells for the new Atlanta Symphony Center, the first dedicated concert hall in the 60-year history of the city's orchestra. In August, his twisting residential tower, Turning Torso, is to open in Malmo, Sweden. And he has designed three bridges to span the Trinity River in Dallas, with construction scheduled to start next year.

To be sure, he was already well known for the more than 30 bridges he has built, most recently the Sundial at Turtle Bay in Redding, Calif., and the James Joyce in Dublin. His latest public projects include the Olympic sports complex in Athens, the Lyon Airport railway station and an extension of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

But Mr. Calatrava's high-profile New York projects have cemented his celebrity status; Time magazine recently named him one of the 100 most influential people of 2005. His profile is certain to be heightened by the show at the Met, which rarely features architects in its galleries.

That show, to open Oct. 18 and run through Jan. 22, is organized by themes that run through both Mr. Calatrava's art and his architecture - stacked cubes, wings and bird images, waves, Cycladic forms, the eye. "Our point is to show the clear and fascinating relationship between his independent sculptures - exercises in pure form - and his subsequent buildings and bridges and works for which he's best known," said Gary Tinterow, the Met curator in charge of 19th-century modern and contemporary art.

Mr. Calatrava's series of cubed sculptures, made more than 20 years ago, turned out to be a template for his South Street building, due to break ground by the end of the year.

Frank J. Sciame, the tower's developer, said the idea for the building was born when he was helping Mr. Calatrava renovate his Upper East Side town house, which doubles as a private gallery. "Standing there in front of his sculpture, that's how this started," Mr. Sciame said. "He went off and did 350 watercolors."

Mr. Sciame said Mr. Calatrava came up with a range of images - some octagonal, others truncated - precisely the kind of flourishes that would make typically pragmatic developers cringe. "I didn't want to say anything," Mr. Sciame said, "but I was getting concerned because every time you turn a corner, it's more difficult."

But when Mr. Calatrava finally designed the building's core, it turned out to be classic construction, Mr. Sciame said - "one of the best, most stable structural elements you could use."

The success of Mr. Calatrava's New York projects so far, which have both received critical acclaim and are proceeding smoothly, seems partly attributable to his training as an engineer.

"It helps us immensely to have someone give us a solution that is workable from an engineering point of view, as opposed to just an architecturally beautiful feature," said Jerrold Dinkels, the engineering program manager on the ground zero project. "That really makes for a better process."

The transportation hub has proved perhaps the least controversial piece of architecture on the site - no small distinction, given how complicated the rebuilding of ground zero has been by various architectural conflicts.

"We think that he is the da Vinci of our time," said Joseph J. Seymour, the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building the station. "He combines light and air and structural elegance with strength."

Mr. Calatrava, 53, was born in the town of Benimamet, Spain, near Valencia, and began his formal instruction in drawing and painting at the age of 8 at the Arts and Crafts School. In 1968, he enrolled in the Superior Technical School of Architecture in Valencia, where he earned a degree in architecture and took a postgraduate course in urbanism. In 1979, he earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Mr. Calatrava said he considered architecture "the greatest of all the arts" because it embraces the others - music, painting, sculpture. "I couldn't be an architect," he said, "without doing those things."

At the same time, Mr. Calatrava - who spends three to four hours of every day sculpturing, painting or drawing - said he considered himself more an artist than an architect. "My work as a sculptor, it's a very intimate thing," he said. "Drawing is among the most personal things you can do. It doesn't have any rhetoric or anything to tell. It's a dialogue between the art and yourself."

For Mr. Calatrava, the art is not an end in itself; he does not sell any of it and has participated in only a handful of exhibitions. Rather, it is a way of working out ideas in a variety of materials: brass, bronze, wood, marble. He concentrates on a series of similar pieces before moving on to another motif. "I try to develop families of sculpture," he said.

This process only reinforces his work as an architect, Mr. Calatrava said. "It's a similar approach," he said, "studying, trying to define things formally."

Mr. Calatrava said he did not make the sculptures as models for buildings, nor did he design the buildings to look like the sculptures. Rather, they both build on a theme, he said, comparing the process to Bach's. "It's like the 'Goldberg' Variations," he said. "You have the aria, then 30 variations, then the aria."

"This is why it is important for me to do sculpture," he added. "You discover a building."

Mr. Calatrava, who speaks seven languages, continues to maintain offices in Spain and Zurich, but closed his Paris office this year. His wife, Robertina Calatrava, is also his business manager. They have four children.

"I think New York doesn't need me, but I need New York," Mr. Calatrava said. "There is a tremendous perfume in the city. New York is a city of our time, unmistakably. This city is epic. The frenetic way, the movement of people, the temperament, the passion."