A fair (and edgy) write-up of Santiago "Bird Man" Calatrava's trajectory to date by the succinct Martin Filler in the NY Review of Books. | nyrb
a sampling:

Some of Calatrava's coprofessionals have cast a skeptical eye on what they see as his tendency to overelaborate his designs and obfuscate the underlying structure. This is hardly typical in engineering, a discipline whose practitioners consider it more a science than an art, much less a form of magic. Any engineer or architect will attest that it is hard to keep a design simple. On the other hand, the duplication of design in order to enhance visual effects, detectable in some of Calatrava's bridges, is also not easy to produce. Not all of his eye-catching gestures are useful functionally; they must be augmented by less apparent components that actually do the heavy lifting. As Marc Treib, an architect who teaches at Berkeley, remarked to me: "With Calatrava there is the bridge, and then there is the real bridge."

The architect Renzo Piano once told his longtime technical collaborator, the engineer Peter Rice, of his interest in the young Calatrava's work. Piano recalled to me Rice's cautionary response: "Something is not right there. When you design a bridge, you go from here to here," which the engineer illustrated with a quick horizontal swipe of his finger. Then, Rice added, "You do not go from here to here," arching his right hand over his head and touching his left ear.