Wow Factor
Scott Weiland
Leaning between the doors on my uptown commute requires that I occasionally reach out to the vertical stanchions holding the seats on either side. When the train lurches or screeches as it brakes into the station, my body must inevitably bend like a bow as the tensile support (my arm) supports the thrust of my frame. I generally don’t find this to be particularly notable but the architect, Santiago Calatrava, just might. Calatrava is more concerned with suspending forms affected by gravity than suspending forms dealing with inertia, but he finds inspiration for his work in observing the body and natural forms. By rendering his structures in elegant and exaggerated postures, his work often has a quality of "frozen motion;" as if the forces and elements were perfectly balanced. A show of his works at the Metropolitan Museum, "Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture," looks at how his practice as a fine artist informs his architecture. This influence on his praxis is the root of his genius as well as the quality that makes his work open to criticism.
In the now famous words (in my circle of friends) of an architect friend, the new PATH terminal at the WTC looks like a "fallen pterodactyl." Calatrava’s work does often look very skeletal, reminiscent in a way of HR Geiger or Cathy de Monchaux’s work but not as dark. His work has indeed been associated over and over with dinosaur fossils. But, his work has a hygienic minimalist feel and most often is built in white materials like the work of Richard Meier. His compositions are articulated with many repetitive elements; some that move in fan-like arcs. It’s not hard to see that the parabolic forms that intrigued Gaudi, a fellow Spaniard, play a significant compositional role in Calatrava’s work. But this skeletal or inside-out tactic is less a conceptual stance, like for instance the building Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano, but more of a device that combines Calatrava’s aesthetic sensibility with the sensibility he has likely formed by building bridges and railway stations.
Bridges have a simple program. The span and a few other considerations are often the sole spatial and engineering problems. Calatrava has been truly innovative in the design of bridges. Solving these somewhat straight forward problems, along with transit hubs which are very complex engineering and program problems, seem to be the heart of Calatrava’s business. The problem that many architects have in calling him an architect resides in the fact that, while he has developed an incredibly strong aesthetic and engineering language, he seems not to have confronted complex multi-use architectural problems that require a deviation from his bridge and transit building aesthetic. In addition, many would ask whether architecture dominated by engineering is destined to become dated. Looking back on the work of Pier Luigi Nervi, one wonders how well the work of this celebrated engineer/architect has faired over time. Just one look at the Transit hub at 175th street and the George Washington Bridge brings this point to life. Yet, Calatrava is the recipient of the American Institute of Architects 2005 AIA Gold Medal and it‘s truly hard to imagine the work of Calatrava (an architect who holds several honorary doctorates and speaks many languages, is considered an artist, architect and engineer) ever becoming dated.
Calatrava’s work is stunning and it’s hard to bring criticality to bear on his brand of genius. One could argue that along with the TWA terminal by Eero Saarinen and the Guggenheim by Frank Lloyd Wright, that NYC will soon see its third building that could be called predominantly sculptural. This is no small point. Calatrava brings, along with his very reputable track record for building transit hubs, an aesthetic sensibility that could cause controversy and obstacles to its full realization. His forms are very specific and seem almost bullet-proof to modification and compromise. This is their strength and their ultimate weakness. I think many architects would agree that the Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, Calatrava’s first railway commission, is in ways his most elegant. The station carries with it a logic and economy that comes from creative problem solving rather than the promotion and further promulgation of a sculptural aesthetic. The later assessment seems to be what we will continue to see from Calatrava in the future. But possibly the most stunning structure that is situated in a way that augments this aesthetic thrust is the new addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum (Calatrava has built and proposed other additions that are more and less note worthy…the BCE Place in Toronto being a bizarre fit and the proposed addition to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine being a sublime example). The addition at the museum sits atop a shell construction by Saarinen; an example of how architect/engineers often create works which bear, all too obviously, the face value of the technology of their day. But this mixture of techniques of the two architects ends up giving the Calatrava addition a contrast that is often lacking in his work. This is the best example of how, (rather than a fine arts impetus driven by the creation of a transferable aesthetic) Calatrava’s designs could ultimately result in more complex approaches to form, technology, program and an ecology of means that will last beyond the "wow factor."
