If you were to fly to the island of Tenerife, to the city of Santa Cruz, 200 miles off the coast of Africa, you would see a large structure at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean that is neither exactly sane nor recognizable. It would defy classification, offering only enigmatic word associations. You could say it was a wave-snake-blade-egg-tail. But that would be an approximation.
Standing directly in its shadow, up against the aquamarine sea, you might find yourself asking questions: What is this? A military installation housing a double-secret laser? The temple of a new cult worshipping horseshoe crabs? And then questions about the environment created by the building: From where are those voices echoing? What are those flickers of light-birds on the wall? And where do those troll holes, dug into the concrete, lead?
And finally, in the most metaphysical sense: Where am I?
The building's most dramatic oddity is its immense scythe-roof, which crests twenty stories over the structure itself and narrows on the far side to a sharp point. It seems precariously set there, like a child's block threatening to topple everything. Or a 3,500-ton tidal wave jus before the crush. Beneath it, an egg appears to come rising out of a roof, the tip of the egg making contact with the scything roof, seemingly balancing it. The building is supported on its plinth—or base—by huge spans in the shape of half-closed eyes. Up a flight of stairs, an open-air walkway revolves around the outside of the building with views of mountain and sea. In places, basalt and volcanic stone cover the concrete; in others, broken white tiles—known as trencadís—create a glittering effect that calls to mind, however briefly, Antoni Gaudí and his work in Barcelona's Park Güell. But compared with Gaudí's melting curiosities, this is a sleek, sharply delineated creature, come from the deep (or above), crouched and gleaming in the African sun.
Though the building gives no clue or code, no signification, of what it might be, inside one finds a great hall, about 1,600 seats sloping to a stage, a phantasm with ribbed walls rising to a ribbed ceiling that opens at an apex. Unlike, say, the Pantheon, which allows a full view of the Roman sky—and with it, the void—this aperture allows indirect light, which pulses downward through the ribs. Instinctively, one isn't just drawn to it; one is overwhelmed by it. It could be some kind of angel up there, or the gleaming eye of the cosmos.
When I went to visit the structure, I didn't know what to expect. I spent the day like a pilgrim, circling the building until nightfall; then I circled it some more. I stood in its porticoes. I climbed its steps. I watched a long-haired, seemingly homeless man rock obsessively on one of the structure's steps, moving his lips in a single mumbling question. I watched a fashion model pose with the structure as backdrop, on a high wall above the sea, in gusts of wind that sent her black-and-gold dress fluttering and nearly toppled her from her perch. I watched as dread-and-patchouli hippies stopped by, snapping pictures. At night, two lovers lay on a bench at a very specific point off the front of the building, next to the sea—it was one of those energy spots, a vortex—and though I averted my eyes as I passed, they were clearly in the throes of passion.
The building incited all of this and more: conversation and revelation, emotion and music, the happenings and copulations in its orbit. Most important, like any great building, it carried within its skin the capacity to enable remembrance. In other words, because of its very unknowability, the building entered one's consciousness as a mystery, tapping into that twilight dreamworld in which we half live our lives. It was here, as one moved through the building's own dream, as one stood beneath the dagger point of the scythe-roof fearfully waiting for something to happen, that dimmer landscapes lighted with strange animals. It was here that memory sparked and took shape.
I wanted to find the man behind that mysterious auditorium in Tenerife, the one who'd dreamed and designed and provoked others by it. So I made a call to the publicists who constituted the first of many protective rings around Santiago Calatrava. My intentions were vetted; a conversation was had between the publicists and Calatrava's wife, Tina, who was in charge of her husband's schedule; then came a green light and a promise of "access"—the usual stuff of movie-star profiles, not necessarily those of architects. And yet a strong case could be made that Calatrava had crossed into sacred territory, that despite being Spanish-born and spending most of his adult life in Zurich, he'd become, in the States, a kind of celebrity. Or national treasure.
What conferred this status upon him—besides the fact that he'd built a museum in Milwaukee famous for its flapping wings—was that, in the aftermath of September 11, the Port Authority had hand-picked him to rebuild its transit hub, the PATH station that had once occupied a part of Church Street and on that fateful day had been buried under a mountain of rubble. It was a massive $2 billion project, as well as a hugely symbolic one. While the station itself had become a grave site, its regeneration was intimately tied not just to the fortunes of the master plan at Ground Zero but also to the psyches of millions of grieving Americans. It was rare for an architect to carry the hopes of so many on his back.
When Calatrava unveiled his plan before a packed house in January 2004, he began sketching what looked to be an underground cathedral with a mechanized roof and an above-ground steeple that he likened to a glass-and-steel dove taking wing from a child's hand. He told those assembled that one of Manhattan's great overlooked qualities was its light—something Matisse had once said—and that the station was going to be built from that light. He said he'd found a "hidden emotion" among the men and women of the Port Authority—eighty-four of whom had perished on September 11—and this building was meant to answer that emotion, too.
In the long, rancorous debate about what kind of buildings belonged at Ground Zero, the unveiling of Calatrava's design was a rare moment of clarity and accord, one that included an ovation for the architect—and his ensuing deification by The New York Times, which called him a man of both "duende" and "soul" and his building an "extraordinary achievement." About the station, a euphoric Mayor Bloomberg blurted: "Wow is the first word that's just got to come to your mind." The Spaniard—the deus ex machina, the angel—who had grown up under the privations of Franco's dictatorship, a man who now proudly proclaimed his love of freedom, had come to save the day, to heal our wounds. It was all part of his burgeoning myth.
Still, the Santiago Calatrava I encountered was more complicated—and more human—than an angel. In fact, I never quite knew which Santiago Calatrava was going to show up for our meetings—or if we were going to meet at all. There was the Santiago Calatrava who seemed to live in a monomaniacal frenzy of visions, meditations, and drawings, the one who innately understood that this PATH station might one day be considered his greatest legacy. And there was the Santiago Calatrava who, having moved to New York in 2002 for this very reason, uprooting his life and thirty years of happiness in Zurich, seemed perturbed by the tortoise pace of progress at Ground Zero. I soon found that, by turns, the architect could be charming, remote, gracious, brusque, charismatic, mildly dismissive, expansive, controlling, and kind. He began half our meetings not with hello but with the terse antigreeting "I'm very busy today." Yet within minutes, excited by an idea, he might repeat the phrase "Do you understand?" genuinely urging me to understand him, as if the weight of something very important, something imminently life-changing, rested on that understanding.
"What can you do as an architect?" Calatrava asked rhetorically the first time we met, sitting on the second floor of his brick Park Avenue town house on a bright June afternoon. "You can try to reflect an order—or an idea. And then you can try to serve people through the building you make. But the architect also believes in a life after: You want to amaze those who come next."
At 55, Calatrava has a hedge of curly black hair singed gray and a doughy, expressive face shadowed by thick brows. He wears oversize glasses and an expensive watch that looks like a miniature speedometer. He's the portrait of an organized, perfectly designed architect: impeccable blue suit with red-and-brown checked shirt running behind it, not overly coiffed but neat and attentive to detail, right down to his manicured fingernails.
When he speaks, the words pour forth in a jumble of accented English. Sometimes he locates a particular word in one of the six other languages he's mastered, and translates it; other times he may improvise, making up words that should exist, like "economicistic," "destinated," or "heroicity." His monologues often begin with simple, quixotic statements—"a table is not an altar; a table is a table"—and are then backed by complicated ideas. There is no doubt he's a man of huge brain—and aspirations. He paints, he sculpts, he makes furniture, he quotes Scripture, he does ceramics, he is both an engineer and architect (a rare occurrence today, when the two disciplines usually find themselves at odds). And unlike the theoretical architect who builds very little because his or her design may be insupportable, Calatrava finds freedom in mathematics, likes to set out engineering challenges and then—as in the case of his gravity-defying scythe-roof in Tenerife—find ways to accomplish them.
In conversation, he caroms from the life of one of his favorite painters, Francisco Goya, to the writings of Spinoza, whose seventeenth-century treatise on whether God possesses a corporeal body Calatrava finds "beautiful." He can conjure historic events that inspired a certain painting, while pausing to cite the etymology of words like culture, politic, or religion (the last being, in its Latinate, "the bonding of things," he told me, "between the spiritual and the human condition").
But it's usually on the topic of architecture that a particular expression of delight—scrunched-up Magoo eyes, hunched shoulders, an amused smile—manifests itself. It's the look of innocence regained, one that causes a contagious smile in a visitor: Somewhere in the architect's well-protected world, it seems, he's found a place where he can be a boy again, setting forth his most innocent inquiries and dreams in an attempt to make something unusual. For instance: to make buildings that move.
When I asked that first day what he would build if anything were possible, he mentioned a rotating house that might follow the sun, thought for a moment, and then pointed out the window of his town house to the leaves of a tree fluttering in a breeze. The wind was light enough so that the leaves rose and fell in undulations, catching the sun, throwing shades of green, leaving the effect of a pillowed lung rising and falling with breath. "A building that moves like that," he said.
It wasn't so crazy. "Even the Pyramids are moving," he said, lighting off on one of his monologues. "Maybe they are a millionth of a millimeter shorter every day, but then the sun, the earth, the cosmos all are moving. We say the structure is static, but the forces at work on it are those of mass and acceleration. Acceleration is kinematic, variable, because it is the second derivative of space to time twice, you know?"
This was one of Calatrava's obsessions, creating structures that emanate with energy and movement, from his art museum in Milwaukee (with its mechanized wings) to Turning Torso in Sweden (with its seemingly impossible ninety-degree rotation) to his PATH station (with its mechanized glass-and-steel roof). What inspired people about his PATH design, what led to his sudden sainthood, was the result of thirty years of meditating on the intricacies of movement as well as his belief that buildings have an obligation to society. On the highly charged field of Lower Manhattan, grief and then hope needed a focal point and a conduit. And here it was. The PATH design bore all the earmarks of Calatrava's innovation: the organic curves, the inclination to mechanize, a highly stylized and expressive way of working with shapes plucked out of human and animal bodies. Existing as it seemingly did, in a moment before flight, it suggested literal movement as well as movement of a transfiguring, spiritual nature.
Still, there were naysayers. Critics have called his work kitschy, overt, superficial. Fellow architect Peter Eisenman went after Calatrava at a public forum at Columbia University last fall, labeling his buildings "easy" and "saccharine." And he didn't stop there. Questioning why the Ground Zero subway station resembled a bird, Eisenman said, "To me, it's just dumb."
At the least, it did raise some questions: Why did a subway station need stark white bone-wings coming out of the ground, and a mechanized roof? Beyond that: Why did an art museum need flapping wings? And why did an opera house need a twenty-story concrete wave breaking over it? Was this the work of a stuntman, a joker, or a genius?
His first memories are of drawing. As a boy, he could not tolerate blank space. He was furious in his pursuit of eradicating voids, which led him to collect discarded pencil stubs from the shop where the carpenters worked. At school he used colored pencils, and before the day was over the reds and yellows were nubs. He drew until the lead was gone and his fingers traced the page. He remembers all this as a feeling of "getting somewhere."
On the first day of school, as a child, while the class waited for its new teacher to arrive, the boy stood up, approached the chalkboard—all that blank space—and started drawing furiously with chalk. He drew landscapes and battles, boats and animals. He drew whatever pleased his classmates, because he wanted to create a spectacle for them. In the years that followed, the boy started school by drawing for his classmates.
At the age of 8, he exhibited enough talent to be allowed into an art school, where he learned to draw with kids twice his age. Though his parents held more mundane jobs—his father exported fruits and vegetables; his mother made clothes—they were the kind to marvel at paintings in museums. They challenged him to draw various objects around the house. Soon it was the pigeons, wing after wing after wing.
Calatrava grew up in Valencia, one of the last Republican hold-outs against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and the ills of Fascism made an impression on the young boy. "In the absence of light, you appreciate light," he says today. It was in the city's architecture that he experienced the freedom of expression. With an illustrious trading past that brought everyone from the Phoenicians to the Romans there, Valencia possesses beautiful buildings and bridges from almost every era—Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque. The highlight for Santiago Calatrava, though, was when his father brought him to the mercantile at the center of town, a building called La Lonja. For a child, it was an absolutely magical place. Constructed in the 1400s, it is one of the first significant secular buildings of the city, and one of its most idiosyncratic. It has secret rooms and a hidden stairwell. It has an image of a man pissing in a pot. People came and went, the place humming with commerce, smelling of oranges. The boy felt this frisson, too. Above was a huge vaulted ceiling held up by a forest of pillars that twisted in a most unusual fashion from the floor, creating energy and movement, then vining out over the ceiling. Years later, when he wonders where the idea for Turning Torso comes from—or the forest he created for Oriente train station in Lisbon—he'll remember those pillars and realize it comes from the fifteenth century.
In 1968, Calatrava went to Paris to go to university, but when he arrived, anarchy ruled. Students had taken a position against anything generational, against conferred wisdom, to the point of solipsism. So Calatrava returned to Spain and applied to architecture school. On his application, at the age of 17, he wrote, "I will benefit society the most [by studying architecture] for I am sure that I will be able to practice this career with enthusiasm and love."
He went to university, for fourteen years of study, first in Valencia and then in Zurich. At the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he wrote an engineering dissertation entitled "On the Foldability of Space Frames," which set in place a calculus for making permanently assembled structures that might move. His drawings became more and more pointed—more human bodies, more birds and bulls and skeletons. By working these subjects over and over again, unexpected shapes began to emerge that, when further abstracted, created more startling, autonomous shapes on the page. He would draw while waiting for a train, between appointments, in hotel rooms. He might sit for an hour waiting for his doctor and draw only his hand—tracing the space between his thumb and forefinger, obsessing on its skeletal outlines—and be a bit perturbed when it was time to be seen.
After building twenty-one ridges and seven stations—after creating museums and opera halls, warehouses and Olympic stadiums, after receiving thirteen honorary degrees and a bevy of prestigious awards—what does he do with his fame? How does he spend it? He wakes each morning sometime between 5 and 6 A.M., searching for something he doesn't yet know—reaching for some shape or form. He rises from bed and goes to his atelier to invent new shapes, that will become his next buildings. He begins again and again, obsessively, by drawing.
"I believe in buildings that deliver an emotion," the architect says. "The first time I entered Grand Central, I couldn't move. I stood, supporting myself on the stairs. A policeman saw me there, standing for a very long time, and said, 'What are you doing?' It was a breathtaking moment, to see this space and the people moving and to see the harmony, the almost musical harmony, of people moving around. The building delivered an emotion—and in the moment you feel that emotion, you see, the building has translated you into another reality. A superior reality. And this link is religious. Grand Central is not a church; it's a station that has a religious dimension. It's a supernatural building."
There was an important coda to Calatrava's experience at Grand Central, another secret to the way the architect saw his work. "In antiquity they made buildings as if they were people," he said. "People and buildings shared attributes. So it is possible to establish a bridge between a person—and I'm not saying a plant and a building or a fish and a building or a bird...no!—between a person and a building, because the building is there for people. This jump delivers a soul to the building, because it is the mirror of a person."
The most literal example of this kind of thinking—of buildings reflecting an order, of buildings mimicking human beings, of buildings thus possessing souls—can be found in Turning Torso, a radical fifty-four-story apartment complex set on the Baltic Sea in the otherwise nondescript, low-lying city of MalmÖ, Sweden, a former shipbuilding center across the inlet from Copenhagen. The tankers of the world were once welded into behemoths here, in Kockums boatyard; in fact, the great symbol of the city had been Kockums's huge crane, which eventually was sold off to South Korea. In its absence, the town leaders yearned to replace the crane with a symbol of MalmÖ's progress into the twenty-first century.
The skyscraper was based on a Calatrava sculpture—seven cubes rotating on a steel support, meant to mimic the revolution of a twisting spine. Calatrava hadn't really considered it more than one of his myriad studies when he was approached by the managing director of a private real estate development firm named HSB, who asked if he might consider actually building it. Thus began the drawings that became nine separate six-story pods, each turning ten degrees on a vertical axis—revolving ninety degrees total—that seemed to many an act of madness to build, especially on this stretch of stormy, windswept coast.
When I traveled to see Turning Torso last spring, I took the train from Copenhagen. There was a low ceiling of clouds, a Scandinavian chill in the thin gray light. The palette of the Baltic was of the blacks and silvers and greens that conspired to create a kind of Bergmanian loneliness. Approaching MalmÖ from the southern bridge, one could look out to the north across the water, to a distant reach of land there. This horizon of land-water-isthmus-pine repeats itself all through Sweden, making room here and there for civilization. But when the small city of MalmÖ appeared, there seemed to be something odd about it, a huge pillar rising from its flatscape, a beanstalk holding up the sky.
Honestly, at first, even on the lookout for an idiosyncratic building, I thought it was a beanstalk. And this image, of course, removed one from one's own self and brought one closer to the mythic, to the fairy tale, to the dream.
The building contained so much internal energy that it appeared on the verge of collapse. Standing at its base, I could see that the corkscrewing skyscraper seemed to have a Pisa tilt. I was told that the engineering feat of the building, among many, was that each floor rotated twenty inches from the one beneath it; thus, every toilet, sink, and electrical wire was placed differently from floor to floor.
While there, I met with HSB's project director, Ingvar Nohlin, the engineer whose task it had been to interface with Calatrava for the seven years it took to complete the project (and whose task now was to collect all the awards that the building kept winning). A solid, affable man quick to joke, he immediately confessed to being an avid collector of old Playboy magazines, then told me the story of Turning Torso. "The town fathers uncorked bottles of champagne after the first meeting with Calatrava," he said. He told how Calatrava, who visited the building site infrequently, made all the decisions at the job site from a remove, in Zurich, which often delayed the process. "Every morning at 8 A.M., there was something wrong," said Nohlin, who still considers himself good friends with the architect and is immensely proud of what they accomplished together. "When he came here, Calatrava didn't want to sit with a contractor, because the contractor is the enemy: The contractor usually wants to simplify and destroy the architect's drawings."
Financial issues delayed the project, too. With cost overruns at double, HSB had to decide whether or not to proceed. Figuring that they were destined to lose the same amount of money either way—just over $200 million, which would end up being the final cost of the project—they gambled and procured the loans necessary to continue. And still, there were uncertainties about the building's viability. "We had a big issue with the core," remembered Nohlin. "The load of the building, the force of the facade, wasn't carried by beams running through the building and into the ground. Instead the whole thing sat on a core, and its size had been underestimated. We needed to start the project, and we needed a solution."
Here Nohlin opened a cabinet and produced what looked to be a bound report of some sort. "So then, one day, this comes from Santiago." He placed the booklet on his desk and began leafing through its pages, a panoply of dreamy watercolors. On the cover was the headless, muscled body of a male nude in burnt orange. It was easy to imagine how this played out in a room full of stressed, hard-core engineers hanging on to every page for practical guidance. The booklet started with abstract shapes in yellows, blues, and greens. In a whimsical voice, hamming it up a bit, Nohlin said, "Here we should have a colorful forest. And over here another naked man. Some more shapes here... And what does this have to do with the building's core?" He kept turning pages, many of which showed a long rectangle with a circle on the far right and inside that circle what looked to be a blue/yellow/orange home plate with a red dot in its center. "Oh, more shapes. Very nice. Another naked man, this time standing on the building. A nice tree here. And more funny shapes..." He was about three-quarters through the book. "And then here: something that looks like the building's core. Uh-huh, more of it. And then an idea here about making an outer wall, with a couple of more nudes looking out from on top of abstract floors and plate glass.... Okay, yes, that's interesting. Past this other naked man, then at the very back of the book: seven architectural drawings. The whole solution, right here! And all the watercolors before it showed us how he got there.
"I can tell you right now," said Nohlin, closing the book, "we'd never seen anything like it. In Sweden, like the rest of the world, architects begin on the computer. But Calatrava got up every morning at 5 A.M. and started painting the solution."
When I arrived again at Calatrava's Park Avenue town house one stormy summer afternoon in June, the architect entered the conference room on the second floor, eyes downcast, without regard for the room's decoration, all done or designed by him: vertebraic sculptures, nude watercolors, primitive furniture pieces, and a chain-mail sculpture the size of a small person that, once turned on, undulated, its shimmering skin throwing bronze light.
"No one told me you'd be here," he said. "I have meetings and a phone call from Europe in twenty minutes." Apparently, there were more hassles on his Ground Zero project about which no one would talk. In fact, a planned trip for us to go to the site had been canceled by Calatrava, as had a visit to Grand Central. "It's because of the rain," I was informed by one of his associates. "And he's too busy."
It's true that as each new problem arose at Ground Zero, the Port Authority seemed to be filling Calatrava's dance card with meeting after meeting to iterate and adjust the plans for the PATH station, now a massive building site due for completion in 2009. Meanwhile, the Port Authority's reputation for secrecy and possessiveness wasn't helping matters. On another occasion, Calatrava had told me, "You need to find a way to renovate your joy in a project every day—and your belief that something important can happen." But today he clearly didn't have that renovating spirit.
The PATH station wasn't the only thing on his mind: There were the sports complex in Rome and four towers in Valencia, the university campus in Maastricht and a luxury apartment complex in Lower Manhattan called Eight South Street (with units starting at $29 million). There was his soon-to-be-inaugurated train station in Liége and the now scotched cathedral in Oakland—as well as projects in Chicago (the tallest building in the United States), Dallas (five bridges), Oveido (an urban-renewal plan verging toward something out of Star Trek), Jerusalem (a bridge)... The list went on. There were upcoming meetings with kings, queens, sheiks, and the pope; and then an impending annual trip to Europe for the summer, moving between his villas in Zurich and Valencia and the flat in the Marais district of Paris.
This busyness was apparently the price paid for being Santiago Calatrava, but one couldn't help but detect a certain ambivalence, even a slight torment in the architect, a resentment at the mundane reality of people—people like me—parading through the door, asking for his time when his destiny required solitude. When I asked Calatrava if he ever felt compromised by the fact that the people commissioning his architecture control his art, he said, "My attitude is very unorthodox about this, because I think the person who knows the most about the building that doesn't yet exist is the client. They know the place; they know what they expect. My work is to go beyond their expectation, to a place they never expected to be."
On that day—as on others that I visited—Calatrava's wife, Tina, a Swedish-born lawyer who helps oversee the business side of an architectural firm with more than one hundred employees, kept poking her head from around the corner, wearing a tight, wan smile. Hers was the unenviable task of keeping her husband on some sort of schedule. "Santiago has a spirit of abstraction," one of the Calatravas' closest work associates told me. "Tina brings order. When he's tired, she literally puts him to bed; when he's stressed, she says, 'Right, okay—we're going on vacation.' They have a thirty-year marriage, and I honestly don't think he's ever looked at another woman."
"He's very tender," said this associate, "but he can be very hard."
No matter what you thought of him or however difficult he could be, I had to remind myself, again and again, that the most compelling thing about him—the reason I was here—was that somewhere in the deep ravines of his brain were these mad visions that, in turn, became his bridges and buildings. Now, feeling the immense pressure to accomplish a masterpiece with his PATH station—facing the challenges of translating those visions to reality—Calatrava was showing signs of frustration. He lamented that in America, because of various interest groups, it was harder to build, as compared with the freer-wheeling Mediterranean countries. He recalled how easy it had once been to build in Spain: If an idea seemed innovative and original, the process carried its own warp speed, often circumventing the bureaucracy. "When you do something new, very new, that nobody has done before," he said, "you have a much better chance of accomplishing that in smaller places, in the peripheria, than in big places, because you have to concentrate on the architecture and you don't have time for the politics."
There was also a question of public perception. He couldn't hide his wariness of the press. Last year he'd had two exhibitions of his work—his sculptures and architectural designs at the Met and painted ceramics at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute in New York. It was the kind of showing rare for any architect not named da Vinci, and it thrust Calatrava into a spotlight he wasn't ready for. Art critics branded his watercolors static, and cries came that the only excuse for exhibiting Calatrava's paintings and sculptures was to explain his architecture. "He was devastated by some of what was written," I was told by an associate.
As he wriggled to get out of our meeting, I reminded him that he was the one who'd agreed to a longer article, he'd been the one who'd offered to show me around Valencia and take me through one of his buildings and let me watch him making ceramics. What I was doing was going to take a little more time, I told him.
"Yes, that's what my wife tells me," he said. "But maybe you will have to write something short now."
We sat glumly at the glass table, pausing to watch the rain begin to fall. Out the window, you could see birds huddled under the eaves of the building across the street. The legs of the table, designed by Calatrava, seemed like unusual specimens of treated driftwood, but upon closer inspection formed the body of one person, riding the back of another. It called to mind the claustrophobic union of human bodies, four limbs growing from the impression of one torso. Calatrava took off his glasses and ran his hands over his face, exhaled heavily, placed his glasses back on. "I need to take my call now," he said.
On cue came the clip-clop of his wife's heels down from the upper reaches of the house in order to retrieve him. He stood and left brusquely. Even the trapped birds across the street looked a little relieved when he left. Or perhaps I was projecting. The copulating couple beneath the table: Pressed beneath hundreds of pounds of plate glass, they didn't seem relieved at all.
"For some, the origin of architecture is in the trees," the architect says. "The first houses were branches, branches taken from the tree. Next came clothing, something to wrap yourself in, like the tent. But I believe very much that the essence of architecture is in the human gesture. For instance"—here the architect holds his arms out before him, connecting his hands as if they were gates—"this is protection. I am sheltering something. This"—he opens his arms wide now—"is openness, an embrace. This is St. Peter's church in Rome, Bernini's church." The architect reaches up and cups his hands together. "And this is the cupola."
He brings his arms down and leans close. "Do you see my hands opening from me to you and you to me? Very important. This is architecture. There is, in our movement, an expression of life. In the gesture is an enormous condensation of life, the essence."
If you were to fly to the Midwest, swooping low across Lake Michigan to the city of Milwaukee—its once fabled Schlitz brewery having given way years ago to the hip Alterra coffee shops—you would come upon another structure perched on a shoreline.
In this case, you might know exactly what this structure was: a bird. Yes, easy, a bird with wide white wings lifting from shore, hovering just before flight. It would be, then, a transparent ninety-foot-tall bird, tilted at a forty-eight-degree angle and partially supported from behind by a needle-mast pylon, itself tilted at forty-eight degrees. The mast would convey wires that harp from the coccyx of the bird on one side, through the mast itself, to a 280-foot pedestrian bridge meant to deliver visitors from the city to the bird itself. Without the counterbalancing support of the bridge, the wings, comprising steel fins weighing one hundred tons in total, would topple everything.
Upon entering the bird, you would be standing inside a great hall with an overex-aggerated prow looking out upon the lake, a hall with a conical glass ceiling rising ninety feet over your head (the structure is made up of 915 panes of glass in all, many of them curved). Standing inside the bird's belly, looking up, you might feel closer to the sky somehow. And everywhere around would be people, standing or rocking in silence, craning their necks to heaven. Emanating away from the great hall to the north are elongated white-ribbed hallways in the shape of—well, a shape without words, recognizable and seemingly organic but not really describable—that gives one the sense of being inside a blue whale.
When I went to visit Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum recently, I took my position on the footbridge at noon, in order to watch the wings flap. I was feeling a little impatient at first—maybe this was a bit kitschy (I had visions of Stonehenge descending in the movie Spinal Tap)—but as I stood there, more and more people gathered. It was lunch hour, and those with office jobs in the big buildings nearby wandered down to gather on the other side of the bridge. Out-of-towners were twittering nervously with each other, cameras poised. It was like a solar eclipse where everything stops for just one moment and everyone stares into space to see what will happen.
Then the wings began their flapping—slowly, over the course of about ten minutes—and at each position, the building changed shape, going from flight to rest, until the wings were wrapped along the body of the bird, which assumed a protected austere beauty and silence. I then went to watch the wings rise from inside, to watch as the light on the floor changed patterns and the ceiling threw shadows and new shapes. Everything seemed to be moving for a moment—and then it was still again.
It was a moment of pure energy, the building revealing itself as a being capable of movement rather than just suggesting it. One couldn't minimize or nullify the effect: Nobody would have come at noon to see the bird if it had had no wings. And because it did, the bird—which wasn't really a bird at all but a highly complicated building, an engineering and aesthetic feat that seemed to be suggesting everything, including immortality—created a lasting civic moment. If one were a critic, maybe it was a false moment of kitsch; if one proudly lived in this city or traveled some distance just to be in the presence of that building, it was a chance to wonder at the boy at the chalkboard creating a spectacle.
"I know people who declare themselves atheists not because they don't believe in God but because they don't believe that through our nature we can realize the nature of God, so far are we from each other," the architect says. "It's a very rational approach. But on the other side is my prosecution of the idea of God, which is more like a child wondering at the beauty of a flower—its chemistry—or the way my hand moves. Do you understand how difficult it is to imitate either of those two things, even by drawing them? Even our thoughts, the fact that we may believe or not, the fact that we could think that there's a superior order. Do you understand that this is a surprising thing?
"The last Psalm, number 150, concludes with a sentence. Everything that moves praises the Lord. It depends on how you translate it: Everything that breathes praises the Lord. Everything that lives praises the Lord. Everything that is moving, breathing, living, praises the Lord."
My last meeting with Calatrava was set for Zurich in the middle of July. Before that time, I'd visited a dozen projects in six countries—and arrived with a long list of questions. I waited for him in one of the studies in the old house that was his office in one of the city's tony neighborhoods. The house had an emerald lawn like a croquet pitch and a long outbuilding at the back, which included another studio where he worked. In the study, there was an easel in the corner, framed pictures of present-day royalty, and books in the bookcase that included Hokusai's One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji. When we first shook hands, Calatrava seemed agitated again.
"I hear you're not interested in my architecture," he said. I asked what had given him that impression. He changed the subject. I pressed again, but his response this time indicated that the subject was closed. "Would you be offended if I eat one of these?" he said, pointing to a plate of chocolate-dipped cookies on the table between us.
Was he trying to provoke an opinion from me? Was he insecure, paranoid, or just being testy again?
"He is his work," said one of his employees. And Calatrava himself had suggested as much. "Even when we used to summer in Saint-Moritz," he'd told me, "I took an extra room, a small atelier, so I could work apart from the family." When in Valencia for vacation last summer, he spent twelve-to-fourteen-hour days making huge ceramic tiles, tiles that were going to be used as the skin for his Valencia opera house, which will open this October. When he returned to Valencia this summer, he had plans to work on ceramic tiles for the PATH station. "This is what I do for physical ertion now," he said.
But he wanted to do it without flies on the wall, without distractions. He didn't want to reveal mundane, human particulars about his life—what he'd had for breakfast, whether he collected wristwatches (he does). You could only know him in those rare glimpses that he controlled, in the classroom where he gave his monologues, at the opening of this or that building where he could act as hero and tour guide.
If you really wanted Santiago Calatrava, the best he could do was to make you look at his buildings. He was swooping curves and the glittering tiles. He was the scythe-roof and the wings spread wide. He was the savior of dead cities, building strange palaces on land that had once been industrial dumps. He was his most idealized self speaking to generations 500 years from now. Would they listen?
When I asked Calatrava what he would be remembered for, he said, "When you do something new, you will be imitated. Turning Torso—this idea of twisting and twisting—will be imitated. One of my bridges, in a corner of Barcelona, has been enormously imitated."
In particular, and perhaps as an answer to the question, Calatrava had wanted me to see the video presentation of his PATH station at Ground Zero. It began to the strains of a haunting remix by Massive Attack, started from the perspective of blocks away and high in the sky—from the eye of a bird or the window of a plane—and swooped down through skyscrapers toward Ground Zero. In the video, the other unbuilt, imaginary buildings stood in ghostly formation, and then what appeared were the white-boned wings of the PATH station, an absolutely moving, chilling, beautiful sight. It seemed to float there, caught in a moment of transition, emanating something. What was it?
The music carried you into the station, where people were going about their business—coming in from New Jersey to work, picking up a bagel to eat at the desk—as if it were any other day, as if they weren't passing through a huge sarcophagus. And yet that was the power of the place, too, that it might allow people to revert back to their former lives. The passages were sleek and white, Calatravan underground vistas that seemed as if they'd been taken from the inside of a living being, as Eve was literally built from the rib of Adam. The mechanized roof shaded and then pulled back from the station; the people kept flowing. It felt like one of those lost American moments, belonging to another era: the light, the calm, the sky coming down through the city to this spot, and the people on this spot speaking to the sky.
"Stations are public buildings," he said. "They are gates, and for the moment when people pass through them they are a home. The station is there to deliver a testimony." And here the architect shifted to what was really on his mind, the station he'd been obsessing over for the past three years, and the soul he hoped to give it. "There are kids of 7, 8, 9, and it may take them until they're 25 to understand what happened at Ground Zero. So the building carries this memory.
"Imagine, the roof of the station is covering us, and suddenly, on September 11 in the future, on the anniversary, the roof opens in the exact moment when the first tower was hit, and the roof remains open until the time of day when the second tower comes down. There is no protection in the station. If it is raining, the rain will come in. If it is windy, you will feel the wind. I think in considering the building as a person, the building also makes a gesture like this, by itself. Of course, we will understand the gesture, but in 500, 600 years, will they?"
He was silent for a moment, as if finished, then a memory seemed to occur to him. "The hole in the Pantheon today still moves me," he said. "There is something about the idea of air and light that carries a very deep sense of reconciliation and generosity—and, you see, also forgiveness. This station must carry forgiveness. Do you understand?"
It was an image that gave me goose bumps: Light pouring down, the souls rising up. It was time for me to go—and suddenly, confronted by the engaging Calatrava, I didn't want our time to end. He presented me with two books, both full of paintings by him: one containing stylized portraits and one, a long foldout, of a herd of bulls. He gave them, and then took them back. He led me into his study and picked up a paintbrush. He looked around for paints—and water—and when he found them, he started painting. In the front of the first book, he added a portrait to the portraits, and to the herd of bulls he added more bulls.
"Here, you'll need to keep these open for a while," he said, smiling. It seemed he was done, but then he saw another bull in his mind that wasn't on the page. His brush moved quickly, whipping and dabbing—and when he'd finished, when he'd said good-bye, he went off through a back door. I could see him crossing the lawn, a complicated man bustling to his studio, to his sketch pads and paints, where he was going to draw the ribs and wings of all the strange angels he had yet to invent.