Santiago Calatrava - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 99

Calatrava's designs—even when they exist only as sketches, drawings, or models—are striking
works of art. His buildings and train stations are rich in sculptural form and detail, and his bridges
are dynamic assemblages of arches and cables with dramatic approaches and spaces for people to
use and enjoy. By the mid-1980s, exhibitions dealing with Calatrava's work began to appear in
Swiss art galleries and museums, and by the end of the decade an exhibition was organized to travel
to America. Awards also began to come Calatrava's way—from art, architecture, and engineering
associations alike—including gold medals from both the French Academy of Architecture and the
British Institution of Structural Engineers.
Among his earliest completed designs is the Bach de Roda-Felipe II Bridge, completed in 1987
in Barcelona, a structure in which two outside steel arches supporting walkways lean over pedestri-
ans and against two more conventionally placed vertical arches on either side of a central roadway.
The cables from the arches to the bridge deck enclose pedestrians in a broad space that gives an
almost shell-like feel to what might in lesser designs have been a narrow path across a busy bridge.
Perhaps Calatrava's most famous bridge to date is his Alamillo Bridge, built for the 1992 expo in
Seville. This dramatic cable-stayed structure has a single 142-meter-high pylon angled back from
the main span. Between the pylon and the two-hundred-meter-span bridge deck stretch the steel
cables in a harplike arrangement.
None of Calatrava's bridges is particularly long or daring in span, and his first British project that
went beyond the drawing board was a sixty-two-meter-long footbridge, the design of which was
unveiled in 1993. Trinity Bridge, which spans the River Irwell between Salford and Manchester, is
also supported by a single, inclined pylon (sixty meters high), but the cables are in a much more
expansive three-dimensional arrangement, and the roadway splits on the Salford side to make the
bridge accessible to the handicapped via two gracefully curving ramps. The bridge was designed to
be the centerpiece of a riverside redevelopment project.
Although by the early 1990s bridges may have been considered the mainstays of his practice,
Calatrava also established his reputation as a designer of spectacular railway stations and other pub-
lic spaces. His Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, completed in 1990, expanded the capacity
of the rail line on a complicated curved urban site from two tracks to three, added an underground
transfer gallery lined with shops hidden between massive but graceful “zoomorphic” concrete pil-
lars, and let daylight into it all to brighten what might otherwise have been a dark and heavy space
indeed. The Satolas Airport Railway Station, fifteen kilometers east of Lyon, France, was com-
pleted in 1994 and uses concrete—“the most noble” of construction materials, according to Calat-
rava—in a much lighter and dynamic way, in keeping with the high-speed French TGV trains that
pull into and out of the station. Above ground, Calatrava's five-hundred-meter-long steel, alumin-
um, and glass building that straddles the railroad tracks gives the traveler the impression of being
inside the skeleton of some prehistoric giant.
Calatrava, who has said that “a building is a sculpture you walk into,” had his first significant
opportunity in the United States in 1991, when he was invited to participate in a design competition
for the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. His controversial concept of
a glass-topped, towering transept was for a long while not fully accepted or rejected, and its future
remains uncertain.