Wings, Eyes, Trees

People now talk of Santiago Calatrava buildings as they do of cathedrals. In presenting their 2005 Gold Medal to Calatrava, the American Institute of Architects described a "soaring structural poetry" that "elevates the human spirit". The process of sanctification was swift. It originated in America around 2004, after Calatrava revealed his design for the new $2 billion ground zero transportation hub. Unlike Libeskind's Freedom Tower that will stand above it, the winged glass and steel hub caused no controversy, no frantic review, no counter-designs, barring a modification for security. It was politically and aesthetically perfect. A barrage of new American projects designed by Calatrava - the virtuosic Milwaukee Art Museum, the Atlanta Symphony Centre, a sequence of Texan bridges, a residential tower beside the Brooklyn Bridge, a Chicago tower to be the tallest in the United States - announced the arrival of a phenomenon. The Met held a retrospective, while Time magazine ominously named Calatrava one of the 100 most influential people of 2005.

But for the Spanish master, now in his early fifties, the shoe actually fits. It is not difficult to imagine the sculptor, artist, architect, engineer and mathematical mind as the modern incarnation of a Renaissance cathedral builder. Growing up in Benimamet, near Valencia, Calatrava studied drawing and painting from the age of eight at the city's Arts and Crafts School. A degree in urbanism from the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura in Valencia was somehow dissatisfactory: Calatrava sought something rigorous and grounding, and went to Zurich's highly regarded Federal Institute of Technology for a PhD in civil engineering. Architect as well as engineer, Calatrava presents his designs - unlike Libeskind's Freedom Tower - as fully worked out structural solutions, built from the ribs outward. Like da Vinci's experiments, they are both mathematics and art, teetering wonderfully on the point between uprightness and collapse.

The Turning Torso residential tower in Malmo, Sweden, for instance, is built of nine irregular cubes stacked like vertebrae, which twist 90 degrees from bottom to top. The twist transforms the tower into a sculpted dancer that leans and pulls its weight sideways and upwards. To make the effect work, the cubes are augmented with a pie-shaped wedge projecting from the building's eastern face. It is the point of the wedge which leads the twist from floor to floor. Highlighting the elegant sweep of this twist, the wedge is guided by a steel tube exoskeleton ascending the entire height of the building. The exoskeleton's single upright is fixed to the tower with horizontal and inclined tubes. These reach back to steel anchors embedded in shear walls at the building's back corners. The building is thus visibly braced and strapped, revealing the genius of its structural engineering. Inside the Torso, no apartment is perfectly rectangular, with many having V or W shaped lounge rooms and windows that lean inward or outward to follow the curving surface of the building's white facade.

The idea for the Turning Torso began with a five foot white marble sculpture of cubes set around a steel support, a sculpture that so took the fancy of the building's developer that he insisted Calatrava develop it into a skyscraper. Similarly, a new residential tower in South Street, Lower Manhattan, was extrapolated from a twenty-year-old sculpture of cubes held with wires in vertical suspension. The South Street Tower, one of the boldest to be built in New York for decades, will consist of twelve glass-clad cubes stacked along a concrete core, creating a series of separated, four-storey apartments hanging in conspicuous privacy over the East River. The cubes alternate with voids, each cube providing an outdoor terrace for the one above. Supported by a metal armature attached to their outer sides, the apartments are unencumbered by columns and plumbing. They are on sale from between thirty and forty-five million US dollars. Here, Calatrava has followed the architectural vanguard - and the architectural dollars - from museum building to luxury residential towers.

Calatrava is patient and inquiring. He spends three to four hours a day painting, sketching or sculpting. His method was built, from the early days of piecemeal engineering commissions, with five finger exercises on paper. He tried to understand the outer appearance and the structure of things by systematically representing them, on the one hand, with the sketching techniques he had learnt at art school, and on the other, with the descriptive geometry he took from architecture studies. Increasingly, Calatrava's technique moved towards metaphor. His sketchbook is filled with birds and bird wings, waves, trees, eyes, blank Cycladic forms and spinning human bodies that resemble the bull jumpers of Crete. These motifs are then worked into structures. The World Trade Centre Hub, for instance, is said to be based on a child's hands setting free a bird.

That his structures are endowed with readymade, anthropomorphised meaning is one reason Calatrava is so popular in America, and in ground zero in particular. The white, luminous wings of the Hub are disarmingly optimistic, and entirely lacking in irony. Calatrava's intention is to dignify and reify the core civic structures of industrial cities, an old fashioned, even classical stance with an aroma of the Victorian age. "I think the fifties, sixties and seventies have been very bad years for bridges," Calatrava told Architectural Record, "because they were all purely controlled by economics. Bringing a little bit of the dignity that existed before to bridges in the twentieth century was an important goal. You can say the same about railroad stations." Calatrava's bridges - he has built dozens, a portfolio that underpins his international reputation - rise beyond the utilitarian to a level of complex purity inspired, perhaps, by his love of Bach. The "Harp", "Lute" and "Lyre" bridges over the Hoofdvaart in Holland are singular steel spindles strung with interlacing, conical cabling, that overlay their pattern on the landscape.

"I like the idea of seeing design as not only the will of a single person," says Calatrava, "but like a religious idea, like binding things together". Calatrava's bridge-like perception of himself as the binding point of disciplines, and of the city as the binding point of cultures, goes against the flow of modern life toward specialisation, separation and discontinuity. Calatrava doesn't own a driver's licence, and doesn't use a computer. He is a man of the city, but perhaps not of the crass and miscellaneous city of the twenty-first century. "We think that he is the da Vinci of our time," says the former head of the New York Port Authority, as he entrusted Calatrava with the future of ground zero, America's newest and most symbolically laden sacred site. +

Previous. The main hall of Calatrava's World Trade Centre Transportation Hub, New York. Calatrava gave the hub a hydraulic roof that retracts to form a nine metre void. In this way, fresh air is fed into the hub's column-free belly. The opened roof will catch the "wedge of light" that falls here - if Libeskind is right - every September 11.

From top. Bodegas Ysios winery in Alava, Spain, 1998-2000. The roof is a series of wooden beams supported on the sinusoidal cornice of the long concrete walls. Its shape is accented by aluminium panelling.

Healing hands: the WTC Transportation Hub, a $2 billion project to be built at the centre of Daniel Libeskind's masterplan. Its steel and glass wings span nearly fifty metres.

Sketch for the Turning Torso.

The Turning Torso and The South Street Tower. The Torso, completed in Malmo, Sweden, was Calatrava's breakthrough project and his first skyscraper. It draws on an old fascination with stacked cubes and adds the idea of horizontal movement. Seemingly effortless, the building at close quarters is a dazzlingly complex composition. The South Street Tower, proposed for New York, will create ten luxury apartments (and two commercial venues) stacked along a concrete service core.

Calatrava Bridges published by Thames & Hudson RRP $50.00

Calatrava established his reputation with bridges. It was here that the elegance and the sinew of his sculptural work found their ideal architectural expression. At the ETH in Switzerland, Calatrava cut his teeth on alpine bridges, admiring the work of Robert Maillart; he set up a practice in Zurich in 1981 and won a series of commissions for bridges throughout Europe, especially in Spain. By the end of the 80s he had built more than a dozen, set up a second practice, and entered a period of international success.