Santiago Calatrava’s Travels

by Christoph Schwab
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY, 1999
VHS, 77 mins., color

Sales: Video-DVD $398.00; rental: Video $125.00
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Artur Goczewski
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

artur.goczewski@uni.edu

Santiago Calatrava is increasingly recognized as one of the most important living architects. Among his growing list of awards is the prestigious 2005 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects: the institution’s highest honor conferred on individuals whose work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. Calatrava has numerous projects underway in many parts of the globe, and this film very aptly takes us along on his travels as this engineer and architect visits some of his own building sites.

With rare effectiveness, the film makes actual characters of the typical frustrations and rewards that come with the profession of architecture so that we can observe, firsthand, Calatrava’s architectural methods both at a construction site as well as at his desk. What is more valuable, however, is that we are also treated to well articulated and illustrated conversations with the artist that enable us to understand his creative thought process and to arrive at a clear comprehension of his work, an understanding of it not just as a progression of engineered developments and transformations, but also of how its elements work together conceptually and esthetically as an orchestrated work of art.

In conversation, Calatrava shares the formal vocabulary of his architecture. He regards his work as abstracted projections of natural forces that he achieves by creating environments that relate dynamically to and interact with the mechanics of motion of the human body. If one were to choose the most salient feature of Calatrava’s work, it would have to be some kind of motion, the antithesis of stasis. Virtually all his architectural structures are curved, or slanted, or twisted, or asymmetrical, or possess actual moving parts, or in some way combine those components. He once said: "Whenever I get an opportunity to introduce something mechanical and movable, I have done so… Why? Because in terms of physics, the discipline of mechanics includes two branches, esthetics and dynamics, but they are all the same."

Another key attribute of his work is its structural transparency, which permits the observer (in Calatrava’s words) "to see a pattern of readability." This access to the formal language of the structure makes it possible for observers to engage in it more fully, by recognizing its various forms as a deployment of forces that define a field of action, and, in turn, invoke a self re-conception as an esthetic force of (re)action.

In clarifying his strategy of provoking an esthetic or "free" (re)action of the observer, Calatrava makes the comment that, through architecture, he "can channel all the impulses of free thinking, free feeling, shape, form, the natural [flow]…" and that he does this by combining an apparent simplicity of form with the intrinsic nature of materials, in such a way that the materials’ internal forces are dramatically articulated (by the way in which he has shaped them) for a maximum impact. Calatrava’s architectural language, which is highly readable and yet, at the same time, devoid of specific meaning or associations, provokes "the impulses of free feeling, free thinking" or the esthetic re-design of the forces channeled and embodied by their materials.

This interesting film offers an opportunity to witness the working process and beliefs of one of the most aspiring architects of our time. An opportunity like this does not present itself every day, and it really should be shared with students, whenever contemporary art, architecture, and/or design are taught. From a didactic perspective, it could be useful to think about Calatrava’s ideas in combination with the earlier beliefs and formal vocabulary of Russian Constructivists as Vladimir Tatlin and Naum Gabo. In particular, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-20), which uses mechanical motions and projections of forces based on the properties of the construction material, seems to anticipate the major formal and conceptual principles of Calatrava’s recent work.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Volume 20, Number 4, Summer 2005.)