Of nice notebooks, insomnia, and bridges: this weekend's New York Times Magazine features an article on Santiago Calatrava's designs for bridges.
November 30, 2003
To Draw a Bridge
By ADAM SACHS
hen he can't sleep, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava draws pictures. Birds, bodies, bulls -- the fluid, figural images repeat themselves in sketch after sketch. The drawings fill his notebooks, and the notebooks -- elegant Japanese ledgers with pages that open out like a room-length accordion -- fill the offices and homes he keeps in Zurich, Paris, Valencia and Manhattan.
Calatrava is known for buildings and bridges that look as if they could have sprung forth whole from the pages of his dreamy sketchbooks. In Valencia, on the Mediterranean in Spain, he built a planetarium inspired by his sketch of a human eye, complete with a hydraulic lid that closes. A drawing of a man's midsection gave rise to the twisting form of a residential tower called Turning Torso, now under construction in Malmo, Sweden. In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, the canopy arched over his recently completed opera house resembles a petal of a flower. If his remarkable buildings start as a gesture on the page, for Calatrava it's the act of drawing itself -- the silent, endless hours spent sketching and resketching a subject -- that constitutes the creative process. So when the mayor of Jerusalem asked him to build a bridge that would serve as an entry point to the holy city, Calatrava started drawing.
Ehud Olmert, Jerusalem's mayor at the time, wasn't just seeking a functional solution to a traffic problem. He wanted a symbol. ''When I went to sign the contract,'' Calatrava remembers, ''he told me: 'You have done many bridges, but you will do a bridge for Jerusalem that means something. This will be the most beautiful thing that you have ever done.' ''
Calatrava, who was recently chosen to design the $2 billion transit hub at ground zero, began by considering the constraints of the situation in Jerusalem: a tram line that needed to cut an S-shaped path from Jaffa Road to Theodor Herzl Boulevard, rising above a dense intersection and clearing the way for a public plaza beneath. The city engineer wanted to make life easier for pedestrians and also give some much needed character and panache to a congested urban entanglement through which much of the traffic arriving into the city passes. Building in Jerusalem means using Jerusalem stone, and Calatrava knew that he would need to balance the sturdy honey-colored rock with more modern touches of fluid steel and glass. He wanted to create something that would seem to fly -- its span soaring over the tops of the cars -- and hoped the structure would serve the city as a gate and not another wall.
The first drawings for the bridge were abstract. ''If there was a reference to anything, it was to musical instruments,'' Calatrava says, looking back over his initial sketches. For each of his projects (he has designed more than 60 bridges), Calatrava, who is 52, keeps extensive files chronicling the progress from inchoate doodle through the final stages of computer modeling. ''Bridges with cables very easily resemble stringed instruments. I thought the city of David deserves a bridge that looks like a harp, the instrument he played.'' Not only would the harp strings hold the bridge up, they would be the focal attraction of a design meant to be as light and transparent as possible. A cable-stayed bridge would avoid the use of heavy pillars that would take up space on the ground, which Calatrava and city planners hoped to use as a pedestrian meeting space. If the embankments were to be of Jerusalem stone, the pylon would have to be tall and thin but stable enough to hold the curvy deck of the bridge together.
Unlike most bridges, Calatrava's well-regarded Alamillo Bridge in Seville has just one supporting tower. The mast is angled, leaning back from the water and, with visible tension, carrying the roadway by its cables. Building on this idea, early studies for the Jerusalem bridge suggested a straight incline, sticking up like a hand on a clock. This, he realized, would create too much pull on the pylon. A second incarnation featured a curved mast resting on two legs. Soon, however, Calatrava figured out that he could add more cables and get rid of one of the legs altogether, resulting in an even more slender, streamlined form -- a single, sloping mast at the center of the S-shape. ''It's very powerful, but it has the ability to disappear,'' Calatrava says of his solution. ''There were three different versions, though each one built on the other. You calculate, you make the model, you leave it for a while, then you come back. Each one tries to be better than the one before. They make a kind of city.''
Santiago Calatrava is a modern architect. His large staff uses computers to help him analyze his models. Calatrava guesses that even Antonio Gaudi -- Spain's singular surrealist Catalan architect who at the turn of the last century was testing structural models with strings and weights -- would use computers if he were designing today. But a couple of factors distinguish Calatrava from the current crop of star architects. First, he has a second profession. He is an engineer. Most architects are not engineers, and most engineers do not design buildings. They graduate from different schools, and though they must collaborate on the same projects, they eye each other with the mutually dependent suspicions of the sausagemaker and the health inspector.
After completing his years of architecture training, Calatrava decided that he needed to know more about how things are constructed. He took a Ph.D. in civil engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The important thing for Calatrava isn't just that he learned about building but also that he learned to ignore the traditional divide between his two vocations. ''Many architects say that they will never do a bridge,'' Calatrava says. ''But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century. And Frank Lloyd Wright was very proud of his study of engineering.''
Which brings us to the second point of departure in Calatrava's work: his process of drawing and sculpturing buildings and bridges into life. Unattached to any school of architecture, Calatrava draws like an artist and thinks like a scientist. ''What is interesting,'' he says, ''is that the sketch is always spontaneous. If you keep drawing, you can preserve much of this spontaneity. You have an idea. You refine it through sketching. You see, the interaction between the free work of the sketches and the pure geometrical work makes things move toward a precise solution. On one side, you have the spontaneity of the sketch. And on the other side, you have the rigor of the confluence of all the square footages you have to account for, all the toilets, the elevators, the doors, the security issues, the questions of fire protection, all of this.''
Right brain and left brain are kept in lock step by a constant overlapping of enthusiasms -- and by constant work. The movement of a man's torso is sketched and reimagined as a sculpture of sleek cubes and tension wires, the figure translated into pure mathematics. The Jerusalem bridge is drawn and, after the models have been tested, drawn again. The result is architecture born of both creative inspiration and scientific rigor. Enthusiasm itself, Calatrava tells me, comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, or ''possessed by the gods.'' The artist, in the Greek mind, was a man given remarkable tools by the gods.
It's no accident that the book ''Santiago Calatrava's Creative Process'' was published in two volumes. The first, ''Fundamentals,'' deals with the mathematical and engineering underpinnings of his work. The second, ''Sketchbooks,'' collects a portion of Calatrava's 60,000 drawings. Neither is it an accident that the books are boxed together: one informs the other. ''You can't have one without the other -- besides, they come as a set,'' says the architect-engineer, who is also something of a salesman. Calatrava is a man of many enthusiasms.
Calatrava's structures tend to be stark, white and eye-catching. Though they proclaim their own complexity, his bridges are more than mere science projects. They are lovely, each an elegant argument for itself.
For his Jerusalem bridge, Calatrava has indulged in a bit of color. Running along the pedestrian walkway is a band of blue light. ''It is a pastel blue, like the blue of the Israeli flag and also the tallit,'' Calatrava says, referring to the traditional prayer shawl worn by observant Jews. ''When you see the bridge from far away, it will appear like a modern obelisk. And at the top we would like to put a bronze plate, something that will reflect in the sun like a golden dome.''
In the post-Bilbao era, comparisons to Frank Gehry will necessarily be made. The two men admire each other, and though they both have produced remarkable works of public-pleasing art, they could not be more different in approach or effect. Gehry makes buildings with beautiful skin. Calatrava is an architect of bones. Gehry's cosmic collages of shimmery titanium speak to the expressive power of modern computing. Calatrava doesn't know how to send e-mail. He sits with his staff members as they test with a computer, but he doesn't create with one. And if Gehry is the more famous of the two, it is Calatrava -- with his railway stations, museums, theaters and bridges -- who has constructed the greater presence in Europe. You may go to Bilbao for Gehry's Guggenheim, but you will arrive via Calatrava's airport -- nicknamed la paloma, or ''the dove,'' for its poised-for-flight form -- and walk across his Campo Volantin footbridge.
Gaudi, too, is an obvious point of reference. Calatrava has noted the unfinished Sagrada Familia temple as a source of inspiration. But in conversation, the Spanish polymath who Calatrava refers to most isn't an architect at all. It's Picasso. ''I prefer the zigzag way as opposed to the linear; Picasso has done this,'' Calatrava says, referring to both a process of art and the development of a career. Picasso painted in different styles while always expressing his time. Calatrava admires that. An architect's career is long, he observes. By always drawing, letting every idea build on the last, he hopes to see his work evolve.
''I think it is like people who pray, repeating the same thing,'' he says. ''Even if you say it a thousand times, finally what you are saying is praying is part of my life. Well, drawing is part of my life.'' He admits he sometimes has a problem knowing when to stop drawing and to let the building begin. He fears the client will tell him to get on with it. ''Or my wife will say, 'Enough,' '' he says. Robertina Calatrava runs the family business, spread as it is between Europe and New York. Robertina keeps her husbands' appointments and generally blocks out distractions so the architect can draw in silence for hours at a stretch. ''The Chinese say dissatisfaction is the first step to progress,'' Calatrava notes. ''You can always think, How can this be better? It happened to me with the Jerusalem project. Everybody was satisfied, but myself, I thought this can be better. The process teaches you. You do the steps again. That was when we took away the leg, and suddenly it emerged. You know you're done when you get the feeling that at last you're in a new land.''
Work is set to begin on the Jerusalem bridge early next year. Construction will take 16 months. When it is completed, Calatrava says, he hopes that he will have done something more for the city than just smooth the flow of traffic. ''Bridges join places that were separated,'' he says. ''They are built for the sake of progress and for the average citizen. They even have a religious dimension. Even the word 'religious' comes from the Latin, meaning 'creating a link.' A bridge makes a lot of sense in a city like Jerusalem.''
Adam Sachs is a writer living in New York.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company