Santiago Calatrava: Complete Works

Poised against the sky like fantastic giant birds, the bridges and buildings of Santiago Calatrava possess a breathtaking grace and rhythm. Some--including the Milwaukee Art Museum and the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain--are designed to expand and contract like living organisms. In Santiago Calatrava: The Complete Works, Alexander Tzonis portrays the Spanish architect as a unique blend of artist and engineer. Using analogy as a creative tool, Calatrava has filled notebooks with bold sketches of lunging and leaping human bodies that mutate into arcing roof forms and bridge suspensions. At the same time--as the author of a doctoral thesis about how to design frame structures that can open and close--he has invented new systems that combine efficiency and stability with the elegance of a brilliant mathematical solution. Tzonis, an architecture professor whose writing is a model of clarity, leads the general reader through the intricacies of Calatrava's solutions for folding frames and new kinds of curved surfaces. Vastly superior in its depth of analysis to Philip Jodidio's Santiago Calatrava, Tzonis's authoritative text is accompanied by hundreds of glorious large-scale images of the work by numerous photographers. The book opens with a photo anthology of Calatrava's greatest works and then follows the development of his vision from 1979 to his 2004 design for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. At the beginning of his career, Calatrava designed a roof that looks like a flying machine from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Tzonis writes that the concept was "a personal manifesto of what architecture could be: innovative, optimistic, rational, and playful." Conceived a mere eight years later, the Alamillo Bridge in Seville became an instant landmark. A towering, dramatically back-angled pylon supports 13 pairs of cables as deftly as if they were strings on a harp, pushing notions of tension and stability to a thrilling new extreme. --Cathy Curtis