With works such as the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain and the footbridge over the River Nervión in Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava has established himself as the most innovative and influential bridge designer of our time. These structures have shaped the way we understand works of civil engineering, making it much more difficult for public authorities to ignore the aesthetic impact of such large structures on our cities and landscapes. But when Calatrava applies this same expressive flair to building designs, his artistic authority begins to waver—at least in the eye of this observer. While his bold structural experiments, often inspired by the study of animal skeletons, plants and other natural forms, have expanded the narrow formal vocabulary of civil engineering, in his buildings, this use of zoomorphic forms has too often resulted in works that can seem overbearing, lacking in human and urban scale, and even grotesque.
A case in point is the Tenerife Concert Hall, with its bold cantilevered arch that surges over the building, an admittedly functionless, expressive gesture [RECORD, February 2004, page79; Archrecord.com, Project Portfolio, February 2004]. What is this form meant to suggest? Is it an enormous breaking wave, as Calatrava has sometimes implied, an orchid blossom, an exaggerated feather in an exaggerated cap, a tentacle, an enormous muscular tongue? Calatrava deliberately avoids any specific symbolic reference, and leaves the associative process open to the imagination of each visitor. But does he take sufficient artistic control of the full suggestive power of the gesture, and of the darker images it can invoke? The same question could be raised to a greater or lesser degree with previous works such as the rail station at the Lyon-Satolas Airport in France (1994), the City of the Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia, now nearing completion, and the Milwaukee Art Museum [RECORD, March 2002, page 92; Archrecord.com, Project Portfolio, March 2002].
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