As I slid into the back seat of a taxi in Valencia, Spain, earlier this year, I didn’t know how I was going to direct the driver to my destination. I speak no Spanish. But when I formed my palms into a sphere, the driver nodded, then sped off to the City of Arts and Sciences, the complex that includes not one, but two huge, domed buildings by Santiago Calatrava—buildings that are, like many of Calatrava’s extravagantly expressive structures, more easily described with gestures than with words.
The buildings that form the complex—the domed opera house and planetarium, plus a vast science museum and a conference center—are stunning white-on-white confections, exemplars of a style that has made Calatrava one of the best-known and wealthiest architects ever. Still, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he has given Valencia, where he grew up, a kind of ghost town. Only one of the buildings on the 85-acre site, the science museum, was open on a recent afternoon; visitors were scarce and much of the vast interior was inaccessible—the “residual spaces” beneath Calatrava’s eccentrically shaped roofs.
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