Architect, artist, and engineer Santiago Calatrava was born on July 28, 1951, near Valencia, Spain. After years of study in drawing and painting, Calatrava shifted course. He attended Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, a relatively new institution, where he earned a degree in architecture and took a post-graduate course in urbanism. Having a deep appreciation for the mathematical rigor of certain great works of historic architecture, he continued his studies and earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1979. Calatrava sees architecture in a uniquely linear composition, using series of straight lines to create the appearance of curves. The bony structures have a very skeletal appearance, with the beams acting as bones under a translucent skin of glass. When asked by reporter Linda Tischler what inspires his work he replied, "Sometimes I say the human skeleton, because it's true that there's something essential in the construction of our body. In my hands, there is a little bit of architecture and engineering. What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us." Calatrava's designs are based in structural engineering and offer an exciting glimpse towards the future of architecture. In the early 1980s he entered competitions as a way to build notoriety and gain commissions. This lead to his winning proposal in 1983 for the design and construction of Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, the city in which he eventually established his office. The following year he won the competition to design and build the Bach de Roda Bridge, commissioned for the Barcelona Olympic Games. More acclaimed bridge constructions followed and established his international reputation. In Dallas he installed a sculpture called "Waves," a series of metal beams attached to a single rail similar to a series of teeter-tawters
imagine if you had a hundred of these at varying degrees of "flight" so they appear to go up and down like giant waves. The sculpture rocks back and forth on the single rail, so the waves appear to roll like an out-flowing tide. In Malmo, Sweden, his "Turning Torso" skyscraper softly turns upwards as though a giant hand has grabbed the top and twisted it, accentuated by diagonal support beams and dotted with windows. This contemporary designer currently has an incredible amount of construction underway around the world, including projects in Valencia, Jerusalem, Dublin, Dallas, Holland, New York, Qatar
the list goes on. Calatrava has also designed the "Spire" for Chicago, which will be one of the tallest towers in the world at over 2,000 feet.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
