Santiago Calatrava: Conversations with Students

The MIT Lectures

Santiago Calatrava: Conversations with Students

The MIT Lectures

Cecilia Lewis Kausel and

Ann Pendleton-Jullian, editors

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Department of Architecture

Massachu se tts Insti tu te of Tec h nol ogy

Princeton Architectural Press

Published by
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Calatrava/.
2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Printed and bound in the United States
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Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Editor: Nancy Eklund Later
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Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Ann Alter, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning,
Megan Carey, Penny Chu, Jan Cigliano, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux,
Clare Jacobson, Mark Lamster, Linda Lee, Jane Sheinman, Katharine Smalley,
Scott Tennent, and Jennifer Thompson of Princeton Architectural Press
Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Calatrava, Santiago, 1951
Santiago Calatrava, conversations with students : the M.I.T. lectures
/ Cecilia Lewis Kausel and Ann Pendleton-Jullian, editors.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56898-325-5 (alk. paper)
1. Calatrava, Santiago, 1951Themes, motives. 2. Architectural
design. 3. ArchitectureTechnological innovations. I. Title: Santiago
Calatrava. II. Lewis Kausel, Cecilia. III. Pendleton-Jullian, Ann M. IV.
Title.
NA1313.C35 A35 2002
720'.92dc21
2002003635

C o n t e n ts Preface
Rafael L. Bras and Stanford Anderson

Introduction

10
Materials and Construction Processes

12
Force and Form

48
Movement and Form

80
Conclusion

110

preface

In November of 1995 ,

I was taking a sleepy walk

in Valencia, Spain, when I saw this unusual but simple and very beautiful bridge. I inquired as to its
architect, and the immediate response was Santiago
Calatrava, of course. I must admit that, at that
point, I did not know who Santiago Calatrava was,
but I am a quick learner and immediately proceeded
to remedy my ignorance. At my request, a colleague, Professor Herbert Einstein, contacted Dr.
Calatrava and began discussing ways to get him
involved with MIT. It turns out that Santiago had
already been invited to visit the school by the
Department of Architecture. That visit gave us the
opportunity to meet and to organize a series of lectures. This book, and its accompanying Internet site
(https://web.mit.edu/civenv/Calatrava/), document the
extraordinary exchange that occurred between
Calatrava and a large audience of students and professionals over three days in 1997.
Hearing Santiago Calatrava speak reminded me of
why I wanted to be a civil engineer. It reminded me
of my own desire to create, to design solutions that
are functional and beautiful, to leave behind works
that will be remembered. I suspect that all civil
engineersand all childrenhave the same dream;
unfortunately, our educational system conspires to
dampen it. The idea of the architect-engineer has
been lost. Creativity is buried under equations or
hemmed in by the walls of specialties.
Calatrava represents what the architect-engineer
should be. His bridges and public buildings reflect a

and engineering is
long standing and now, at least in the United States,
almost ubiquitous. This divorce injures both parties.
The ambition of architects to build well is diminished. Engineering becomes formulaic and uncomprehending of its social, environmental, and aesthetic
dimensions.

The divorce of architecture

As a school, MIT cannot exist independently from

the conditions of our time and place, but we can
foster ambitions to restore a profound alliance
between architecture and engineering. Happily, there
are those creative individuals who hold such ambitions and create exemplary works. In architecture,
one thinks of Renzo Piano and his building workshop, where building well is manifested even with
the special challenges of building innovatively. But
for all the excellence of Piano and his shop, he, like
many other fine architects, works through a process
of collaboration with the all-too-rare creative engineering firms. One thinks of Ove Arup in London,
Buro Happold in Bath, and RFR in Paris, all of
whom collaborate with architects to achieve works
beyond the scope of either partner alone.
Especially in bridges, infrastructure, and long-span
buildings, one finds engineers who control the entire
design and succeed both in technical and aesthetic
terms. Through our collaboration in the Felix
Candela Lectures,* we have brought such practitioners to MIT, including Heinz Isler, Minoru
Kawaguchi, Christian Menn, and Joerg Schlaich.
Each of these engineers would be wholly convinced

deep understanding of engineering. Like a classical

arch, his structures seem to flow with the forces and,
vice-versa, the force vectors seem to merge with the
structures. There are no superfluous elements. The
motion, real and apparent, of his creations is smooth
and effortless, like motions in nature. Indeed,
Calatrava commonly finds inspiration in the human
body, the most beautiful and functional of all natural
objects. His buildings, like the body, integrate individual elements through simple interactions to create
enormously complicated machines.
Not everybody can be Santiago Calatrava. Not
everybody is blessed with the same talent and artistic
sensibility. Nevertheless, every civil engineer can
strive to be more creative, and every architect, to be
more imaginative and aware of the interplay between
structure and mechanics. If we did, our professions
would be far more exciting.
Rafael L. Bras
Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor
Former Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

of the sound scientific principles their designs embody.

Nonetheless we also observe a personal signature in
their works.
Santiago Calatrava, architect and engineer, unabashedly pursues the unity of art and science. His exploration of natural forms (particularly of the human
body), his readiness to work metaphorically, and his
brilliance in representation all facilitate his creative
exploration of form, space, light, and even kinetics.
His mastery of engineering principles not only allows
the realization of his designs but is challenged and
advanced by the dialogue between formal invention
and scientific principles.
The genius of this process is embodied in the energetic manner of Santiago Calatrava and powerfully
advanced by the drawings that inform his lectures.
We hope something of this dynamic survives in the
static form of this book and will contribute to the
larger ambition of promoting the fruitful common
bond between architecture and engineering.

Stanford Anderson
Professor of History and Architecture
Head, Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*A series of annual Felix Candela Lectures was launched in 1996 by the Structural
Engineers Association of New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and the departments of architecture of Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Beyond honoring the creative achievements of Candela at the frontier
of architecture and engineering, the series recognizes such excellence in current
practitioners and seeks to advance these concerns through education.

INTRODUCTION

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here in this school. After having been a student for a long time, studying in Valencia and then in Zurich
for something like fourteen years, I started my practice as an
architect and engineer. For sixteen years now, I have been
working very intensely in this practice, and the only contact
I have had with institutions like MIT is in sporadically giving talks. This is the first time that I have made a commitment to give a series of talks with the specific intention of
communicating my experience. I think it makes sense now
because these sixteen years form an important period in my
life and because they define a generationone stage in the
life of a person. The things that I am saying I say for the next
generationthe people who will look at my work and
invent other styles and find their own way, just as I have
integrated the work of those before me in finding mine.
I thought it best to speak about my own experience because,
in fact, this is the only thing that I know. I mean to look back
at the works that I have done and try to introduce you to the
very essential thoughts that have informed my work during
those years and the steps that have permitted me to go from
one building to another, trying each time to implement a little bit more of my thinking.

11

M AT E R I A L S A N D C O N S T R U C T I O N P R O C E S S

I choose to speak first about the idea of materials, because it

seems to me that, in terms of architecture, materials are fundamental. After all, in architectural ruins you find only
stones. So the material part of architecturelets say the
physical support of the architectureis, in my opinion, very
important and very fundamental.
I thought that a good first step toward understanding architecture was to understand what concrete is, what steel is,
what wood is, how to use them, what they signify. What are
the forms they can achieve? What are the differences
between these forms? This is what I want to try to show you,
beginning with the very first projects I undertook and continuing with the most recent works.

13

In this small figure done by using pieces of toys, the force of

the hanging stone goes through all the pieces and is materialized in stone, wood, cord, and parts of steel. It seems very
simple, but there is a lot of complexity there: the different
pieces of the toy working in tension; the spindle that separates the parts working in tension, itself working in compression; even the colors that are put together in a simple but
deliberate manner. There is no doubt that the simple act of
holding a stone in the air can be a matter of expression.

15

The work that I did for the Wohlen High School in Aargau,
Switzerland, required me to make a series of interventions in
some existing buildings. I added an entrance, a central hall,
a roof for the library, and another roof for the great hall. In
this project, I changed materials several times. One part was
built in concrete and steel; another part, in steel and glass;
another one, in wood and concrete. Along with the experimentation with materialsusing particular materials for
particular solutionsI also introduced another theme. I
thought that it would be interesting to work with the light,
controlling it differently for each particular space.
The idea of the entrance was generated from the existing
plan and its geometry. The plan was a trapezoid, which I cut
with a diagonal to create a canopy that consists of two cones
attached by an arch. One works in one direction and the
other, in the other direction, with a pipe in cross section that
provides torsional resistance and also holds the gutter. Even
though the pipe has torsional stiffness, I used it here for the
purpose of creating a link between the faade and the
canopy, so that these elements work together in the same
gesture. An ensemble has to become a single thing.
And of course, independent of the fact of construction, it is
clear, looking especially at the elevation, that there is the idea
of a leaf, or a palm. A very figurative idea was part of the
design. There is certainly behind my very first approach
this free approachto architecture a looking for inspiration
in natural forms. The simple observation of things motivates
me as much as the material aspects of architecture do.

17

The second intervention at Wohlen High School is an entry

space. There I made a circular cupola in wood. The shape
was very straightforward; a circle was subdivided into radial segments. These segments were made using a V that I cut,
opening the interior. I replaced the portion of the crease that
was removed with a linear element that signifies the compression in this element. I separated the different components of the cupolas support in order to make visible all the
different types of support and to create a free ring around
the periphery. This tension ring is floating. The idea of defying gravity is expressed in showing this ringmaking it visible but not structurally significantand then pushing back
the corner supports of the V segments, which are the real
supports of the cupola.
The light comes in from behind the cupola, at its base and
through the creases of its triangular segments. The surfaces
behind the cupola disappear in this light, so that you get the
impression that the whole thing is floating in the interior
space. It is clear, when you see all those shapes together, that
they can be associated with petals.

19

In a library, the control of the light and the relationship of

the light to the space is even more important. I thought it
necessary to liberate the walls and to create tangential light,
as Louis Kahn might do. I decided to make the roof at the
center of the space seem to float. Its main support is a column toward which the roof inclines and through which rain
water is channeled. The roof is a shell composed of several
shells. The corners are held in place so that the roof will
not move laterally, but all the weight is supported through
the center column. Then light descends along the walls,
tangentially.
For the genesis of the idea I started thinking about a book
an open book. Again, as in several other cases, the idea of
the roof as floating came to mind. This is a theme in which
the idea of lightness is embedded, and lightness is often created because of the contraposition of materials or of static
systems. If the roof is heavy and the spindle is light, this contraposition of two materials combined with the light coming
from the sides will make the whole roof seem to fly. The
basis for the form of the shell was not the usual hyperboloid
or paraboloid; it was a bookan open book. At the same
time, the shell also wanted to become a bird. It is a kind of
superposition of concepts. You can also see a leaf in it, held
in the spindle support.

21

With the design of the great hall, or auditorium, what I

wanted to achieve was quite simple. I proposed making the
roof emerge by creating a parabolic arch on the interior that
supports a raised shell that is independent of the walls. At
each side of the shell is a gutter and a longitudinal window
that brings light to the interior, very softly emphasizing the
underside of the shell and bringing transparency to the repetitive, oblique elements that are transferring the weight of the
roof to the arch. These oblique elements are all standardized
pieces of wood approximately three inches by three inches.
The parabolic arch and an upper arch supporting the shell
are of laminated wood. The space is very intimate, partially because of the decision to use wood. The contrast
between light and pattern on the interior also contributes to
this intimacy.
As in the entrance canopy, there is the idea of a palm tree.
Alsoand this may be very figurativeI was trying to
express the idea of the force of the parabolic arch transferring to the column. Many people think the column top is a
reminiscence of an Ionic capital, which is not the case. It is
more like the head of a ram.

23

The columns were pre-cast in concrete. I like very much

brute concreteconcrete done on sitebut pre-casting can
be very interesting because of the complexity and freedom of
forms that you can achieve. In Valencia, in my mother language, we used to say formig. Formig comes from forma.
In Spanish, concrete is hormign with h replacing the f
of formig. Formig means material to which you can give
form. This is a good definition of concrete. With pre-cast
concrete you are very free to choose the shape, the texture,
and many other characteristics of the material.
We cast the columns for the great hall in the most economical way. We cut the column in two and cast each half horizontally and then glued them together. This has another
advantage in that all the exposed surfaces in the end are finished surfaces; you do not see any of the places in which you
have been casting the concrete.

25

Ernstings Warehouse in Coesfeld, Germany, is also an early

work. It was an exercise in how to clad an existing warehouse
and give it new signification. The first decision I needed to
make was about the materials, which had to be very economical. So we decided to use concrete and crude aluminum
crude in the sense that it is the standard aluminum that you
can get very easily. You can purchase it corrugated or flat
you can get it in many waysand it is easy to work with.
We investigated how to transform this building, not only
materially, but also thematically. The limitation of the material created a significant restriction; the idea of working with
a themehere, the pintoresqueallowed us a certain
freedom. By pintoresque I mean like a painting; each
faade should appear like a different painting executed in the
same two materials. The material creates a unity, and the
treatment of the material makes each faade different from
the others.

27

The south faade was done using corrugated aluminum,

made into a sinusoidal curve. This gives the faade a double
rigidity, because the convex segments of the curve are held at
the inside with transversal connections. This curve gives one
level of rigidity and the corrugation of the metal itself provides a second rigidity, permitting us to make quite a tall
faade.
In order to emphasize the movement of the curve, we cut the
faade at the top and bottom on an oblique angle, so that
looking from the front, in elevation, the section of the sinusoid is even more accentuated. Looking up to the top of the
faade, the curve is clear and readable. The client said that
for safety reasons he needed a lot of light on the exterior, so
we put lamps on the faade. The light makes the plasticity
even more readable. We mounted the lamps away from the
faade so that the shadows of the lamps follow the curve.
They create drawings on the faade, and this is quite a plastic relationship.
This is the south faade, which means that the movement of
the sun during the day makes a very significant change in the
faade itself. In the curve you see shadows of the light and
also the reflection of the sun. Vertical vibrations are produced by the reflection of the sun in the corrugations of the
aluminum. The faade is extremely sensitive, changing with
the hours of the daywith horizontal light, with vertical
light. The oblique cut at the base makes the faade seem to
float and move over the concrete structure.

29

On the north faade, the problem was different, because it

has just zenith lighta very diffused light, ambient light. So
how do you emphasize the plasticity of the faade in zenith
light? I proposed using an S profile placed horizontally on
the faade in very long piecesas long as possible, which
means maybe ten meters, or thirty feet, long. In this profile,
the center section, on the diagonal, will generate quite a
reflection. At the top edge where the two profiles overlap
you will get shadow. Then again, less reflection at the bottom of the profile, until it breaks in shadow again. This
makes a linear structure but one that is sensitized to the
zenith light.

31

32

On the east faade we used corrugated plates seventeen

meters high. The problem here was to put them on in one
piece and to hold them in place with small elements at the
bottom and the top. The east side is very flat, confronting
the horizontal light of the morning sun. There was an elevator body on this side that needed to be clad. In order to distinguish it from the rest of the faade we used scaleslike
those of a fishbut very big ones, made of aluminum, that
fold at the corners and into the top.
So again, each one of these faades is conceived as a separate
picture. I spoke before of the pintoresque, meaning like a
painting. But how do you link these different paintings, these
faades? From the very beginning, the building was like a
foreign body. We had to find a way to give life to this body.
The west faade has almost the same light conditions as the
east faade, the sun setting versus the sun rising. It was also
done using those very large panels of corrugated aluminum.
It incorporates three large gates for the lorries that come in
and go out every day. There are a lot of them. Many lorries
wait at the door. The gates open and the lorries go in or out.
If you look at these doors, at the buildings scales, and at
other things, the building somewhat resembles a whale. And
with the lorries going in and out, it is like the story of Jonas,
or like the elephant and the snake of St. Exupery. There is
here a theme of swallowing. You see, it is also very important, this kind of game.

33

The sculpture I showed at the beginning of the lecture was

made with toys. It was an exercise for me to take my childrens toys and the things in my housepencils, the cord
that hangs the curtains, whatever I foundand make the
sculpture. The elementality of the exercise, or of the thought,
takes absolutely nothing away from the complexity of the
solution. In the beginning something can be extremely spontaneous and simple. I want to walk. Where am I going? That
is the question. But, you know, to walk is just a very natural
thing, a very simple thing. A very long trip needs to be started with a small step. These thoughts of the whale are, in my
opinion, an effort to pass from the pintoresque to the textual and to give the whole thing a life.
In the warehouse doors, the module is a continuation of the
module of the faade. The pieces of the faade are all very

34

repetitive; only the length of each has changed. In this there

is a very beautiful idea. It is the idea that a faade can be
transformed. The idea of transformation, of metamorphosis,
is a mother of evolution in architecturean unbelievable
mother! It is not only because we can deploy mechanical and
physical elements to create new architectures based on the
idea of metamorphosis but also because we are maturing in
our needs and in our understanding of culture that now is
the moment to introduce these components into architecture
in a major way.
Can you imagine, for example, a whole faade that gets transformed? Not just half a faade, like in this project, but the
whole faade, like a curtain opening from one side to the other.
This is, in my opinion, feasible today and certainly a challenge
for the new generation and in the evolution of architecture.

35

The Stadelhofen Railroad Station in Zurich is sited on a hillside. In section, you have the lake of Zurich that used to
extend to the base of this hilla moraine made by glacial
deposits. Early settlers walled off part of the lake to create a
flat area upon which they started building. Later, the railroad came and made a cut into the hill for two rail lines. The
cut separated two areas of very different charactera situation that is still preserved today; on one side it is very urban,
and on the other side, very green.
Our exercise was to enlarge the station. It is a station that is
heavily trafficked and one that is important within the
regional railway scheme. Our intervention considered the
fact that there was an existing cut from which we had to step
back, cutting deeper into the hill. The basic idea was to conserve the original edge of the cut, so as to be able to retain
the green condition above it. For this, we proposed a walllike structure that is permanently anchored to the hill. The
wall supports the houses built on it, which are often very
close to the edge of the site. Gardens and a pergola were created along the wall, preserving the character of the upper
part of the site and allowing for the possibility of people
promenading above while passengers wait for the train
below. Beneath the train lines we built an underground
arcade for shops, which makes the link to the platforms
more safe and more interesting.

38

There were many other issues technical in nature that conditioned the construction process. For instance, the site on
which we worked was very narrowsometimes only twenty-seven meters, or ninety feet, in width. There were houses
on both sides, so for technical reasons we had to go underground as much as fourteen meters, or about forty-five feet.
Also, we had to build the project with the trains circulating
the whole time; the traffic in the station was never interrupted, with a train arriving sometimes every two minutes.
This was quite a challenge on such a tight site, especially in
terms of staging and issues of safety.
I was very nervous because it was one of the first jobs in
which I was responsible for the architecture and the engineering. This was a big thing, but I thought that we should
also have some fun with the station. So in addition to relating the station to the functioning of the complex and to the
urban context, I began for the first time to experiment with
ideas of the body and of anatomy. I thought about gesture. I
started with my hand and the idea of the open hand, which
signifies sincerity and openness. From the open hand turned
palm-side-down, I chose the area between the thumb and
index finger as the shape of the column, which you then see
repeated several times throughout the project.

39

I should also explain that the station is geodetic; it is not flat.

The trains come out of a tunnel underground and go back
into a tunnel. The two sides of the tunnel are curved downward in section, and only the center of the station is level. So
we built the station slightly arched. The columns are inclined
to remain perpendicular to the contour of the arch, but you
dont see them as changing inclination one to the other. If
they were vertical, you would immediately see it, but they
are inclined in all directions. Even the underground gallery is
like this. The station is also curved in plan. This was purely
an engineering circumstance; the plan and section of the
tracks were existing and had been done by engineers. But
having a curve creates the possibility of making a station 280
meters longapproximately 900 feetseem much longer
than it is, because from the center platforms you do not see
its ends. So the curves in both plan and section help the concept. You see, the shape, turning around like a torus, emphasizes the dynamics of the trains. Having this kind of rotational geometry makes it possible to achieve a dynamic effect in
the architecture, especially through the repetition of elements.
It is interesting to observe that, in fact, the station is almost
a non-station, because it disappears, hidden behind the roofs
in the middle of the city.

41

I would like to make a small parenthesis to explain to you a

different experience with concrete. I was charged by the
Swiss Association of Concrete Makers to do a pavilion for
an exhibit in Basel. For this project, I produced a machine
that attempted to put concrete in movement. We know light
concrete, we know heavy concrete, we know of all kinds of
concrete, but concrete in motion is a rare thing. I dont know
if you know Eugne Freyssinet, who was the inventor of the
pre-stressing of micro-concrete to make wings for airplanes.
This probably was never achieved, but he did all kinds of
studies for this. This is to say that in the early twentieth centuryin the 20s and 30speople were extremely daring in
their ideas and in their hopes for the use of this material.
In this pavilion I wanted to achieve forms that were extremely related to the body. By body, I mean the anatomy of the
female and male bodies. I was interested in the idea of the
sensuality of form. So you will see, maybe, ribs and circular
elements that turn. It is a very tactile and soft way to use
concrete that one does not usually consider. It is not only
about moving the concrete but also about giving it sensual
properties, like the properties of flesh or skin. The idea of
organicity is even carried out in the details of how one
piece joins to another. The shape of the detail becomes
more than the result of an elaborate structural geometry; it
permits us to recreate, as in a dream, the idea of the breast,
for example.

43

The last project I would like to talk about is the Satolas

Airport Railway Station in Lyon. You have to understand
that this object was built by extremely careful and very gifted people using their hands to make the concrete. You have
to understand the beauty of the construction site as a process,
the way things are put together, the importance of getting
close to the people working on the site, because they are fundamental. In fact, if someone risks their life it is certainly not
the architect; it is the people on the site who do that.
The station is built in concrete, aluminum, steel, and glass,
with granite paving. The concrete is white, using only white
cement, natural aggregate that is taken from the area, and
sand that is light gray. This gives a very light concrete, the
color of which reminds you of the site. The roof is aluminum
and reflects the sun. The faade of the train galleries is done

44

using just pure concrete, with glass in between. The

esplanade is made of granite cobblestones, and the handrails
are all done in concrete. The large, open faades of the wing
are in steel and glass. There are many different materials, but
there are very precise rules for the way they are used. For
example, the steel never touches the groundit is always
bordered by concrete. There is never a direct connection
between a supporting element and the ground.
The wing of the station is oriented toward the south. We set
the angle of the roof by the inclination of the sun on the solstice so that between the middle of June and November the
sun does not enter the interior of the space. After November
the faade lets light into the whole volume of the interior
space. This permits us to have a building with very little need
for extra climatization.

45

I was interested in the idea of creating a structure that is

based on certain proportions of the human body. Many of
these bodies together support the train galleries of the station. The whole gallery is based on this modular.
The idea for the shape of the station and its roof was generated from the idea of the eye, and this is very important.
Someone once said that if the painter Raphael had not had
arms, he would have been a very good architect, because the
working instrument of an architect is the eye. It is the faculty for seeing and judging and inventing things. There are two
sets of eyes: the two eyes in front of us and the eyes of the
mind that invent and combine things.

47

FORCE AND FORM

If we consider engineering an artas I believe it isand if

we go back to a time when there was no difference between
the art of architecture and the art of engineering, as I suggested we do at the beginning of my first talk, then we can
consider that it is in ourselves, and especially in the new
generation, that a rebirth of art happens. It is not only our
heritage but also the mother of heritage that we must translate into action through our capacity to make buildings,
reinventing them each time.

49

I would like to begin my second talk by showing another

small object that is done using my childrens toys. This one
expresses another way of putting things together, hanging
the same stone as in the previous case, but in this case, the
forces are working parallel to each other; they do not cross.
So it is like a game in which you discover that the weight of
an object has the capacity to express something and that it
all depends upon the ordering of the forces.

In my opinion, the consideration of the static properties of a

bridge is very important. The bridges static equilibrium is
probably its most essential part, so that if we think of a
bridge like a body, this static condition is analogous to the
heart. Of course, the body has other parts; in a bridge you
have other properties. The central part of the whole problem
is certainly very much about resolving the problem of how
to bring the forces from one shore to another.
One of the earliest bridges I designed was my diploma project done at the ETH in Zurich. The inspiration for this
bridge comes from two different ideas. The first idea is of a
cantilever bridge and the second is one of those beautiful
arch bridges in which the forces are expressed by the arch.
In a cantilever bridge, the forces work in another way. You
have tension through the top and compression through the
bottom, and then part of the bending moments are transferred into the shaft of the support. Beginning with the section of the cantilever bridge, I divided the material at the
support so as to separate out these three forces, and I found
that the idea of leaving a hole under the deck could be quite
interesting.

54

For the vertical support, I started with the idea of a pillar

that has a certain proportion that today I relate to the
human body. In fact, if you look at the pillar from the front
it seems like the figure of a body with arms reaching up over
his head to hold the deck. The lower support is located
where this figures head might be. Also, it is maybe a contradiction, but instead of making the bottom of the cantilever wider at the vertical support, I made it narrower to
emphasize the independence between the upper deck, which
needs to stay wide to conserve the dimension of the roadway,
and the lower part of the cantilever, which is working in
compression.

55

The first bridge I built and would like to talk about is the
Alamillo Bridge in Seville. For the World Exhibition of 1992,
my thought was to do two bridges that were symmetrical;
one on one side of the island and another on the other side,
with a viaduct linking them. First, I created the viaduct
across the islandone that has many supports and is quite
transparent. Then I generated the bridges in response to the
scale of the space. These bridges were to have masts, which
are the gestures that articulate this response.
For various reasons I could only build one of the two
bridges. The design of the bridge was original; as far as I
know, this kind of bridge had never been built before.
Usually, in a cable-stayed bridge you have a compensation of
the forces from the cables on the bridge side of the pylon to
the cables on the anchored side of the pylon. However, if you
incline the pylon, the forces are not only compensated for by
the cables behind but also by the weight of the pylon itself.
If the pylon is inclined enough and heavy enough, you can
almost compensate the forces of the whole bridge purely
through the pylon itself. This is what I tried to do here.

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It is important to understand this object mechanically, and

this will be one of the few times I will talk about this subject.
You see, mechanically, what is happening is that each segment of the pylon or mast has a certain weight that pulls
downward. Together with the tension in the cable, the resultant of these two coincides in direction with the mast. The
next element of the pylon has then another weightanother
forceand so on, and in each case the resultant stays in the
pylon. Finally, the resultant compensates with the horizontal
force coming from the deck and arrives as a pure vertical
force into the foundation. The foundation is very small relative to the huge span of the bridge. It is interesting that, if the
dead load produces a resultant at this point, then the live
load will move it away. And then we have other problems,
like the wind and many other things that we have to take
into account in a cantilevering system.

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Now I would like to return to my home town of Valencia

and its river, the Turia. Valencia has a patrimony of bridges
built in stone that, in my opinion, few other cities in this part
of the world can claim; early Gothic, high Gothic,
Renaissance bridges, all done using arches. These are magnificent works that we consider, without a doubt, as having
architectural value. In fact, if you look at the old stone gates
of the city and the Gothic bridge that leads to these gates,
you see that there is very little difference between the architectural language of the gate towers and that of the bridge.
There is another bridge that has not only huge public stairs
but also chapels, and anothera concrete bridge from the
early twentieth centurythat has caryatids and other decoration executed by Terencio, a sculptor from the city. This is
to say that if you go back a little, you come to a time when
architecture and bridge building were absolutely linked
together. The bridge builders were very conscious of this particular relationship. They were also conscious of the seriousness of the act of constructing a bridge. Many of those
bridges are five hundred, six hundred years old and have
resisted unbelievable floods. But even while taking into

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account the engineering needs of the bridge, the builders also

thought about making small chapels (maybe to pray in, so
that they would not be swept away in the next flood).
In this context I built a contemporary arch bridge over the
Turia. It has a plaza below it and an underground station
below the plaza. It is a pure steel bridge as much as the others were pure stone bridges. (I also built another bridge for
Valencia, just outside of the city. Except for a few elements,
the whole bridge is done in concrete.) In this one I divided the
bridges ramp into two, because first, it had to be very wide
for traffic, and second, because it was the continuation of a
boulevard that comes onto the bridge from one side. I chose
to leave a void down the center of the bridge that corresponds to the space of the boulevard. In the space underneath
the bridge, I wanted to emphasize the spatial effect. A pool of
water is to be built in this lower space that will reflect light
onto the underside of the bridge and also reflect the bridge
itself. Light comes into this space from the sides and from
above, between the pedestrian deck and the roadway.

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Next is the Felipe II Bridge, built for the city of Barcelona. I

would like to emphasize in particular with this bridge the
capacity of a public work such as a bridge to generate infrastructure and in doing so, change the circumstances of a part
of the city. The Bach de Roda area where this bridge was
built was a very poor neighborhooda kind of bidonville.
The people who were living there were moved into better
apartments so that the area immediately adjacent to the
bridge and the train station below it could be turned into a
series of parks. So, in a very rough part of Barcelona you
now have a place that has the potential, in my opinion, to
become a significant part of the city. In this case, the need to
build a bridge and produce a link provided the impetus for
regenerating a portion of the city.
One of the ideas of this bridge was to make a place. I made
the bridge wider in the center, like a balcony, and the arches
that span the railway tracks signify not only the bridge itself
but also this place in the middle of this neighborhood. In this
part of the city the landscape is not very romantic, but on the

62

other hand, when I look at the mountains behind and the

housing around, this space has huge potential to become a
place of interest in Barcelona, especially now that there are
green areas on both sides of the bridge.
I think that all cities need very much their public works to
help them regenerate, especially now. During the 70s, architectural and urban interests focused on the historical point
of view, which supported the regeneration of city centers to
make them more habitable. Those interests also initiated the
preservation of a lot of buildings that otherwise would have
fallen victim to speculative development. But meanwhile,
the development of the citys periphery began to become a
very significant problem. So today, the problem is how to
reform those parts of the cityand particularly European
citieswhere the population has doubled or tripled during
the last thirty or forty years. I think that public works like
bridges and stations can become very significant forces in
regenerating areas by creating and focusing urban activity.

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These next projects explore the idea of the arch. The first
is a trade exhibition hall in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands.
Sometimes when you design a functional building that, like
many of the bridges, has to be done for a very low cost, the
idea of using the arch is important. It is very efficient for
large spans. In this building there are many different types of
arches: concrete half-arches, and, on the top, steel arches. A
large arch spans 240 meterssomething like 800 feetto
support the whole roof.

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66

I would like to talk about the inclined arch in particular. The

first example I will now show is the La Devesa Pedestrian
Bridge in the city of Ripoll, which is in the northern part of
Catalonia in the very dramatic landscape of the Spanish
Pyranees. In this landscape we built a bridge to link the train
station to a residential neighborhood located on the other
side of the river Ter. The area between the bridge and the
edge of the neighborhood was also transformed into a park,
with a plaza and a series of interventions that were built by
other architects. As I said earlier, bridges are very powerful
when you want to regenerate a place, because they introduce
a very good reason to restructure the surrounding area and,
in so doing, make more livable these parts of the city that are
rather lost, like this one here in Ripoll.

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68

I would like to focus on the cross section of the bridge and

the inclined arch, because there is a progression toward a
rather bold asymmetry in the arched bridges as I have
attempted to exploit the phenomenon of torsion. In the
bridge in Ripoll, because the supportthe archis offset to
one side of the bridge, the weight of the bridge and its load
create a torsional moment about the point of support. This
torsional moment is put into a pipe section that runs the
length of the bridge and connects the ribs of the deck to the
inclined arch. In the bridge in Valencia, we transformed this
pipe into the whole deck, so it is the deck that resists the torsion. In the case of Ondrroa, we have a lateral box girder
and a cantilevering pedestrian walkway from which ribs
spring to hold the arch against buckling, and from the arch
we have tensional members that hold the lateral box. In the
case of Orlans, the torsion is taken completely by the section of the roadway, which the arch supports just by cables.

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70

So there is a kind of progression beginning with Mrida,

where the arch is centered above the roadway deck, which is
the element that provides torsional resistance. This is a large
arch with three cords and is case number one. Case number
two is Ripoll, which was for me a kind of experiment to control the system of the inclined arch in a span of 70 meters, or
230 feet, making it feasible at a very low cost and with a
deck that is only something like 3 meters, or 10 feet wide.
Case number three is Ondrroa, in which there is a significant traffic load, and case number four is Valencia, with four
lanes of traffic. Orlans is case number five, with a major
span, four lanes of traffic, and pedestrians on both sides.
What is interesting in this type of bridge is the torsion. In
many of the standard cross sections that we see in arched
bridges, the arch is straight up and so the torsional stiffness
that we have in the box girder that supports the roadway is
mostly unused, because you have only the unilateral load.
What I have tried to explore in these bridges is the phenomenon of torsionhow to exploit the torsional resistance of
the roadway to create a certain asymmetry in the bridge that
permits me, for example, to emphasize the position of the
bridge in relationship to the city around it, or the direction
of the water, or even the position of the sun. It permits me to
sensitize the bridge itself, as a phenomenon set into the surrounding landscape.

71

The landscape of Ondrroa is very picturesque with the

Atlantic ocean in front, a small harbor, and fishing boats.
For the Puerto Bridge, I tried to take advantage of local conditions and materials, using the stones of the area to build
the embankments, for example. Many people walk across
this bridge to Ondrroas only beach, so it was necessary to
provide an ample walkway. This brought me to the idea of
making a big balcony on one side of the bridge. There is
another pedestrian walkway on the other side of the bridge,
but this one is given major importance by separating it from
the roadway. With the hangers of the walkway, I made the
bracing for the arch, which supports the bridge with cables.
As with the bridge in Valencia, I was also interested in the
space underneath the bridge. There are very large changes in
the tides in Ondrroa and many people come with their
boats to the area that surrounds the bridge. It was necessary
to build big staircases going down into the water as part of
the embankments. I separated the parts of the bridge so that
the light can enter the space underneath, and this, together
with the embankments, makes a very interesting space.

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The Campo Volantn Bridge that I built in Bilbao is interesting because it is somewhat the antithesis of what I had
learnedor thoughta classical bridge was, especially in
terms of the embankments. If you think about a classical
bridge, like the bridges in Venice, you have an arch and then
all the forces of the arch are brought directly into the ground
at the embankment, which is solid. This event is signified
with a staircase, which permits the people to descend to the
canal. The embankment is a classical element of the bridge;
it is the way the bridge touches the ground as a continuation
of the forces.
In Bilbao, I supported the bridge on cantilevered sections that
rise up from the bank of the river and run parallel to it on
both sides. The bridge deck is placed on these supports,
which are like arms. The cantilevered section of the support
is a half-arch, and so, where you usually would have had
solid embankments, there are now voids. These voids and
supports give a directionality to the bridgeone that can be
associated with the direction of the flow of the river.

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The flow of pedestrians runs parallel to the river, crosses the

river, and then returns in the original direction. I signified
this movement in a very simple way, by making a curve in
the plan of the bridge. So the idea of the strict, straight line
of a classical bridge disappeared as well. I wanted to make
an element to hold this structure thatalthough asymmetrically placedwould optically compensate for the asymmetry of the deck. So the arch inclines over the deck counter
to the curve.
The torsional pipe under the deck runs straight, so the particular point in which the arch and the torsional pipe come
together is very important. Because the force of the arch is
coming into this point diagonallyin sectionand the force
of the torsional pipe is coming in horizontally, the resultant
of the forces displaces the vertical support necessary by several feet, revealing, in a way, one of the many paradoxical
situations in the bridge: the support for the arch is three or
four feet away from where it joins the torsional pipe, although
it is centered in terms of the forces. I tried to play formally
with a very pure understanding of the way forces of construction work in this bridge. For example, if you look at the plan
of the bridge, you will see that the torsion is compensated
globally, because the deck on one side of the torsional pipe is
equal to the deck on the other side in surface area. At the end,
we have the same torsional forces side to side.

77

Today we have somewhat lost the idealism of the 60s, when

architecture was very much devoted to social problems. In
fact, today we ignore these problems, yet we live in a world
in which a third of the people do not get enough to eat every
day. I mean, it is quite dramatic. Can you imagine how much
infrastructure is still needed? If you think back to the heroic
times of engineering, when people arrived at new places,
imagine what it took just to bring water to a place, or to stop
a flooding river, or to create sanitation infrastructure. I think
you still feel the strength of this need when you build bridges,
especially bridges in cities.
I also think that the potential of bridges and bridge design
has not yet been achieved. The vitality of bridges comes both
from necessity and from the fact that they are unbelievably
significant, unignorable elements of the city. Could you

78

imagine New York, for example, without those magnificent

bridges? What if the George Washington Bridge was a multispan bridge, instead of being this gesture jumping over 1,000
metersmore than half a milewhen the previous span had
been just half that, or even less? Engineering can still provoke very wild and strong responses from gestures like these.
If you look at engineering design of the nineteenth century,
you see that engineers took a lot of care in designing the
handrails and the lighting. They were conscious that to take
care of the details was to give more to the bridge. There are
people that say architecture is all that you can take away
from a bridge to leave the bridge standing. This is not true.
Architecture is the bridge itself, because the bridge is dedicated to man. All that gives satisfaction to man is good for
a bridge.

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MOVEMENT AND FORM

This evening I am faced with the task of giving you the third
lecture, which is probably for me the most difficult one,
because I would like to convey to you, in a way, the most
intimate part of the work. This part is the cumulative result
of ideas, sculptures, and drawings that have generated this
or that building. In showing you these, I am acting somewhat like a cook who wants to give to other peopleespecially to young peoplehis secrets; what ingredients, what
kind of herb or spices he has been mixing in to give this or
that particular taste. Although the work is very personal in
nature, it is also the culmination of many things that I
have learned during my life . . . the approach of different
artists . . . the approach of the idea of art . . . of the art of engineering . . . of the art of architecture, and of how these things
can be linked together. So what I want to give you is quite a
lot. For this reason, I will speak with very simple words,
because that is the easiest way to communicate most directly.

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In the first two lectures I began by showing small sculptures

made from my childrens blocks. The sculptures were not
very bigsomething like one foot wide. In both, the problem was how to hold a stone hanging from these machines.
If you look, it is only the change in the placement of the
bearing (I want specifically to use this word, which is an
engineering word) that creates two different ways of ordering the forces. In the first case, the forces are working parallel, and in the second case, they are crossing each other, but,
in fact, it is exactly the same exercisehow to hold a stone.
Relative to this, there are several things that I would like to
emphasize. First, to hold a stone is, itself, something important, because you are working against the tendency of the
stone to fall. Like the scientist who allegedly was hit on the
head with the apple, we live in a field of forces and gravity
that is immediate to us. Probably our bodies would be built
completely different if gravity, or the forces around us, were
other than they are.
Second, the sculptures hold together because the weight of
the stone is activating the system. This means that, if the

82

stone was not there, it would be very difficult to hold the

machine together. So the weight, or the permanency of gravity, is also something that is materially present. The sculpture
stays together because gravity is there and because gravity is
a constant situation. What would happen if I were to cut the
cord that transfers the weight of the stone through the whole
system? It is very simple; the stone would fall down, and
then, also, the small structure. When the stone falls down, a
movement is produced. The forces of the machine are very
much related, in their static condition, to this movement.
This means that the presence of force is always related to a
movement that cannot be established prior to its activation.
Consider for a moment that forces are like crystallized
movement. This is, in my opinion, quite a beautiful understanding, because even in its static condition, in the most stable thing, movement is hidden. A movement is there, and
because of that I went from the idea of force and form,
which I talked about in relation to my bridges in the previous lecture, to the idea of movement and form, which is
much more difficult to represent in slides.

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I would like to start by talking about two projects that were

done while I was a student at the ETH in Zurich. The first
project was done with a group of students under the direction of Jrg Altherr. We built a swimming pool hanging from
the cupola of the ETH. It was hung by twenty-four wires
that supported twenty-four ribs and a skin of polycarbonate
that was 1.2 millimeters thick. It contained twenty-four
cubic meters of water, and it was even possible to swim in it,
although it was not possible to remain in the water for long
because the pressure of ones feet might have broken or
deformed the membrane. The construction was a very particular challenge, because below the cupola, under this
swimming pool, was the library. Can you imagine? All that
water over the library?

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Different from, but not unrelated to, this idea of holding

something heavy, the second project was a study of the
explicit movement of polyhedra. My doctoral thesis was
called On the Foldability of Frames, and its basic focus
was on the study of topology and the way in which a polyhedrona very complex polyhedroncould be folded or
transformed to become a bundle in which all the lines are
parallel. Through a series of phases, this bundle opens, slowly changing its shape to recuperate the major polyhedron,
which approximates a dome. Even if it did not look extremely good, the focus was on the complex geometrical process
of changing shape from bundle to half-sphere.

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Another source of interest that I would like to emphasize is

nature and the very simple observation of nature, meaning
to look in a straightforward and pure way at the natural
objects that are around us: trees, grass, flowers, or whatever
the natural object. From a group of study sketches, one early
model that I made attempted to take the structure of a tree
and apply it to an idea for a group of trees using steel and
glass. I was no longer thinking in terms of the specific qualities of the object itself, but rather, through a kind of systematic approach to the object, I decided to make them
transformable, meaning in this case that they change their
form. So the ribs at the tops of the treesconfigured as the
roofhinge at the point at which they are supported, and
the entire roof opens through a mechanical transformation.
The idea of the trees was later incorporated into a project for
a gallery in Toronto. The idea of mechanical transformability, however, was not incorporated into the trees but into a
very large, operable window that separates the gallery,
which is quiet, from Heritage Square, which is a noisy, animated space.

89

Continuing with the idea of the treean idea that is quite

general, in my opinionwe built the Orient Railway Station
in Lisbon. Here, I used the same vocabulary, specifically
choosing it because the city of Lisbon is not only very beautiful, but also has the very, very soft character of cities on the
Atlantic coast. The space is very transparent, with a beautiful quality of light. In this context, I did not want to do a
very strong structure, like in Lyon, but a soft onean open
structure with the trains passing on one side and the view
passing on the other side.
Another topic that is also very important in architecture is
anatomy and the idea of reading in the human body structures, or appreciating in the human body a sense of architecture. Whatever we do, the magnitude or the dimension of
a thing is always related to our bodies. Architecture, in a
very natural way, is purely related to humans, because it is
done forand bypeople. This makes anatomy a very powerful source of inspiration. And this was true not just in the
Renaissance, when the human anatomy was the basis for
rules and proportional systems, but also in the twentieth
century with the Modulor. Anatomythe idea of the hand,
of the open hand, the idea of the eye, the mouth, the skeletonis a rich source of ideas and inspiration. In the tectonics of our own bodies, you can discover an internal logic that
can be valuable in the making of buildings.

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It is important to recognize in the phenomenon of architecture its purely plastic or sculptural aspect. This is not in conflict with the functional aspects of architecture, nor with the
structural aspects. The wings of the station in Lyon, for
example, take their geometry from a sculpture that was done
previously as a study on the eye.
More abstract than my studies on the eye are my studies on
how the head is supported in a position over the shoulders.
Why and how can I turn my head? The entire mass is supported only by the atlas of the vertebral column, and so the
head can move. This wonder of moving the headrotating
it, inclining it, or both simultaneouslyis quite interesting
and, in a way, quite dramatic. I have been studying how to
hold the head. I begin with a pure volume and massa
cubetrying to hold it with a minimum amount of elements;
for example, with a very, very thin spindle and a series of
cables around it. In another sculpture, the mass, or head, is
supported vertically by one element and a second oblique
element is used to push it backto fix it in its horizontal
position. In the section of the Stadelhofen Station, the same
principle is used, but the mass that is represented is a cube
and the sculpture is the earth.
I like very much the purity of a single idea, just as the pure
expression of a single note can be a very powerful thing.
Complexity comes from the superposition of ideas in a
coherent way. This means that, although each one of those
ideas is capable of living independently, you can also put
them one over the other, like a painter who works not only
with black but with several colors, or hides a lot of blue
behind the painting in order to capture the horizon. So, for
example, in Stadelhofen, in addition to the reference to the

93

propped head, there is also the idea of the handthe open

hand. This reference is represented throughout the project. It
became a leitmotif for the configuration of most of the structural members of the station: the main buttress supports, a
small canopy, the pergola. The hand mirrored makes the
cross section of the underground. In many places there is a
gesture that can be associated with this same geometry.
Another important series of plastic studies goes a step further. They describe the spine, or how our body stands up.
The spine is made up of vertebrae that are represented in the
sculptures in a very elemental way, as a series of cubes.
Once you have the concept of the spine, it is very easy to
move the elements around, reshaping the spine in several
ways. In one case I staggered the position of the cubes
around the central cord. In another they are stepped out so
that the idea of movement is much more explicit. Although
the material is the same, the hieratic rigidity has disappeared, so that you now have more the idea of a curving
spine. Also quite important is how our spine twists, how it
turns around an axis, and how it bends and reaches. What
before was quite a shy movement becomes very explicit.

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In some later studies, I changed the geometry of the cube in

order to make the sculptures bigger. In one project that is
twelve meters, or forty feet, high, I wanted to create a more
organic shape, and so I moved away from the cube, using
double pyramids, or octahedrons, instead. There is a series
of seven of these octahedrons in concrete, one after the other,
each held back by two pins and a single cable. The seven
pieces are counterbalanced by two very long legs. At this
scale, the sculpture is now more than an abstract form; it is
also a construction principle. This sculpture became the
basis for the bridge I built in Seville.

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Starting with a very pure and abstract study of the human

body and anatomical relationships of weight, one can move
through to a major problem in steel. When you start building a sculpture that is twelve meters high, the construction
problem begins there. How to hold things, how to choose
the material; these issues become critical. You have to deal
with concrete. You have to deal with cables. You have to
deal with supports and with tensions, with transport, and
with many other things.

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In particular views of the bridge in Seville, you can recognize

the very abstract origin of the bridges idea. When you look
at the bridge from the front or from the back, you do not
think of a bridge. Instead, it is the expression of something
autonomous. A plastic or sculptural exercise is very beautiful in itself, because you feel free. You are only bound in
terms of the limits you set, saying, for example, I would like
to be extremely orthodox. I will work only with cubes.
Whatever the specific terms, you have limited your vocabulary, but you are still free, because the only goal that you are
pursuing is a pure plastic achievement. When you are dealing with a bridge or a building, even if it is a plastic event,
you are bound by functional needs. On the other hand, you
have a big advantage, which is scale. No sculpture in itself
will ever reach the scale of a bridge or a building. It is this
that gives architecture and particularly, architecture that is
integrated with engineeringits significance.

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Here I would like to talk about some research that is related

to movement, but more specifically, to simple structures that
can move. We built a pavilion for the State of Kuwait at the
Worlds Fair in Seville, and it is done using a series of wooden half-arches that can open. This structure covers a terrace,
the floor of which is made of translucent marble. Below this
terrace is the interior part of the pavilion, and during the day
sunlight is filtered through the marble to light up the interior space. The roof elements are supported by concrete members, and each one of them can be activated by an individual motor so that very slowly the whole roof opens and
transforms. Because the elements are independent, you can
control the different stages of the roofs opening. In the
movement of the roof, one can imagine the hands with their
fingers bent down, serving to protect the space, and then
opening, palms up, to cup the sky.

101

A sculpture that we did for the courtyard of the Museum of

Modern Art in New York was placed beside a weeping willow. The branches of the willow are gently curved. The
branches of the sculpture are also curved, and they fall slowlyeach one turned by a wheelto almost touch the sculpture of The River by Aristide Maillol, which is below, on the
surface of a pool.
From a series of sculptural studies that were based on the
idea of movementand specifically, the idea of topological
surfaces that are generated by straight lines that revolve
around multiple centerscame another set of studies for a
possible roof structure. In these sculptures, straight lines generate folded, curving surfaces. In subsequent architectural
studies, these straight lines became single elements of construction. You have a shape on the ground, then one central
inclined ridge line, and the identical construction elements
connect the profile of the shapewhich is a circle in one case
and a half-ellipse in anotherto the inclined line. This same
study was also a source for ideas about how to make this
type of form move and open. The two halves connected by
the central line are like two hands that are hinged together
at the thumbs. They open up and close down around the axis
of this hinge.

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The extension for the Milwaukee Art Museum, which we

are now building, uses a variation of this roof structure. In
my project, I linked the original building by Eero Saarinen
and the extension by David Kahler, built something like
twenty years ago, back to the city with a bridge. This existing museum is, itself, like a bridge, and, in my opinion, what
I have done is very respectful of the idea of this museum and
its relationship to the city. In the existing museum you have
a bridge and a sculpture-like volume in front of the lake; in
my project you also have a bridge and another volume in
front of the lake. While the existing volume is compact and
closed, this new volume is transparent. A very shallow shed
building links the new extension to the old extension, permitting from the height of the bridge a view of the lakes
horizon beyond.

105

So as to conclude with architecture, I will speak about the

cathedral of Saint John the Divine, which was never completed. It was started by Heins & Lafarge and continued by
Ralph Adams Cram, with some work done on the vaults by
Rafael Guastavino. Only the nave and apses exist today. In
a competition entry for the cathedral, I tried to implement
some of the vocabulary you have seen before but in a more
symbolic way, because symbolic language in a cathedral is
very manifest. I thought of comparing the cathedral to a tree,
with the roots at the bottom, the trunk, and then the foliage
at the top. One task of the competition was to create what
they called a bio-shelter. The bio-shelter was supposed to
be on the interior of the cathedral, but I thought it better to
put it above. The vaulted space in between the cathedrals
interior space and the roof is usually dark and closed. I
wanted to open it up.
The idea I proposed was to replace the roof, which is temporary today, with a glazed roof and to plant trees in this
upper space so as to create a garden over the cathedral. The
garden would be a reproduction of the temple itself. It is
interesting that in the work of Beethovenfor example, in
the fantasy for choir, orchestra, and pianothey sing about
Im Tempel der Natur. Nature is considered a temple. And so
we were thinking about making this temple of nature. This
is a very romantic idea.

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The plan of the cathedral follows a Latin cross. One can

look at the human body as a temple, and inside the shape of
the Latin cross can be found the idea of the human body. So
the garden and the body are superimposed and related to the
geometry of the cross. This kind of mysticism that comes from
a far away time was part of the conception of the building.
I wanted to make the glass roof of the garden operable, so as
to let the rain water collect in the garden. The triangular sections of the glass roof function in a way that is similar to the
big windows in the gallery in Toronto. They just turn around
an axis. The roof was designed with a very high spire, which
could be used for thermal purposes, to create a microclimate
on the interior of the roof.
To approach the natural world with respect, to approach the
landscape with much more respect; this is a concern of architects and engineers. And I would like very much to underline
this, without going too far into this theme, but the integration of buildings into the landscape is something very important. I think that in the basic idea that we submitted for Saint
John the Divine there was an interesting equilibrium.

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CONCLUSION

All these projects in which I have been working have been

possible not only because of the people who have executed
themand who I appreciate very muchbut also because
many people have been helping with their hands and their
eyes. Making models, making drawings, in my office. They
have all participated in this effort and have contributed a lot
to the projects. My wife has helped me very much in these
talks. Thank you very much to everybody.
This defines the end of my talk. I would like to thank you
very much for your attention.

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SANTIAGO CALATRAVA VALLS is one of the most important figures

working at the intersection of architecture and engineering today. Born
in Spain, he maintains practices in Zurich and Paris. His innovative and
undisputedly expressive bridges, train stations, airport terminals, concert
halls, and art museumsand the remarkable sketches he creates while
designing themhave been the subject of numerous books, including
Calatrava, Public Buildings and the two-volume Santiago Calatravas
Creative Process, both published by Birkhuser.
CECILIA LEWIS KAUSEL is professor and director of the Interior Design
Department at the Chamberlayne School of Design at Mount Ida
College in Newton, Massachusetts. She received BA degrees in biology
and physical anthropology from UMASS and an SM from the
Department of Architecture at MIT. A guest professor at the Bauhaus
and a research affiliate at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Lewis Kausel has published numerous journal articles and
a report on the preservation of the Alhambra for CEDEX, in Madrid.
ANN PENDLETON-JULLIAN is an architect and associate professor at
MIT. After studying astrophysics for three years, she received her BArch
from Cornell University and her MArch. from Princeton University. She is
the author of the award-winning book The Road That Is Not a Road and
the Open City, Ritoque, Chile and several other theoretical works. Her
architectural work has been published and exhibited internationally.