Taschen's XXL monograph traces the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who combines architecture, engineering, sculpture and organic forms in spectacular, harmonious and poetic designs.

Santiago Calatrava Valls is a "starchitect" like Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. This Swiss-born native of Valencia has made a name for himself by creating aerodynamic, organic architecture, where poetry vies with sculpture and the living. He has designed bridges, railway stations, towers, airports, museums and stadiums. Places of encounter and exchange, connecting people in a permanent flow of mobility. Taschen and author Philip Jodidio, behind several works by major architects such as Shigeru Ban (Acumen no. 48), pay tribute to this extraordinary master in a limited-edition XXL monograph, as grandiose as his architectural follies.

SCULPTURES IN ARCHITECTURE

Architect, engineer, painter, sculptor and even ceramist, the 73-year-old is all at once. He has forged a rich and eclectic academic career, combining art, architecture and engineering into a coherent and expressive whole. After studying drawing and painting, then architecture and urban planning, Santiago Calatrava soon added a doctorate in civil engineering to his pedigree.
Page after page of his designs, which he has elevated to the status of works of art, demonstrate this taste for the sculptural and the spectacular. His major influences include architects such as Le Corbusier and Robert Maillart, as well as physicist-theorists (Albert Einstein), artists, sculptors and painters (Alexander Calder, Auguste Rodin, Joan Miró, Francisco de Goya, Antoni Gaudi, Leonardo da Vinci).

When you look at his architectural creations, the end result is hardly surprising: the Catalan virtuoso is constantly questioning the dimension of time, mass, movement, statics and biomorphism. The result is a series of aerial, slender, geometric and undulating sculptures.

BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND COMPLEXITY

His creations evoke an imaginary world of the human body and nature. The Lyon-Saint-Exupéry TGV station and the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in Manhattan recall the movement of a bird's wings. Lisbon's Gare de l'Orient appears to have tree-covered platforms. The Bodegas y Bebidas winery in Spain takes on the shape of undulating waves thanks to the movement given to its aluminum roof. The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia is inspired by the shape of the human eye, a recurring theme in his work. Not forgetting the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin, which takes on the allure of a harp, or the Valencia Opera House, conceived as a series of random volumes, which takes on surrealist forms while evoking the bow of a ship in certain respects. As for the Turning Torso in Sweden, this building is undoubtedly the most representative of his interest in the human body, sculpture and the art of static and movement.

While the rest of his work is equally impressive, from the Olympiad sports complex in Athens to the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, in recent years he has been widely criticized for overrunning budgets and falling behind schedule. Nevertheless, on the pages of this handsome XXL book, his watercolor drawings combined with photographs reveal
a real dynamic power on the scale of the building.

CALATRAVA. COMPLETE WORKS 1979-TODAY BY PHILIP JODIDIO
TASCHEN, SEPTEMBER 2024
TASCHEN.COM