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| Calatrava's Puente del Alamillo in Seville |
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| Eye-shaped planetarium, Valencia |
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has designed many of the cooler-looking structures of recent decades.
With some other starchitects, such as Thom Mayne, you have to know a lot of theory to understand why the buildings aren't as ugly as they look, or at least why ugly buildings are Good for You.
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| Opera house in Canary Islands |
With Calatrava, in contrast, you get buildings built to look like natural objects (eyes, crescent moons, birds, human bodies) or resemble finely engineered objects (e.g., harps, suspension bridges). His work carries on the tradition of the Finnish architect Eeno Saarinen who designed TWA's terminal at JFK in the late 1950s to look like a soaring bird.
His subway station under construction at Ground Zero in Manhattan will cost $4 billion and be six years late, at last notice.
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| Rendering of WTC station |
So, how is Calatrava so creative (leaving out that he makes everything white)?
An article in the New York Times explains his secret for being so productive: not worrying about details like how to keep his buildings from flooding, how to keep people from falling down and breaking their hips on his beautiful but slippery glass bridge, and how to keep his buildings from starting to fall apart after a decade or less:
As for Valencia’s cost overruns, the politician Mr. Blanco said in a recent interview that one contributing issue might be that Mr. Calatrava’s designs appear to include few details. “Other architects, they know exactly the door handles they want, and where to buy and at what cost,” Mr. Blanco said. “But Calatrava is the opposite. His projects do not have this degree of precision. If you look at the files on the aquarium, which was built by someone else, they are fat. But there are just a couple of pages on the Calatrava projects.”
$4 bill for a subway station, the blue state at work.
ReplyDeleteI always did figure it was the engineers who figure out how to get these things built who are the real heroes of starchitecture.
ReplyDeleteAnd other heroes include the people who finally figure out how to wash the buildings without paying a fortune each time.
ReplyDeleteA combination of NYC unionized labor costs and an architect who mostly wings it as he pushes the envelope of design sounds expensive.
ReplyDeleteThere are probably no heroes in the type of "starchitecture" described here, either you are someone who cares about other people or you are not, only people in the first category have any chance of being a real architect or a real hero. Theoretically, an engineer who salvages an ugly building prevents its early replacement by a better building. Only if in their private lives starchitects and their lackeys are decent to their loved ones, then they are not total failures.
ReplyDeleteAs Dolly Parton said: "It takes a lot a money to look this cheap."
ReplyDeleteFrank Lloyd Wright was Calatrava's predecessor. I've never been in a Wright building that doesn't leak.
ReplyDeleteK
As far as I can tell, from wandering around NYC and talking to on-location people (construction, maintenance, managers) working in and for swoopy new glassy buildings, those things are generally under repair and heavy maintenance from the day they open.
ReplyDeleteAm I really the only person in the world who's not wowed by the supposed beauty of Calatrava's designs? To me they look like TV graphics, or the doodles on the cover of a talented junior high school student's notebook: "Shape" and "motion" and "elegance" for media junkies who know nothing about actual architecture.
Thanks for the link to our Thom Mayne posting!
Confronting a legacy of a leaky roof
ReplyDelete"Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy includes famously leaky roofs. "
http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a-leaky-roof/article_d3988310-a36c-11df-b071-001cc4c03286.html
His stuff is better than 95% of modern public architecture. New middle class homes still sometimes look decent. It's the public, big-time architecture that usually sucks. Of course at the same time his best stuff is worse than any public structure built in the West before the 20th century. Modern public architecture is like modernist classical music this way.
ReplyDeleteThe bird-shaped train station design only looks great if you don't compare it to Grand Central. But it would have looked much, much worse if Gehry did it.
Re Frank Lloyd Wright, an interesting commentary on how unlivable his houses are here.
ReplyDeleteWright seemed to use architecture as a vehicle to express his resentment at being unusually short. He told his students, "I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, as the human scale. If I had been taller, the scale might have been different."
There is a clear division of labor on large international architectural projects. Design Architects like Calatrava are brought on to create conceptual designs and the further along the process goes the less they are involved in the project. These firms are extremely expensive and tend to have a lack of local building rules. So a local Project Architect (or simply referred to as the “Local” from the point of view of the Design Architect) is also hired to take the design drawings and turn them into full construction documents and then to administer the construction process. So it is quite normal that Calatrava is not choosing the door hardware although he may get veto power over the choice in critical areas.
ReplyDeleteThe norms, fire regulations, and handicap access requirements vary wildly in each first world country. No architect could ever master the systems of every first world country they work in. Not onl that but in some first world countries the rules often vary from extremely ambiguous all to way to totally non-existent, so there must be local architects involved to wade through these regulatory labyrinths. Of course unclear rules are job insurance for the locals making it difficult for younger or outside architects to push them out of the way.
In terms of cleaning a building, there are building maintenance consultants that are brought in early to make sure facades are cleanable after construction. For interior surfaces typically the client’s rep will keep a sharp eye on all decisions to make sure they can maintain the building for a reasonable budget once they occupy it.
That said Calatrava does make some very striking buildings. I work for a famous architectural firm and along with my boss (who is even more jaded than I) we recently happened to pass through a Calatrava train station in Europe on our way to an exterior wall test. We were both very impressed and took lots of pictures. But yes we did comment on how amazingly expensive the guardrails were but we understood that following the concept of the building there were no other options they could have taken to save money.
Interesting, the fictional version of Frank Lloyd Wright/Calatrava -- Howard Roark of course -- always made buildings that were practical and cheap, in addition to being gorgeous. Wish it really worked that way.
ReplyDeleteFor all his leaky roofs and broken hips, Calatrava at least tries to make beautiful buildings. Unlike Frank Gehry, whose buildings embrace ugliness.
Gehry's Disney concert hall in L.A. is pleasant looking -- they used software for designing sailboats to design the metal shell, so it has a nautical aspect that's hard to dislike. (His Bilbao is presumably even better.) The inside is absurdly convoluted (I wouldn't want to have to try to get out during a fire). But the view from the high side seats is wild: you're so close you can almost read the score over the first violinist's shoulder.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw those photos, I thought: "This must be the guy who designed the train station of Liège in Belgium." And so it was.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A8ge-Guillemins_railway_station
Yours for a cool 312 million euros.
While in the bowels of this particular building myself during late 2009, I had no mishaps; nevertheless I still prefer the unpretentious Victorian-Edwardian edifice it replaced (having seen this building on a visit in 1990).
"$4 bill for a subway station, the blue state at work."
ReplyDeleteCorruption all the way down. The contractors are happy. The politicians are happy. The only people unhappy are the taxpayers, and since it's all on the credit card of some future generation of taxpayers even they don't care all that much.
The 9/11 attacks were the best excuse for a taxpayer rip-off ever invented. New Yorkers used our sympathy to rob us blind.
However bad Calatrava's work is, it can't be nearly as bad as the US$700 million blown on the Scottish Parliament Bulding. Looking at it, you're not shocked that it's the capitol of a country full of absurd socialists.
ReplyDeleteThat the NYT chooses to single out Calatrava's problems strikes me as odd. As others indicate, the deficiencies they identify in his work are by no means unusual among prominent architects.
ReplyDeleteI worked in Richard Meier+Partners' Westwood office for maybe three years in the late 80s / early 90s, where a photocopied paper detailing the as-built defects in several of his noteworthy projects circulated samizdat-style among the young architects. I recall there having been seriously leaky clerestory windows in his addition to the Des Moines Art Center, for example. (Previous architects: Eero Saarinen's father and fellow crossword solution Eliel, and I.M. Pei). This is a major problem for a museum in Iowa's less-than-pleasant climate. He was also being sued at the time by some rich people in I think a suburb of Pittsburgh for what they claimed was their complete disaster of a house.
As I learned working for Richard Meier, Torn and Frayed is exactly right in his or her comment above: diminishing involvement over the course of any project is pretty much the standard M.O. among big-time architects. Furthermore, there was a lot of talk in the LA RM+P office back then that Richard was in the habit of designing for the portfolio photos: once Grant Mudford or whoever was finished shooting the white building against a deep-blue sky, that was it. The underlying rap was that he didn't care at all about durability.
This is probably an exaggerated view, but it's not entirely false. I remember the first building of Richard's I ever visited, the New Harmony Atheneum in Indiana. It was no more than seven years old at the time, and they'd already had to close an exterior stair for major repairs.
Anyway, shoddy construction detailing is so common among architects at that level--with the possible exception e.g. of Norman Foster, with his intense focus on engineering--that I was very surprised to see the NYT piece in the paper at all. And on the front page, no less! My immediate reaction: "What do they have against Santiago Calatrava?"
"not worrying about details like how to keep his buildings from flooding, how to keep people from falling down and breaking their hips on his beautiful but slippery glass bridge, and how to keep his buildings from starting to fall apart after a decade or less:"
ReplyDeleteCorrect me if I'm wrong, but no architect worries about that stuff, because they don't understand any of it.
Those practical concerns are the job of the engineers who takeover once the architect comes up with the design.
>Wright seemed to use architecture as a vehicle to express his resentment at being unusually short[emphasis added]. .... "I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, ..."
ReplyDeleteaccording to google US male height 5'10'' +- 3'' His 5'8.5'' would put him .5 std below average. Which means more than 60% of men differ more in height from the average than he does.
I wish you would do a post taking down the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. The metal structure is intentionally covered with rust and looks terrible.
ReplyDeleteExtroverts love a building full of glass; their ideal is to live outside in a meadow, with a transparent sky-high ceiling. On constant display and constant alert.
ReplyDeleteEvery woman I ever bought a house with insisted on giant windows and wanted no curtains on them.
As for me, living in an underground bunker has always been a comforting daydream.
The 19th Century is looking better all the time. The 20th, at least in America, was marked by a goofy optimism: we will all live amidst nature and in open communities, with open floorplans. Minimum privacy. Ray Bradbury wrote somewhere that in suburban LA mid-century, keeping your curtains drawn was cause for neighborhood-wide suspicion.
By contrast, some traditional societies build their houses facing inward. There is an enclosed courtyard in back, but no front porch or lawn. Their idea is that a dwelling exists to protect you from nature and people. Strange, I know, but the wheel may be turning in that direction now, particularly as society becomes more brutal and people turn inward psychologically.
I thought brutalism was the nadir of modern architecture, but that Thom Mayne building makes me appreciate that he has opened up whole new horizons to bad buildings. I think Mayne has it in him to come up with some argle-bargle to justify watch towers, razor wire, and roving leather-jacketed actors that demand to see the papers of passerby.
ReplyDeleteI don't get the hate for Thom Mayne's Caltrans District 7 Headquarters. The building looks pretty impressive in person. The scale of the building is incredible it just feels intimidating.The courtyards around it are pretty nice areas though (small dog park, infinite fountain, weird bear statue garden). Also, from the openness of much of the building you can see how he was stressing the tranparency of the "new" LAPD
ReplyDeleteI snuck into and walked around Gehry's Peter B. Lewis building last time I was in Cleveland. The views inside the central atrium are cool--stunning, even, if you look upwards--but the building becomes remarkably normal-feeling once you get off the beaten path and into some of the back hallways, classrooms, lounges, and offices.
ReplyDeleteI never went inside the Disney concert hall while I lived in Los Angeles, but an architect friend of mine said it was designed in a way that wasted space, creating a lot of unusable corners and so forth.
I'm a fan of Gehry (plenty of his work at least) despite agreeing with many people in this comment section about architecture in general.
ReplyDeleteI watched a movie about the "unappreciated genius" louis kahn and i just didn't get it. then again, even his son who made the movie had a funny segment about one of his buildings at yale that he thought looked like crap.
steve--
ReplyDeletei wont say every building should look like this but i've walked past this gehry work...and if anyone can see this in real life and not find a little joy in it, well, he is more curmudgeon than i: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_House
Gehry's IAC building in New York is isn't bad. The back wall of the lobby is a video screen, so I always glance over and see what's playing on it when I drive by.
ReplyDeletePS. Learn from my experience: if you want to get married in the Peter B. Lewis building, don't specify what you want to reserve the space for. They tend to want to keep any events there business related, but I don't see how they could kick you out once they realized it was a wedding.
ReplyDeleteHere's another tip: don't tell the catering company youre having a wedding reception. They charge twice as much for weddings.
ReplyDeleteForgive me for a little self-linking. Here's an irreverent blogpost I wrote about modernist hero Louis Kahn.
ReplyDeleteI've been suspicious of architects ever since the building of the John Hancock Tower in Boston back in the 70s. The I.M. Pei & Partners building was 5 years late, costs rising from $75 million to $175 million, and it was famous mostly for swaying in the wind so much that people got motion sickness and raining glass window panes down on the surrounding sidewalks.
ReplyDeleteGimmicky. Better as toys or models than actual buildings.
ReplyDelete