Santiago Calatrava
Calatrava is trained both as an architect and as a structural engineer and designs bridges, stations and towers in which the structure is the form. Turning Torso in Malmö is based on his sculpture of a twisting human body.
Santiago Calatrava was born in 1951 in Benimàmet near Valencia in Spain. He studied art and architecture in Valencia and qualified as an architect in 1974. He then studied civil engineering at the ETH in Zurich, where in 1981 he completed a doctoral thesis on how structures can be folded and collapsed. That same year he opened his own office in Zurich. The combination of training as an architect, artist and engineer is unusual and has shaped all his work. He also works as a sculptor and draughtsman, and many of his buildings start from studies of human bodies, birds’ wings and skeletons that he has made in sketches and sculptures before they become buildings.
Calatrava’s early commissions were bridges and stations, such as Stadelhofen in Zurich and the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, with a single inclined pylon supporting the deck. The station at Lyon airport takes the form of a bird with outstretched wings. In his home city of Valencia he built the City of Arts and Sciences, with an opera house, planetarium and science museum. The Milwaukee Art Museum has a movable sunscreen that opens like wings. Turning Torso in Malmö, 190 metres tall and inaugurated in 2005, is based on his sculpture Twisting Torso: nine cubes stacked and rotated around a core. He also designed the Oculus, the transport hub at the World Trade Center in New York.
When completed, Turning Torso was one of the tallest residential buildings in Europe and became a new symbol of Malmö after the closure of its shipyards. The building was built by HSB in the Western Harbour, where the old Kockums Crane had previously dominated the skyline, and was part of the transformation of the harbour into a new district. Calatrava’s buildings have inspired many cities to build sculptural bridges and stations as landmarks. At the same time several projects have been criticised for cost overruns, delays and technical problems. He represents the contemporary architecture in which structure and form merge into a whole, and he shows how engineering can become an expressive part of architecture.