Calatrava has made sketching in public another signature move. In Dallas, where two Calatrava bridges are being built, he pulled out the watercolors after lunch at the home of Margaret McDermott, a local philanthropist who contributed two million dollars to the project. (“He reached into his briefcase and dipped a brush into his water glass,” Mary McDermott Cook, McDermott’s daughter, recalled of the occasion. “My mother said, ‘Get him another glass of water!’ ”) In Liège, Belgium, Calatrava was one of seven contestants in an architectural competition to design a high-speed-train station. His rivals came in teams, armed with examples of their past work; Calatrava showed up alone, with his paintbrush, and won the commission. In January, 2004, while presenting his proposal for a new PATH transit hub for the World Trade Center site, Calatrava drew in chalk a child releasing a bird from her hands, thus conveying the genesis of the design, in which a pair of glass-and-steel canopies would arch over the sidewalks of lower Manhattan, like outstretched wings.
Calatrava has been trained both in architecture and in engineering, but he thinks of himself as an artist, and it is as such that he has been embraced by his most enthusiastic champions. Three years ago, the Metropolitan Museum presented a show of Calatrava’s sculpture and architectural models; it was the largest exhibition the Met had ever devoted to a living architect. The show’s curator, Gary Tinterow, says of Calatrava, “When he approaches a project, he begins to think about it in terms of form. Then he refines the form, as he adapts it to the function at hand.” Joseph Seymour, the executive director of the Port Authority at the time Calatrava was selected for the PATH-station project, has said, “He’s the da Vinci of our time.”
“My personality is more the personality of a painter,” Calatrava told me a few months ago, when I met him in his New York office. (He has lived in the city since 2005.) “I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience,” he continued. “In order to solve the kind of problems I have to solve, I have to work in myself, and with myself.”
“And yet Calatrava rarely finds seclusion. He shuttles constantly between New York, where he has a staff of about thirty-five, and Europe, where he has a staff of a hundred: half in Zurich and half in his home town of Valencia. Demands are made on his time by clients across the globe. In Tenerife, he has built a waterfront concert hall that looks like a shell topped with a ram’s horn; in Buenos Aires, he has created a cable-strung footbridge that, spectacularly, pivots from its transverse position to a position parallel to the bank, to permit the passage of water traffic.
Calatrava is unafraid of the big emotional gesture. At the official ground-breaking of his PATH station, in 2005, he enlisted his daughter, Sofia, then age ten, to release over the site what were officially billed as a pair of doves, in order to insure the comprehension of his architectural conceit. (They were actually white homing pigeons, a more reliable bird for ceremonial purposes.) In comparison with the work of his architectural peers, Calatrava’s buildings appeal more to the heart than to the head. For all their structural complexity, they do not enjoy the playful indeterminacy of Frank Gehry, the cerebral audacity of Rem Koolhaas, or the mathematical austerity of Zaha Hadid. But, at their best, his buildings inspire visceral awe rather than thoughtful appraisal, and deliver the uplifting impact of a cathedral, even when their purpose is merely to shelter commuters.
To generate this sense of transcendence is precisely Calatrava’s intention. “To do simple things is very difficult,” he says. In spite of the earnestness of his buildings, though, Calatrava is not without a personal capacity for irony. Having delivered his remarks at the sales event for the Chicago Spire, he noted, as he laid down his brush, “The most beautiful part of this is that the building is already under construction.”
Calatrava does not always travel in a private jet, but there are times when the convenience offered by a Cessna of one’s own outweighs all other considerations. Such an occasion presented itself on a wet April afternoon in Zurich, when Calatrava set off to show me one of his designs, the high-speed-train station in Liège, which is nearing completion. As Calatrava hustled across the rainy tarmac of the airport and boarded a seven-seater provided by NetJets—an aviation time-share company—he did so with weary relief. That morning, he had flown in on Lufthansa’s red-eye from Qatar, where he had been exploring a site for a proposed photography museum. He had intended to return a day earlier, but the Emir had requested that he stay on another night, and the comic indignities of commercial travel were fresh in his mind. He had made a rushed connection at dawn in Frankfurt, where a security agent insisted that he jettison a half-used bottle of cologne that was in violation of antiterrorism regulations. “I said, ‘Look, it’s almost empty,’ but it made no difference,” Calatrava recalled, shaking his head as he switched off his iPhone, placed it on the polished ledge at his elbow, and sank into the buttery taupe leather of his seat.
Calatrava began his career in Zurich, where he studied civil engineering; he was thirty-two when he won his first big competition, to design the Stadelhofen commuter station, an open, airy structure made of steel and concrete that on one side leans into the cleft of a hillside and on the other opens into a city square. More recently, he built a library for the University of Zurich’s law school—an ovoid structure topped with a glass oculus—that fits snugly within the courtyard of the school’s existing hundred-year-old building. A visitor standing inside the splendid skylit atrium will see no books or students; the workspaces are hidden behind five levels of pearwood-clad balconies, as if the library were a beehive in which all honey-producing activity had been cunningly concealed. The oculus is equipped with a brise-soleil that silently opens and closes according to the available daylight, and the library is so popular that even students not enrolled in the law school have taken to working there.
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译文:
带翅膀的胜利（续1）——［纽约客］
卡拉特拉瓦曾在一次签名活动中当场写生。在达拉斯，卡拉特拉瓦设计了两座桥，当地的一个慈善家玛格莉特 麦克德莫特为此项目捐献了2百万美元。在玛格莉特的家中，午饭后，卡拉特拉瓦开始泼墨作画。（“他把手伸向他的公文包拿出他的刷子，然后把刷子浸湿，”玛丽麦克德莫特 库克，麦克德莫特的女儿，回忆当时的场景。“我妈妈说，‘再给他拿杯水!’”）在比利时的列日，卡拉特拉瓦参加了高铁站设计项目的竞争。共有七个人参加这一竞争，他的对手们全副武装带着他们过去的作品，组团而来。而他则是只身一人，带着他的画笔，赢得了这个项目。2004年1月，当他为世贸中心遗址下的PATH地铁换乘中心做设计的时候，他用粉笔画了一个放飞鸽子的小女孩，通过这表达了他的设计理念：一对玻璃和钢结构的天篷呈拱形遮盖在曼哈顿地下人行道的上方，就象张开的翅膀。 卡拉特拉瓦学过建筑和工程，但他自认为是一个艺术家，正因如此他被他的狂热的拥护者所爱戴。三年前，大都会艺术博物馆举办了卡拉特拉瓦雕刻和建筑模型展，这是该馆专为在世的建筑师举办的最大型的展览。展会的管理者，盖瑞丁德罗这样说卡拉特拉瓦：“当他着手一个设计时，首先设想它应呈现的形式，然后不断提炼，直到它能满足功能需求。”约瑟夫 西默，港务局的执行理事，在卡拉特拉瓦当选为PATH站的设计者时，曾说：“他是当代的达 芬奇。”
“我不仅仅是一个画家，”当我在他的办公室访问他时，他说。（2005年他就住在这个城市。）“我更愿意做一个在封闭环境下创作的艺术家，”他接着说：“为了解决我必需解决的问题，我不得不倾心尽力，事必躬亲。”
但卡拉特拉瓦并不是与世隔绝的，他经常穿梭于纽约的欧洲之间。在纽约他有一个35人团队。在欧洲有100人，一半在苏黎士，一半在他的家乡巴伦西亚。全球的客户按他的时间来运作。在特内里费岛，他建了一个码头音乐厅，外形看起来像一个贝壳顶着一个公羊角；在布宜诺斯艾利斯创建了一座索编步行桥。特别壮观的是，这座桥能从它的横断面转到与岸平行的位置，这样就不会影响水上交通了。
卡拉特拉瓦敢于应用肢体语言表达他的设计思想。2005年，在他设计的PATH站的官方动工典礼上，他让他10岁的女儿索菲亚放飞一对和平鸽，以向公众传达他的设计理念。（这对鸽子实际上是信鸽，是那种仪式上用的鸽子。）和与他同级的人设计的建筑相比，卡拉特拉瓦的建筑更多的是吸引人的心灵而不只是人的头脑。就建筑的复杂性来说，他们不喜欢弗兰克 盖瑞近乎嬉戏的随意、雷姆 库哈斯的大胆张狂、或者扎哈·哈迪德的数学式的精简。他是他们中间最优秀的。他的建筑激发的是内心的敬畏而不是深刻的评价，诠释了建筑物对心灵的一种震奋，那怕这个东西只是用来遮蔽行人。
卡拉特拉瓦的最终目的就是要达到这种卓尔不群的感觉。“越简单的事情越难做。”他说。除了对他自己建筑的真诚外，他也不乏嘲讽之能。在Chicago Spire 销售会上，介绍完他的设计理念后，他放下画笔，说：“最美的是建筑已经在建了。”
卡拉特拉瓦不常乘座私人飞机旅行，但有时候拥有一架塞斯纳私人飞机所带来的便利显得犹为重要。在苏黎士四月的一个湿漉漉的下午就出现了这种情况。当时卡拉特拉瓦正要出发把把快要完工的列日高铁站的设计拿给我看。当卡拉特拉瓦冲过大雨滂沱的机场停机坪用登机计时卡（NetJets是一家飞行时间共享公司，见http://www.tianyabook.com/jingji/lanhaizhanlue/3.htm）登上一架七座飞机时，整个过程他没有觉得疲劳，非常轻松。那天早上，他是乘座汉莎的红眼航班从卡塔尔来这儿的。在那儿他正在为一家筹建中的摄影博物馆选址。他本想提前一天返回的，但酋长已经要求他再呆一晚。那段滑稽的令人难堪的商务旅行仍历历在目。他曾经有一次傍晚的时候在法兰克福匆忙转机，那儿安检坚持让他把用了一半的古龙香水扔掉，说这违反了反恐条例。“我说，‘你看，这几乎是空的，’但是没用，”卡拉物拉瓦回忆说，摇了摇头。说完，他关掉了他的iPhone,把它放在他手肘边的精美台架上，然后,便陷进了光亮的褐色皮座椅内。
卡拉特拉瓦的职业生涯始于苏黎士，在那里他学习了土木工程；32岁时赢得他的第一份大的订单，设计Stadelhofen火车站。那是一座轻快、通透的钢筋水泥结构建筑，一边倚靠山腹，一边面对城市广场。最近，他还为苏黎士大学的法学院建了一座博物馆－一座卵形建筑，顶部装有圆形的玻璃窗－这正好和校园内百年老建筑紧密地熔合在一起。参观者站在这座辉煌的带天窗的中庭内，不会看到任何书籍和学生；工作区隐藏在5层的梨木包裹的阳台内。整个图书馆看起来就象一个蜂巢，所有的酿蜜活动被巧妙的隐藏起来了。天窗配有遮阳设施，可根据平均日照无声地开关，这座图书馆是如此有名以致于外系的学生也上这儿学习。
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