Winged Victories The soaring ambition of Santiago Calatrava.
by Rebecca Mead September 1, 2008
Calatrava does not work with a computer; each of his buildings begins with sketches in watercolor. Photograph by Ethan Levitas.
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Slide Show: The architecture of Santiago Calatrava.
Keywords
Calatrava, Santiago; Architecture, Architects;
Milwaukee Art Museum; Train Stations;World Trade Center PATH Station; Bridges;City of Arts and Sciences
Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, speaks six languages, and although his English is less than perfect, its wrinkles only heighten the allure of his pronouncements. “Though I love the arts with all my heart—paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music—and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important,” he declared one evening last March, at a cocktail-hour gathering in the wood-panelled ballroom of the Harold Pratt House, the Park Avenue mansion that is home to the Council on Foreign Relations. Calatrava, who has a low voice and a professorial manner, was dressed in a dark suit and wore glasses with the narrowest of metal rims. He stood next to an overhead projector, upon which lay brushes, a box of watercolor paints, and two weights of paper that had been supplied in advance by an aide.
“You can penetrate architecture, you can enter into it,” he continued. “This room is part of ourselves in this moment. I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved. All those things, in modesty, are what I have tried to convey.” Calatrava turned to the box of paints. “I thought it better to draw than to speak,” he said, as he dipped a brush into a glass of water and began sketching a slender green leaf and a snail’s shell, which were displayed on two screens flanking him.
The images drew appreciative chuckles from the audience: each shape could, with only a limited exercise of imagination, be seen expressed in the structure of the Chicago Spire, a building designed by Calatrava, which the event was intended to promote. At present little more than a construction site with an attractive street address—400 North Lake Shore Drive—the Chicago Spire is to be a silvery, faceted tower spiralling from the bank of Lake Michigan to a delicately tapered point, with Calatrava attending to the smallest ornamental details, including bronze door handles cast in the shape of leotard-clad dancers. Before Calatrava took the podium, the guests had the chance to listen to a sales representative for the building’s twelve hundred luxury apartments—“From the observation deck you can see the curvature of the earth,” she claimed, seductively if implausibly—and viewed digital renderings of the Spire’s torqued, glittering form, which looked less like a place to live than like a drill bit from a tool kit produced by Cartier.
Calatrava, who, at fifty-seven, has thick, dark hair that is barely touched by silver, took a second sheet of paper. With a few brushstrokes, he sketched the tapering outline of his building as seen at some distance, added a strip of green to evoke Chicago’s waterfront, a wash of blue to suggest the lake, and some brownish blocks to stand in for the rest of the city’s skyline. The result looked like an illustration from a children’s book—an effect that was enhanced when Calatrava put into the foreground a park bench and two seated figures gazing at the Spire. “What has finally been important to us is not so much the idea of the building as the idea of the persons watching the building, and also those inside living in harmony with the natural world,” Calatrava said, as, with a flourish, he added the crowning, naïve touch: a distant bird in flight.
For Calatrava, who is one of the world’s most successful architects, sketching with watercolors is an essential part of his creative process. He does not work with a computer or with drafting equipment; each of his buildings begins with a sheaf of paint-dappled pages. His archive in Switzerland includes more than a hundred thousand sketches; he has also had copies of them bound into handsome keepsake books for his clients, a beguilingly artisanal alternative to a PowerPoint presentation.
Calatrava typically paints images—a leaping figure, a charging bull, a disembodied eye, a skeletal hand—that at first seem to have nothing to do with buildings but, rather, suggest the contents of the sketchbook of an art student who has spent the afternoon at MOMA lingering over the Picassos. The relevance of such drawings becomes fully apparent in Calatrava’s completed structures, which are instantly recognizable for their use of sculptural forms that draw upon motifs found in the natural world. A station for the airport at Lyon-Saint Exupéry has sand-colored concrete wings with black steel struts, raised aloft, as if the building were a bird of prey alighting on the ground with its latest capture. A transportation hub in Lisbon has dozens of uprushing white steel columns topped with a canopy of striated, faceted glass that evokes a forest of tropical palms. The first completed Calatrava skyscraper, the Turning Torso tower, in Malmö, Sweden, which is fifty-four stories high and twists through ninety degrees, was derived from a sculpture that Calatrava first made in 1985, and this, in turn, was prompted by his sketches of the human spine. (Similar studies lay behind 80 South Street, an apartment tower that Calatrava proposed in 2004 for downtown Manhattan, consisting of twelve glassy, cube-shaped town houses airily stacked one atop another, with apparent disregard for gravity. That project has stalled for lack of investors.) Calatrava’s bridges, for which he initially earned his fame, often evoke the shapes of lithe human forms, bending or lunging with Olympian vigor. Though he does not like to describe his work as having been inspired by nature—he is fond of quoting Rodin, who said that inspiration does not exist—the connection has been made by the developers marketing his buildings. The sales slogan for the Chicago Spire is “Inspired by Nature, Imagined by Calatrava.”
译文:
带翅膀的胜利——【纽约客】
长了翅膀的胜利 圣地亚哥 卡拉特拉瓦的雄心在翱翔
卡拉特拉瓦不用计算机，他的每张建筑设计都是用水彩绘制的。葛特曼莱韦塔斯拍摄
圣地亚哥 卡拉特拉瓦，西班牙的建筑师，能讲六种语言，尽管他的英语还算不上完美，但是他的发音极具诱惑力。“我全身心地爱着艺术——绘画、雕刻、戏剧，和音乐——我认为这些都是我们人类所能取得的最高成就，但是我真的确信建筑是最重要的成就之一。”他是去年三月的一个晚上发表这番讲话的，那是在哈罗德普拉特大厦内一个用木材装饰的舞厅里举行的鸡尾酒会上。这座位于公园区的大厦是对外关系委员会的总部。卡拉特拉瓦，声音低沉，富有学者气派，他穿着黑色西装戴着金属窄边眼镜。他站在顶式投影仪的旁边，投影仪上放着刷子、一盒水彩颜料和助手预先提供的两摞纸。
“你可以看透建筑，你可以走到它里面去”他接着说。 “此时，这间房子已经成为了我们的一部分。我认为重要的是为人们而建，以及为传达这种希望的信息面建，即：通过好的建筑和对进程的必然认识，能够加强人与人彼此之间的理解。所有这些，毫不夸张地说，是我一直想努力传达的。”卡拉特拉瓦转向那盒颜料。“我想画比说更能说明问题，”他一边说，一边把一把刷子浸入水中，然后开始画一片纤细的绿叶和一个蜗牛壳，这些图象都显示在他两侧的屏幕上。
图像引起了听众的一片吃吃的笑声，稍有点印象的人都能认出这是Chicago Spire所呈现的外形，这座建筑是卡拉特拉瓦设计的。现在很少有一座建筑能拥有这么吸引人的街牌号——北湖岸街400号——Chicago Spire将会是一座银色的，多面的塔形建筑，它从密歇根湖畔一直盘旋向上，最后巧妙地汇成一点。在这里，卡拉特拉瓦连最细小的装饰细节也注意到了，包括铜制的门把手都被铸成了穿紧身衣的舞者形象。在卡拉特拉瓦上台演讲之前，客人们有幸聆听了销售代表对这1200个奢华单元所做介绍——“从观景台上，你能看到地球的曲线，”她声称，毫无疑问有勾引的味道——他们还观看了Spire扭曲度的数字效果图，闪闪发光。这让这个地方看起来更象由卡蒂尔制造的工具组件中的一把钻头，而不是一个用来居住的地方。
卡拉特拉瓦，57岁，一头浓密的黑发，几乎看不到一丝白发。他又拿出一张纸，寥寥几笔，勾画出建筑物的远景，又添了一束绿色代表芝加哥的堤岸，一抹蓝色象征湖水，几块褐色代表芝加哥天际线的剩余部分。这副画看起来就象是小学生课本里的插图——当卡拉特拉瓦又在前景中加入了一张公园长椅和两个正欣赏Spire的人，这种效果就更明显了。“最终，对我们来说最重要的不仅仅是观看这座建筑的人的想法，还包括那些住在建筑物内与大自然共度蜜月的人们。”卡拉特拉瓦一边说，一边又加点睛之笔:在远处飞翔的小鸟。更给人一种天真烂漫的感觉。
对卡拉特拉瓦，这个世界上最成功的建筑师来说，用水彩来勾勒是他创造过程的基本部分。他从不用计算机或绘图设备，他的每一个建筑都是从一捆色彩斑驳的纸开始的。他在瑞士的建筑物文档超过了10万张写生，他还把其中的几张编成了漂亮的纪念册送给了客户，是一组幻灯片的精美艺术替代品。
卡拉特拉瓦以画意象为主——一个跳跃的人、一头奔牛，一双失神的眼睛、一只瘦骨嶙峋的手——初看起来和建筑一点也搭不边，更像是一个艺术系的学生花了整个下午，在纽约的现代艺术博物馆内毕加索的画前临摹的写生手册上的东西。但是在卡拉特拉瓦的已建成的建筑物上，一眼就能看出是来自自然的图案的雕刻形式在建筑物上的应用。在这些建筑物上，这些绘画与建筑的关系完全体现出来了。里昂的Saint Exupery机场的一个航站楼，有一对沙土色的带黑色支柱的翅膀。翅膀高高耸起，使得这个建筑看起来就象一个带着刚捕获猎物降落在地上的鸟。在里斯本的一个客运枢纽中心，有十几根高耸的钢柱，顶上是用带条纹的多面玻璃做的罩蓬，整体看起来就象上一个热带棕榈树林。卡拉特拉瓦的第一个已建成的摩天大厦，瑞典Malmö的Turning Torso，54层高，扭转了90度，得自卡拉特拉瓦1985年第一次创造的雕刻。而这个雕刻作品又来自他的人体脊柱写生。（在北街80号，一座公寓建筑上也体现了同样的设计理念。这是卡拉特拉瓦于2004年为曼哈顿市中心设计的，由12座玻璃的立方形市内住宅轻巧地层叠在一起，显然不受重力的影响。这个项目因缺乏投资而停滞不前。）卡拉特拉瓦设计的桥，常让人联想起柔软的人体正弯腰或者正在向前冲，展现了一种奥林匹克精神。尽管他不喜欢把他的作品描述成是受自然的启发——他喜欢引用Rodin的话：灵感并不存在——但是销售他的建筑的开发商会把它们联系在一起。Chigacp Spire的销售口号是：“自然激发灵感，卡拉特拉瓦创意想象。”
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