Santiago Calatrava - Architect

(Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden - 2005)

Santiago Calatrava’s architecture from a visual perspective owes it self to the sheer crony indulgence of it all and his attempts at reflecting nature in design - which I think man-made objects should not reflect nature as such, but rather remove it's self from it, then try and appease a natural system that is indifferent to us.  Otherwise you are going to run into all kinds of problems.   Visually, you cannot deny the beauty of the designs, but at the same time an excessiveness which in turn shows a fragility or sloppiness.  This is just from aesthetic point of view, let alone the runaway economic idealism of exponential growth, which is an illusion of course and one that appears to be creeping up to Calatrava and his projects.

From New York Times:

VALENCIA, Spain — For a while, this sprawling Mediterranean city embraced Santiago Calatrava’s architecture with gusto. In a dried-up riverbed, Mr. Calatrava built and built, eventually filling 86 acres with his radical, and some say awe-inspiring, designs. 

But these days, even as Mr. Calatrava’s eye-catching PATH station creeps toward completion in Lower Manhattan, he is often cast as a villain here in Valencia. One local politician runs a Web site called Calatravatelaclava, which loosely translates as, “Calatrava bleeds you dry.”  

Ignacio Blanco, the member of the provincial Parliament who started the Web site, has unleashed a flood of information about the complex during the past year, concluding that Valencia still owes 700 million euros (about $944 million) on it.

Mr. Calatrava was paid approximately 94 million euros (about $127 million) for his work. How could that be, Mr. Blanco asks, when the opera house included 150 seats with obstructed views? Or when the science museum was initially built without fire escapes or elevators for the disabled?

“How can you make mistakes like that?” asked Mr. Blanco, a member of the small opposition United Left party here, who said millions were spent to fix such errors. “He was paid even when repairing his own mistakes.” 

and more serious allegations:

But in numerous interviews, other architects, academics and builders say that Mr. Calatrava is amassing an unusually long list of projects marred by cost overruns, delays and litigation. It is hard to find a Calatrava project that has not been significantly over budget. And complaints abound that he is indifferent to the needs of his clients. Just last month a Dutch councilor in Haarlemmermeer, near Amsterdam, urged his colleagues to take legal action because the three bridges the architect designed for the town cost twice the budgeted amount and then millions more in upkeep since they opened in 2004. Mr. Calatrava is already in court over a footbridge in Venice, a winery in the Álava region of Spain and a massive exhibition and conference center in Oviedo, Spain.

In Bilbao, Spain, there have been problems with a bridge and an airport.

“What you see over and over again is that rather than searching for functionality or customer satisfaction, he aims for singularity,” said Jesús Cañada Merino, the president of Bilbao’s architects’ association. “The problem is that Calatrava is above and beyond the client.” 

American cronyism via Calatrava at Ground Zero NYC:

"...PATH train station at ground zero. It is expected to open in 2015 but is six years behind schedule and will cost $4 billion, twice the original budget.

Critics of the project, commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, find the final price tag hard to believe. (In January 2012 an independent audit of the Port Authority concluded that the agency was “a challenged and dysfunctional organization.”) But several executives who have been involved in construction at the World Trade Center site, who did not want to speak on the record because of their relationship with the project, said Mr. Calatrava’s designs were problematic, too, calling for hugely difficult construction, including a vast underground chamber. In addition, they said, he demanded that surrounding buildings house all the station’s mechanical elements, like ventilation, which complicated construction and called for time-consuming coordination." 

 (City of Arts and Sciences  - Valencia, Spain.  Now being repaired due to wrinkled exterior.)

The New York Times article goes on revealing further issues and problems with Calatrava's projects.  Full article: A Star Architect Leaves Some Clients Fuming

Makes you double think Robert Greene's book: Mastery and his chapter on Santiago Calatrava as a '10,000 hour master'.  Sometimes you got to laugh at the absurdity.