His buildings and bridges make steel and concrete fly through the air with the greatest of ease. But these days, Santiago Calatrava, equal parts showman and Renaissance man, may be moving too fast for his own good.
The acclaimed Spanish-born architect and engineer, whose spectacular, soon-to-open expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum anticipates his doing an equally prominent design on Chicago’s shoreline, appeared for a hard-hat tour of the Milwaukee project recently with a warm smile on his face and his left arm in a sling. He broke it skiing in St. Moritz.
The 49-year-old Calatrava (pronounced Cal-ah-TRA-vah) leads a lifestyle as daring as his buildings. Few are more daring than his addition to Milwaukee’s lakefront art museum. It is Calatrava’s first U.S. building, as well as his first museum, and, sitting just south of the existing museum, will house new galleries and a towering reception hall. This building won’t just look like it’s moving. It will move.
The galleries of the already delayed $75 million project are to open May 4. But the real thunder will come next fall — or maybe, the way things are going, next year — with the debut of Calatrava’s signature stroke: a 200-foot-wide, mechanically operated sunshade that will be Milwaukee’s answer to the Sydney Opera House and the St. Louis Arch. If all goes as planned, the grandiose contraption will lift off the glassy walls of the new structure’s steeply pitched reception hall, then rise like a pair of outstretched wings.
Dubbed “The Bird,” the kinetic sculpture promises to make Calatrava’s addition the biggest architectural event since the stunning 1997 debut of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But any comparison to the Bilbao museum, which drew critical raves as well as thousands of tourists to the violence-prone Basque region, inevitably raises a question about Calatrava’s bold design: Will it fly, not just aesthetically but mechanically?
“I am absolutely confident,” Calatrava says in his slightly accented English.
The words are spoken with the quiet confidence of a corporate executive who knows everything about his product and the buyers to which it appeals. And why not?
This is the way the museum-building game is played these days: Museums hire traveling architectural superstars and get their distinctive “brand,” which is designed to attract national media attention, bring in hordes of visitors and (oh, yes) house some paintings and sculptures too. The Calatrava brand is visually dynamic and unfailingly theatrical — a sort of Baroque Modern that bursts the boundaries of convention, the antithesis of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s sober steel-and-glass boxes.
Yet the futuristic face of Calatrava’s designs is deceiving. He is the closest thing architecture has these days to the old-fashioned, aforementioned Renaissance man. He speaks seven languages; the others are Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Swedish and Italian. He is not just an architect and an engineer, but an artist who has been drawing with exceptional skill since he was 8 years old. Even more rare, he is generous with what he draws, unlike famous architects who doodle on a napkin at the end of a meal, then keep their sketch, afraid that someone will sell it at an auction house.
“He gives out the sketch,” says Martha Thorne, the Art Institute of Chicago’s associate architecture curator, who knows Calatrava from her extensive research on Spanish design.
“He has a little paint box of water colors, a miniature one,” she recalls. “I’ve seen him take out this paint box and in a matter of minutes — two minutes, three minutes — make a beautiful watercolor. Over dessert.”
Calatrava rocketed to fame in the mid-1980s with a lyrically arching Barcelona bridge, one of several infrastructure projects done as that Spanish city remade itself to host the 1992 Olympic Games. Since then, he has turned out a series of dramatically sculptural bridges, including a curving footbridge near Gehry’s museum in Bilbao and another in Seville, with a huge canted pylon and tautly strung cables, that resembles a giant harp. The arches and cables supporting some of these bridges serve the dual role of shaping roomlike outdoor areas where people can sit and socialize.
“I have always tried to create bridges that are more than a connecting structure — places in their own right,” Calatrava says.
He may soon get a chance to bring that philosophy to Chicago with an underpass or pedestrian bridge that will enable pedestrians moving between Buckingham Fountain and the lakefront to move safely across heavily trafficked Lake Shore Drive. The project, to be done with the Chicago architectural and engineering firm of A. Epstein and Sons International, is sure to arouse controversy if it turns out to be a bridge and blocks drivers’ down-the-alley view of the Field Museum’s classical facade. No designs have been released for the nascent project.
“It’s a similar problem as here — how to bring people to the lake,” Calatrava says, gesturing to a key part of his Milwaukee design, a towering, cable-stayed bridge that marks the eastern terminus of downtown Milwaukee’s main drag, Wisconsin Avenue.
Resembling a ship’s gangplank, the bridge will lead pedestrians into the sun-washed new reception hall. The hall’s dramatically pitched exterior has been likened to a billowing sail. Continuing the nautical references, the concrete foundation for the hall has prowlike ends that look as if they’re ready to slice through the lapping waters of Lake Michigan. Within the curving-roofed exhibition building that links the hall to the existing museum, designed by Eero Saarinen, are riblike concrete arches that make the visitor feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale. Festive and lightweight, in pointed contrast to the heavy, stone buildings found throughout Milwaukee, the expansion is a typical Calatrava performance — an instant landmark, impossible to ignore.
The design, Calatrava says, “can speak to a small kid as much to an adult.”
Some of his fellow engineers privately snipe that his attention-getting designs depart from their field’s traditional goal of solving problems efficiently and economically. Indeed, when the Art Institute mounted a 1992 exhibition that showcased the best of contemporary Spanish architecture, Calatrava was left out because a committee of experts felt he was too flamboyant compared with more measured Spanish modernists such as Rafael Moneo, who would go on to win the field’s highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Calatrava responds that his projects, many of which are done for public agencies in Europe, are not extravagant and are done on “very limited” budgets.
Referring to the unconventional sunshade in Milwaukee, he adds: “If the client says, `I am not interested in this roof,’ I find another solution.”
Yet even Calatrava’s defenders say he is best suited to clients with deep pockets and a deeply held passion for buildings that don’t simply contain space but strive to create a major civic presence.
“He has to have enormously risk-taking clients,” says the Art Institute’s Thorne, a co-curator of the 1992 show, “because once you open the door to an artist — to somebody as individualistic or unique as Calatrava — you don’t just say, `Take a little off here, take a little off there.'”
In that light, Calatrava and the Milwaukee Art Museum appear to be a match made in architecture heaven.
The expansion got underway in the mid-1990s after Calatrava bested two Japanese architects, Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki, after a long interview process. Gehry, who had designed museums in Minneapolis and Toledo, was pointedly not included because officials of the Milwaukee museum wanted to set their institution apart from those in other Midwestern cities.
The museum set out to raise $35 million for the project. But Milwaukee’s civic and business leaders were so captivated by Calatrava’s plans — and by Calatrava himself — that $36 million poured in in just nine months.
In short order, the expansion shifted from a cultural undertaking to a civic cause. A 100-space underground parking garage for visitors was added. So was a prowlike terrace, designed by Calatrava, that will extend the new museum building to the south and provide an outdoor dining area for visitors. Eventually, public gardens and fountains by the noted landscape architect, Dan Kiley, were incorporated.
Today, the building budget has more than doubled, to $75 million, and the overall fundraising target stands at $100 million, including an endowment to cover operating costsand other needs. According to the museum’s director, Russell Bowman, $83 million has been raised.
“The design and Calatrava himself made the expanded scope possible,” Bowman says. “He always finds the right words to say to his audience. I’m always amazed by his ability to do that in what is his fifth language.”
An example occurred, Bowman says, when Calatrava met with the contractors for the museum addition and told them safety was his top priority. Says the director: “What a brilliant thing to say if you want to wed a construction team to your purpose.”
Calatrava grew up near the Mediterranean port city of Valencia in a town that was largely inhabited by Jewish converts to Catholicism, including his mother’s family. He got a strong taste of architecture when he was about 10, going with his father, who exported oranges, melons and other agricultural products, to a nearby mercantile exchange called La Lonja. The twisted stone columns of its soaring Gothic interior reminded him of a forest and taught him a lesson that still informs his work.
A non-religious building, he says, “can be as monumental, or even more monumental, than a sacred place.”
Then came a detour characteristic of the tumultuous 1960s. In 1968, planning to study at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Calatrava traveled with a fruit shipment to the Spanish-French border, then hitchhiked to Paris. But the Ecole was shut down amid the wild student protests of that year. So he returned to Valencia and enrolled in architecture school there.
Yet even before he graduated, Calatrava became intrigued by the construction of great buildings and began studying civil engineering in Zurich. There, he would receive his civil engineering doctorate in 1979, meet his wife, and open his practice. Most important, he would develop a design philosophy inspired by the natural (some would say divine) order that makes flowers unfold, birds fly and the human body move.
“God does not throw dice,” Calatrava says, paraphrasing Albert Einstein in a recent Catherine Adda film about the architect.
That spirit has animated a remarkable series of buildings, bridges and sculptures — some of which are static, but appear to be moving; others actually do move. Among the latter: A sphere-shaped planetarium in Valencia that sits in an arching concrete pod. With the flick of a switch, a cantilevered glass and concrete canopy drops down from the arch, like an eyelid closing over an eye.
Calatrava does not shy from comparing such buildings to medieval cathedrals. He points to Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of the cathedral at Rouen, which recorded the different appearances that the cathedral took on as the sun moved across its exterior. His buildings are a little like that, Calatrava says, but, ultimately, they are different because of the modern machinery that transforms the way they look.
“Today,” he says, “we are able to make the cathedral move by itself.”
It’s not just Calatrava’s emphasis on mechanics that distinguishes his buildings from Gehry’s more sculptural designs. Gehry conceals the bones of a building within his shimmering metal wrappers. Calatrava, reflecting his background as an engineer, reveals those bones, as a walk through his football-sized expansion in Milwaukee makes clear.
A visitor passing through the long art display spaces on the east and west sides of the exhibition hall, with their riblike, steel-reinforced concrete arches, feels like he has been swallowed by a Leviathan. Directly below these spaces, and the 12,000-square-foot main gallery between them, is an underground parking garage like no other: Pairs of canted concrete columns run down the center of the garage, forming a skeletonlike series of elements shaped like the letter “V.” It looks like you could display art objects in this sculpted space, whose welcoming qualities seem all the more remarkable when you realize Calatrava, a hard-core city dweller who gets around on public transportation, never learned to drive.
“We’ve joked about calling it the parking gallery,” says Bowman, the museum’s director.
In the end, however, Calatrava’s expansion is likely to be judged on what is above ground rather than below. And the focal point surely will be the reception hall, still taking shape, and its sunshade, which will consist of 72 finlike louvers made of lightweight, high-strength carbon fiber.
When the sunshade is in the “down” position, the louvers will fold like a bird’s sheltering wings over the hall, keeping out the sun’s glare. But when the museum wants to preen — voila! — the louvers will lift off the reception hall’s slanting walls, then keep moving upward, for roughly four minutes, until they are completely outstretched.
Museum officials say the sunshade will close automatically if wind gusts top 30 m.p.h. for at least three seconds.
While the rest of the expansion is to be open in May, the officials acknowledge, the complex curves and angles of the reception hall have contributed both to construction delays and rising costs. Originally, the museum was supposed to be finished in 2000 or early 2001. Now, Calatrava’s “Bird” won’t fly until at least September or October, when the reception hall is to open.
Distinctive architectural brands, it turns out, don’t come cheap. “We wanted a signature building, something that identifies us,” Bowman says. “We felt a responsibility as an art museum to build an important work of art. That sometimes takes a little longer and costs a little more.”
