It was a little like dragging Mozart to a concert where a hack plays some godawful tune on a kazoo.
Or inviting Michelangelo to your neighborhood art fair.
Here was the world’s most renowned bridge designer, Santiago Calatrava, walking across one of the ugliest spans in Chicago — the rusting, repulsive eyesore of a bridge that crosses Lake Shore Drive and the railroad tracks at 35th Street.
The 50-year-old Spanish-born architect and engineer wore a crisp white shirt and dark blue pinstripe pants — the wrong clothes for urban trekking, but the right threads for his meeting with the mayor later in the day.
As Calatrava strode over the decades-old hunk of steel and concrete, the dark eyes under his thick, Groucho Marx eyebrows instantly picked up everything wrong:
Stairs inaccessible to the disabled. Puddles collected on the bridge deck after a rain. Ugly, outdated lights shaped like a cobra’s head. Overhead steel braces so low that a bicyclist who failed to duck could conk his head on them.
The bridge actually is two cobbled-together spans — one a rickety cage of steel, the other a concrete hulk with Frank Lloyd Wright wannabe stone trim.
It should be a single, united form.
Then, without prompting, Calatrava politely asked for my yellow legal pad and blue pen and started sketching his vision of the type of spans that might beckon people to the long-underused south lakefront and create a landmark presence that would form a gateway to downtown Chicago.
His hand drew arches and pylons and cables — all the prosaic structural forms that he typically endows with poetry.
“There is a lot of potential there,” the Zurich-based Calatrava said in his slightly accented English, one of seven languages he speaks. “It’s a wonderful place for a bridge.”
And it’s the perfect place for Chicago to make its very own Spanish acquisition.
Who needs a sculpture garden like the one planners have envisioned for the south lakefront when Chicago could have a chain of Calatrava bridges that would themselves be sculptures?
Why not endow the south lakefront’s Burnham Park, still the poor stepsister of Lincoln Park to the north, with the finest collection of waterfront bridges in America?
This logic apparently is not lost on Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told Calatrava to consider doing bridges on both the south and north lakefronts, according to Lee Bey, Daley’s deputy chief of staff for planning and design.
“The mayor clearly was expressing his enthusiasm for Calatrava to do work in the city,” Bey said.
But no deals have been signed. No money has been committed. Indeed, one Calatrava-designed project for Chicago — a pair of curving bridges across Lake Shore Drive that would have linked Buckingham Fountain to the lakefront — already has been shelved.
The official line is that the plan is on hold because the city is in a budget crunch. Yet the $19 million project, which threatened to block drivers’ views of the Field Museum, could have brought further controversy to an administration already under fire for sticking a massive seating bowl between Soldier Field’s classical colonnades.
Whatever the outcome, Calatrava seems destined to do something here.
The architect, who does buildings as well as bridges, is such a talent that he can even make parking garages look good.
One of the unexpected treats of his year-old addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum is its light-filled underground garage.
With its splaying concrete columns and curving concrete walls, the garage is so fetching that Porsche this year shot an ad there for the 2003 model of the 911 Carrera — quite an achievement considering that Calatrava doesn’t even have a driver’s license.
Parking lot magic
Speaking about his recent works to a packed auditorium at the Art Institute, he cracked up with the crowd by remarking that Hollywood seems to favor parking garages for violent movie scenes.
Why, he wondered, can’t a parking garage be welcoming instead of an assault on the senses?
“A parking lot is a sense of arrival,” he said the next day, after he had walked over the 35th Street bridge to the lakefront. “A bridge is the same thing. A gateway.”
Reared in the Mediterranean port city of Valencia, Calatrava (pronounced Cal-ah-TRA-vah) rocketed to fame in the early 1990s with a series of dramatically sculptural bridges — one for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, another for the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville.
These days, so many inferior talents are knocking off so many copies of his work that wags have termed the trend “Cala-trivialization.”
Along Milwaukee’s lakefront, Calatrava’s nautically themed museum addition is linked to the downtown by a narrow, cable-supported footbridge that recalls a ship’s gangplank.
The project, Calatrava said at the Art Institute, taught him how to design alongside an oceanlike expanse of water — precisely the challenge he would face on Chicago’s lakefront, but hardly the only one.
His visit to the south lakefront began in the neighborhood where a mob last summer beat to death two men after their van plowed into a front stoop. Three women were injured, one of whom later died.
Calatrava took note of the new, well-maintained houses in the area, as well as the handsome old graystones and the many vacant lots, overgrown with weeds.
He’s used to being a design doctor who helps heal urban wounds.
“When you work in areas that are not necessarily beautiful and give them more beauty, they are more grateful,” he said.
Walking across the 35th Street bridge, looking at the city skyline and noting the cars on Lake Shore Drive below, he remarked that a new bridge could form a symbolic gateway to downtown Chicago.
Moving eastward, he stopped and admired the grassy expanse of Burnham Park.
A new span, he said, could be “a balcony to the park,” a belevedere overlooking the park and the lake.
Then he began sketching:
– A double arched bridge — one arch each for the spans over Lake Shore Drive and the railroad tracks.
– A single arched bridge — a grand, continuous curve expressing the big leap over the barriers to the lakefront.
– A cable-supported bridge with a pylon in the center — a variation on the theme of bridging the railroad and the highway.
– An asymmetrical bridge (much like his 1992 Seville bridge) with a giant inclined pylon — small on the city side to match the scale of nearby houses, big on the lake side to create a landmark amid the vast open spaces of the shoreline.
– Another bridge where the ramp on the lake side would contain a restaurant or some other public use, one way to overcome the lack of amenities that still plagues Burnham Park.
Matching contours
I told Calatrava that Burnham Park needs several bridges, not just a single one, to make it easier for people who live in the North Kenwood and Oakland neighborhoods to get to the lake.
He replied that it would be easy to take a certain kind of bridge and do different versions of it to match the changing contours of Lake Shore and the changing character of the neighborhoods to its west.
Then to the bottom line: How much more might one of his bridges cost than a standard span?
About 50 percent more, he said.
Perhaps.
Calatrava is so charming that his budgets have a way of magically mushrooming. In Milwaukee, he was so adept on the fundraising circuit that the budget for the museum addition shot from $35 million to $100 million, allowing the project to more than double in size.
But Calatrava’s bridges do so much more than simply get cars and pedestrians from point A to point B.
They are urban symbols as well as conduits, sculptural objects as well as connective tissue, spans that simultaneously define communities and help to form them.
Who knows?
Maybe a Calatrava bridge here would even push up real estate values, as the architect himself suggested with a self-deprecating story about the opening of one of his bridges in the southeastern Spanish city of Murcea four years ago.
Hearing that the townspeople actually applauded his bridge during the dedication ceremony, Calatrava called the city’s project manager to share the news.
“Don’t believe they applauded the bridge,” the project manager kidded him. “They applauded the bridge because their apartments are now 1 million pesetas more expensive.”
