While most “icon” buildings are demonstratively useless — often galleries and museums whose form is of far greater importance than their functions — what Calatrava specializes in is infrastructure, or rather, making things that should be entirely functional utterly useless. He is not a particularly original designer. His railway stations are visibly inspired by the faintly kitsch futurism of the high Cold War era, evoking especially the “organic” concrete structure of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal for JFK Airport. Calatrava’s railway stations in Zurich and Lisbon, or the incongruously immense (and frankly, breathtaking) Guillemins Station in the Belgian steel town of Liège, are intended to give the effect of an immense organism into whose concrete ribs you are plunged in order to buy your ticket and get your train. [...]
But that constant maintenance is only one of the problems with Calatrava’s work. For a trained engineer, he has notoriously little interest in economy of structure. As a rule, since the mid nineteenth century, the aim in bridge design has been to achieve the greatest structural feats with the scarcest of means — to do “more with less,” in Buckminster Fuller’s phrase. That line probably reached its peak in recent years with Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct, which spans a vast canyon with little more than thin spindles of concrete and steel. For Calatrava, though, organic metaphor trumps all, and the structural purpose of his bridges — in Dublin, Salford, Dallas, Venice and elsewhere — is subordinated to their rhetorical purpose, as sweeping statements of the transformation of industrial docks and canals into showpieces of real-estate speculation. They must billow, swoop, and spiral, because otherwise they wouldn’t be eye-catching as advertisements. The preference for shiny cladding leads to some literal pitfalls — his bridges in Venice and Bilbao both have tiles which, it’s been claimed, are too slippery to walk on. The resultant lack of interest in economy is now rebounding on the architect, although he could fairly plead this is what he was hired for. [...]
The Left should be very careful here, as this is an austerity argument — an argument against public space and the public good. An argument, essentially, that we cannot have nice things — that bridges, railway stations, and art galleries are somehow dubious means of spending “taxpayers’ money.” The twisted right-wing mutation of social democracy that dominated Europe during the boom seldom had the public interest at heart, and every concession to it had to be balanced by something profit-making. But for its conservative successors, the public interest is entirely nonexistent.
Public buildings and structures that are luxurious, dramatic, even excessive — if hopefully less whimsical and egotistical than those of Calatrava — should be ours as a right, not as a reservation for the wealthy.
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