Santiago Calatrava is a leading architect known for his stunning bridge designs that blend architectural elegance with engineering mastery. This book offers a tribute to his work, featuring his insights on artistic philosophies, detailed descriptions of 75 projects, sketches, watercolors, and high-quality images, showcasing his creative process.
Over the last 20 years, Santiago Calatrava has made literally thousands of drawings and paintings and more than a hundred sculptures. Many of his drawings portray the human body - often in motion - alone, or in groups, or in an architectural context. Others show preliminary ideas, subsequently transformed into sculptures and which go on to provide the inspiration for his bridges, railway stations, airports and museums. A drawing is always the starting point for an entire laboratory of ideas. This book contains a selection of over 200 drawings, water colours and depictions of sculptures, chosen by the architect and the author because they are particularly well-suited to showing how Calatrava s creative ideas ripen and develop, from the initial drawings, to the sculptures, finally attaining completion in the realised buildings. At the same time, it examines the interfaces between the fine arts, engineering and architecture.
These two volumes provide a comprehensive documentation of the creative processes which underlie Santiago Calatrava s diverse and prolific architectural ouput, featuring his personal thoughts, unique documents and analyses. The first volume presents Calatrava s doctoral thesis which combines the varying disciplines of engineering, mathematics and architecture. In the second volume, three of Calatrava s key sketch books are presented, capturing the essence of his more experimental, biomorphic, surreal, metaphorical, and analogical thinking. In this publication, the editors examine the hypothesis that both analytical and analogical tendencies are evident in Calatrava s creative work. The volumes provide a unique glimpse into the mind of this architect where opposites seem to form a rare synthesis and give rise to works of the highest quality.
Includes an essay by Lyall Sutherland and texts by Tischhauser, Anthony; Kobler, Tristan; and Bosma, Koos. Features numerous illustrations.
A personal reflection on the nature of the architectural imagination, shown through private sketchbooks, by one of the great architects of our day.