When was santiago calatrava born

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Calatrava tried to fill the gap between architecture and structural engineering and made these two fields go hand in hand in his projects. He poured in his personal style statement in modern engineering techniques and left long lasting impression of his work with extensive study on human body, nature and its various aspects. Calatrava believes that practice of architecture gathers all fields of arts and pool them together in one creation.

This is the reason, along with his architectural projects, he did not lose grip on his skills of painting and sculpting. He even boosted his work through exhibitions held at different venues. Santiago Calatrava still enjoys designing bridges while staying in Zurich with his family and overseeing offices in New York City, Doha and Zurich. Louis and other abstract structures that communicated a peaceful sense of order and of integration with their surroundings.

In a way, Calatrava's work combines the best of these diverse predecessors. Born in Valencia, Spain, on July 28, , Calatrava grew up in an established family involved in the primary industry of that coastal metropolis: agricultural exports.

The family's hillside home was imposing, with large rooms that Calatrava later named as an inspiration for his attraction to major projects and big spaces. Though Calatrava's father was oriented toward commercial activities at work, he loved art and took his son to see Spain's greatest museum, the Prado in Madrid. Calatrava started to show an interest in sculpture and drawing, and by the time he was eight he had enrolled in art classes in Valencia.

Calatrava's family had suffered during the political upheavals of the s in Spain, and they saw an international future as their son's best chance. When he was 13, they took advantage of a liberalization of travel restrictions imposed by dictator Francisco Franco in order to send him to Paris under a student exchange program.

He later took classes in Switzerland and learned German on his way to eventual fluency in seven languages. At this point Calatrava still hoped to become an artist. He made plans to attend art school in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts School of Fine Arts , but he arrived in mid, with the student protests of that year at their height, and found that his classes had been cancelled.

He challenged himself with extra work: he and a group of friends wrote two books on the architecture of Valencia and the island of Ibiza while he was enrolled. Receiving dual Ph. In Zurich, Calatrava met and married his wife, Robertina, a law student and later lawyer who has played an important role in managing his far-flung business enterprises.

A glimpse of his growing architectural imagination appeared when he and some other graduate students designed and built a swimming pool in the rotunda of the school's main building—transparent, donut-shaped, and suspended above the floor, it allowed passersby to watch swimmers from below. Calatrava opened his own architecture firm in Zurich after finishing his degree in It did not take him long to graduate from small projects to major civic commissions; after he won a contest, his design for Zurich's new train station was built in the early s.

The station was situated on a small strip of land that left no room for the spacious interior of a traditional train station.

Calatrava responded with a unique design: a series of individual concrete corridors that resembled the ribcage of an animal and in fact was inspired by a dog skeleton a veterinary student in Zurich had given him and which he later mounted on the wall of his office, marveling to interviewers about its mechanical perfection. Accept Read More. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.

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