1000 photos

Tomorrow marks the 3rd birthday of my Flickr photostream, and as it happens, I am also celebrating my 1000th picture there. Oh, and I even got used to the new design. Looks kind of cool as long as you don't scratch the shiny surface and it saves me money on the pro membership ...

The most-viewed photos are still the same ones as last year, so instead I'm posting a brand-new one here, photo number 1000:

This is of course Calatrava's Liege Guillemins station.

introduction to Calatrava

slightly belated review of:

Calatrava
by Philip Jodidio
Taschen 2007

I’ve been intrigued by Santiago Calatrava’s architecture since seeing the station at Liege Guillemins just before it was completed. At that point, not knowing much and wanting to find out more, I found this little Taschen book the perfect introduction. There are short (2-6 pages) chapters on each building and a 15-page introduction.

As a scientist at the interface between life sciences and physical sciences, I am of course particularly attracted to Calatrava’s characteristic way of taking inspiration from soft, living, moving creatures and using it for his structures, giving them a life of their own. Biology shines through everywhere in his work, and the book is good in pointing this out, using some of the architect’s sketches as well. The photos are brilliant, too, though it may well be physically impossible to make a boring photo of anything designed by Calatrava - even my photos succeed, see below.

Most importantly, the book contains a world map with the locations of his buildings at the end, very handy for planning travels to see as many of his works as possible (so far I’ve seen his completed works at Liege, Barcelona, Sevilla, and Lyon).

PS here's one of my photos of the station at the airport Lyon-St.Exupery:

Santiago Calatrava at Lyon

While I was at Lyon, I also visited one of the major works of my favourite architect, Santiago Calatrava, namely the railway station serving Saint-Exupery airport. From the outside it looks like it could fly:



while from the inside the gravity defying height and lightness of the structure makes me think of a modern variation on the theme of gothic cathedrals. In both cases, the windows are extremely important:



After duly admiring the structure itself inside out and from all sides, I had a lot of fun walking around and checking which details were and which weren't designed by Calatrava - the granite benches, the departures board, the dustbins, and the bollards clearly were part of his grand design. Disappointingly, the fittings in the gents were off-the-shelf stuff (maybe he doesn't want his work to be peed on?).



When you drive a train to the station, it looks like this:



Ok, I'll admit I cheated here, this is in fact the tram towards the city centre moving away from the station ...

For further photos of my visit, check my flickr photostream. In the architecture set you'll also find two other buildings by Calatrava.

Tweet

dancing about architecture

Whoever said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" clearly didn't take the work of Santiago Calatrava into account. I hear the New York City Ballet is currently running a season of new productions developed in collaboration with the architect. See the fascinating video Calatrava at New York City Ballet on YouTube (can't embed it for some reason).

Which reminds me, I do need to adjust my travel plans to be able to see a few more of his buildings in situ. Valencia, Barcelona, Lyon, Zurich, Venice, Malmo, that would make a nice tour around Europe.



(somebody didn't want me to hotlink to their photo, so I had to recycle one of my own!)

PS: conflict of interest declaration: I often write about music, but rarely dance about architecture, so I always felt the statement cited above couldn't be right ...

liege guillemins in passing

Last stop of my April travels -- admiring Liege Guillemins station by Santiago Calatrava (see previous raving here) from within the train, on our way back to Brussels. It's also interesting to notice how the structure stimulates conversation among passengers who didn't know about it, look out of the window, and notice there's something rather special going on outside.

So here's the view from the windows of an ICE train (running 100 mins late, and being overcrowded due to the ash crisis):

architect honoured but not commissioned

Architect Santiago Calatrava was among those honoured by the University of Oxford this summer (along with local author Philip Pullman), but I reckon the University's enthusiasm for his work wouldn't extend to commissioning a building from him ?! There would be plenty of space at the Radcliffe Observatory site.

If you look at the world map of Calatrava's works, there is a suspicious white area just north of the English Channel. One might blame it on the heir to the throne who devours modern architects for breakfast, but I also have a nagging suspicion that those people handling big building budgets around here just don't have the courage to ask somebody like him, who would build something really special. Now I dream of a new Oxford spire ...

Calatrava's new wave

I hear that the new railway station at Liege-Guillemins, which I saw under construction this April, see here, has been officially opened yesterday.

Here's the Guardian's Jonathan Glancey getting all lyrical about it. Quote from his concluding paragraph:

Britain aside, this is the age of the high-speed train in Europe – and Calatrava has provided one of the era's finest monuments, a station that is a destination in itself. It is worth taking the trip from St Pancras to Liège–Guillemins just to experience this building, which makes our own mess of a railway seem all the more maddening.

I agree with all of that -- will have to go back and see how it looks finished. Even though we may soon get direct high-speed trains from London to Cologne, it will still be worth stopping over to admire Santiago Calatrava's new wave. Will also have to check out his other buildings. I was about to say I haven't seen any of them, but looking them up on wikipedia I realised that I had seen the bridge he built at Sevilla for the 1992 world exposition.

PS: another Calatrava building I have seen in statu nascendi (without knowing) is the new footbridge linking Venice's railway station to the bus station, Ponte della Costituzione


here are some of my photos from April:

liege

On my recent trip to Germany, I stopped over in Liege, which isn't all that pretty, but gets a lot better after dark:



and it has a spectacular new railway station by Santiago Calatrava under construction:



which looks even more stunning from the inside, with whe white scaffold viewed against a blue sky. I've uploaded a few photos of that to VIEW and to my MySpace photo album.