Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by Santiago Calatrava
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.
You need to know a lot to become master of your profession.
Not only did America invent the skyscraper, it invented the skyline.
The Freedom Tower has a cost overrun. A significant cost overrun.
Beautiful is difficult. I admire very much the courage of the people who have said, 'Let's do something different. Let's try to see if our environment will be more beautiful and our city will be more beautiful.'
A railway station is something that can generate a city.
My architecture is very much place-related.
I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I've always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.
The reality is that throughout my career I've tackled projects in Spain that I'm proud of.
As an architect, you do not have control of who will build the building and who will have the capability.
I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music.
The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.
A bridge is born of necessity, but it must establish its own identity. It should harmonize with its surroundings, and the design must transcend the purely local and transform the setting.
A first building is like a first novel, it is always autobiographical.
I understand and accept criticisms of my work, provided they are done with professional criteria and arguments.
What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.
Valencia is a pure Mediterranean city; it is a city like Naples or Palermo, like Rome a little bit. Walking in the old town has a little bit of the flavor of the old city of Rome.
I always admired the U.S. as the country of the space shuttle, of technological achievement.
When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.
A new building should deliver a feeling of hope.
I like the word monument, because the word monument is a Latin word.
Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.
My goal is always to create something exceptional that enhances cities and enriches the lives of the people who live and work in them.
I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.
Building a bridge, in my opinion, is a symbolic gesture, linked with the needs of people who cross over it, and with the idea of overcoming or surmounting obstacles. A modern bridge can also be a work of art. It helps to shape our daily lives and becomes a vital experience for all the people who use it.
What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.
Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.
If I was not born in this lifetime in New York, certainly in a previous life, I was a New Yorker.
I just want to build the best buildings. It's not about me, it's about the buildings, creating a space where society can gather and marvel in beauty and nature.
You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.
Being an architect is like playing piano, you learn to play to admire how well the other guys play piano.
Women are the salt of our lives. They give it flavour.
For people of the younger generation, the 21st century has started for them with a positive sign that Valencia is and will continue to be a very modern city.
Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.
I did not want to do stereotypical buildings.
Like Grand Central Station, which is a marvelous building, the design and engineering of the Oculus will endure for many generations to come.
When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.
Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.
Some have tried to use my work for politics, using inaccurate or out-of-context information that, repeated enough, becomes truth to some even though it is not.
I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.
In my opinion, as an engineer, a bridge is the most difficult thing you can do. You are not working in the direction of gravity but against it - so the problem opposes the solution.
Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.
You have to live with the necessities of other people.
I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience.
Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.
The bones of my architecture are very much related to the structure, to the physical fact of how a building can stand up; it's also related to geometry and a certain understanding of the architecture in which there is a balance between expression and function.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is for the community of San Francisco. And the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the most magnificent bridges ever built, is also a monument to the community, you see.
I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.
Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines.
I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved.
The first significant work I did was a railway station in Zurich called Stadelhofen.
There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.
My personality is more the personality of a painter.
My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.
For the first project I did in North America, I was asked as an artist, not as an architect, to collaborate on a big development in the heart of Toronto. I was working with other artists and was in charge of giving form to a street, and I proposed a galleria.
Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.
The two most important functional aspects to be fulfilled in a transportation facility are ease of wayfinding and easy orientation.
I always considered the role of teaching to be very noble and relevant.
The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.
Many of the architects I admire have given the best of themselves as they mature. I'm hoping to do the same.
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