-- Competition winner: Steven HollArchitects:Herning Center of the Arts, Herning, Denmark -- Rafael Viñoly: Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina   Sustainable Gulf Reconstruction: ...Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), LEED and USGBC are all examples of voluntary approaches that aren’t utopian, but practical and ready to go right now. By Tensie Whelan, Rainforest Alliance- Environmental News Network Planners put wise to wide, open spaces: What are...unruly citizens doing? ...they are threatening to disrupt the Victorian Government's Melbourne 2030 development plan...a lot of the citizens who are supposed to put up with higher density development in their suburbs don't care for it at all.- The Age (Australia) Right of Reply: Cork: a city I've always liked a lot . . . but poor urban design is having a negative impact on its fabric, says Frank McDonald- The Irish Times My Home:Our Place - a six-month programme that will delve into the future of housing and neighbourhoods in the North East of England- Northern Architecture (U.K.) Living Large: ...houses are growing from sea to shining sea, like some alien weed.- CBS 60 Minutes Sand and freedom: Dubai is trying to build itself a future as a great global city. In the process, it has become the largest architectural experiment on earth. -- Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Atkins; Foster; Grimshaw; Hopkins- Guardian (UK) Heaven, as built by architects: Where else would a building as mundane as a signal box be the work of Herzog & de Meuron...This is Switzerland, where architecture, and building, are taken seriously. By Edwin Heathcote- Financial Times (UK) Science Center Celebrates an Industrial Cityscape: The new Phaeno Science Center in Germany, designed by Zaha Hadid, is the kind of building that utterly transforms our vision of the future. By Nicolai Ouroussoff [images]- New York Times Zaha meets the Beetles: Zaha Hadid's first signature building - in Volkswagen's hometown - is genuinely revolutionary...Phaeno Science Centre...an astonishing, exhilarating concrete and steel vortex of a building... By Deyan Sudjic- Observer (UK) Half-baked dome: Mayor's insistence on rotunda detracts from new San Jose City Hall...one of the world's best architects has laid a gigantic egg in the middle of what is otherwise an impressive civic home. By John King -- Richard Meier & Partners; Steinberg Architects [images]- San Francisco Chronicle Revamp on the cards for Garden of Remembrance...at Parnell Square in Dublin's north inner city into a more people-friendly park...also to be made more accessible [to] Hugh Lane Gallery, which is undergoing a €12 million extension. -- Howley Harrington Architects; Gilroy McMahon Architects (gallery)- The Irish Times Giles Worsley on why the BBC must keep faith with its bold architectural plans: It seemed a marriage made in heaven...the country's leading cultural force...declared an undying alliance with the cream of British architecture...Then it started to go sour. -- MacCormac Jamieson Prichard; David Chipperfield; Foreign Office Architects; Keppie Architects; Sheppard Robson; Allies and Morrison- Telegraph (UK) Faces of Africa create a tapestry of all humanity. A new museum traces threads of the diaspora. -- Freelon Group; Sussman/Prejza & Co. [images]- San Francisco Chronicle Life in the old barn yet: Simon Conder's modernism meets rural vernacular. By Hugh Pearman [images]- HughPearman.com (UK) Scandal over bogus quake data spreads to Gunma -- Hidetsugu Aneha- Japan Times Call for papers: 12th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference (Hong Kong, April 6-8, 2006); deadline: November 30, 2005- University of Hong Kong How big names put their stamp on the skyline: Celebrity architects: visionaries or vassals? "The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World" by Deyan Sudjic; "The Iconic Building" by Charles Jencks. By John King- San Francisco Chronicle Pop Art: Bubble Wrap & Other Marvels: ...a neat new book from Paola Antonelli..."Humble Masterpieces"...a welcome departure from highbrow design. By Linda Hales- Washington Post

شعری از شیشه و فولاد (معماری هایتچ)

SANTIAGO CALATRAVA: "A tradition is always in evolution," says Calatrava, 53, who counts the architects Antonio Gaud’ and Eero Saarinen as major influences. "You can look back, but one of the bases on which I build is to push ahead"

The Poet of Glass and Steel

Structures That Take Flight

By RICHARD LACAYO

Posted Monday, March 15, 2004
Santiago Calatrava can't drive. Whereas this would be surprising for almost anybody over the age of, say, 16, it's a much bigger surprise when you consider that the Spanish-born Calatrava has revolutionized the design of the places we move through and along. In the scores of bridges, airports and train stations the architect has designed throughout Europe and more recently in the U.S., Calatrava has brought to the world of travel an incomparable high-tech lyricism. His structures speak plainly of engineering, of struts and cables, white concrete pylons and keen-edged glass louvers. But at the same time they suggest unmistakably the pliant forms of nature„#151;an eye, a torso, a bird in flight„#151;that inspire him.

As a boy Calatrava wanted to be a sculptor, but an early encounter with the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe sent him down the path of architecture (art is still his avocation—his Manhattan town house and his villa outside Zurich are filled with his abstract steel sculpture). Shortly after finishing his architecture studies he won a design competition for a train station in Zurich, and because he had taken the unusual step of getting a second degree in engineering, he soon found himself being sought out to design bridges throughout Europe, a job that ordinarily falls to engineers and rarely to architects. His bridges are unusual for having asymmetrical flourishes, canted curves that slant against the water or—as in his first American span, a $23.5 million glass-and-steel footbridge in Redding, Calif., that opens next month—a long, slender tail fin at one end that operates as a sundial. "Asymmetry allows you to explore," he says. "You can emphasize things having to do with the position of the city against the water or the curvature of the stream."

Calatrava has brought this vocabulary, both rational and anatomical, to other kinds of public building as well, including the tidal wave of his new opera house in Tenerife, Spain, and his addition to Wisconsin's Milwaukee Museum of Art, a structure that culminates in the rising arc of a sunscreen that opens and closes like the wings of a bird. But recently he unveiled another train station that is sure to become one of his best-remembered structures, not only for its airborne exuberance but also for the location where it brings that feeling to bear— at ground zero in New York City. Calatrava was chosen last year to design the $2 billion new terminal there for the PATH commuter line that connects Manhattan with New Jersey. The design he unveiled in January is an angular palisade of white ribs with an upward thrust that he says was inspired by the idea of a child releasing a bird into the air. If ever there was a place that needed a building that lifted the spirit, it's that place. Now it may get one.