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THE SCULPTOR
Santiago Calatrava redefines the apartment tower.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2005-10-31
Eero Saarinen’s swooping concrete T.W.A. terminal, at Kennedy Airport, has often been compared to a bird with outstretched wings. When Saarinen, who died in 1961, was asked if that was what he meant his building to look like, he responded that people could say whatever they wanted, but he had far more serious things on his mind than birds. The Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who has been greatly influenced by Saarinen’s forms, takes the opposite tack—he embraces analogies between his buildings and living creatures. If Calatrava had designed the T.W.A. terminal, he would have named it the Soaring Eagle.
And so Calatrava’s first high-rise apartment tower, in Malmö, Sweden, has been christened the Turning Torso. The title is a reference to a white marble sculpture, by Calatrava, of a human form in motion; in 1999, the five-foot-high work so captivated the building’s developer that he hired Calatrava to stretch the piece into a skyscraper—even though the architect had not yet designed one. The fifty-four-story structure, which has views of Copenhagen from across the Øresund Strait, opens in November. There are a hundred and forty-seven apartments—each of which has slanting windows, curving walls, and oddly shaped rooms—and all of them have been rented.
Calatrava is the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And, just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties, Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers. In 2003, he designed a striking apartment complex for lower Manhattan consisting of twelve four-story cubes stacked in a tall, open frame. And this spring a Chicago developer, Christopher T. Carley, announced that Calatrava will design a corkscrew-shaped, hundred-and-fifteen-story tower, along Lake Michigan, which will contain condominiums and a hotel; the building, when completed, will be the tallest in the United States.
At the press conference for the Chicago building, Calatrava, who speaks English with a heavy accent, began with an awkward description of the design. He called the shape of his building “helicoidal,†which is as arcane a term for “spiral†as there is. He then turned to his secret weapon: an easel-size pad. He drew a human body, torqued like a tennis player in mid-swing. He then sketched a tree trunk. Finally, he drew a lovely spiral, and explained that what he had in mind was a tall tower that rose organically, in a way that echoed natural forms.
Calatrava’s slick salesmanship helps to explain his success with real-estate developers, especially considering how little commercial work he has built. For years, he was best known for a series of magnificent bridges, including one in Seville, Spain, that resembles a giant harp. A Calatrava form tends to appear both delicate and powerful, like a futuristic version of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost invariably white, which emphasizes its lightness and modernity. His first American project, an expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum, completed in 2001, has a lacy, curving façade—a spectacular homage to Saarinen.
The museum addition, for all its allure, is not particularly practical: it’s basically a soaring entry hall, with little exhibit space. Still, when Christopher Carley went to see it shortly after it opened, he was smitten. “I said, ‘My God, even the parking garage is beautiful,’ †Carley told me. “I stumbled out in total awe. I thought, Chicago ought to have this, I have to get Calatrava down here.†Carley attended a lecture that Calatrava gave at the Art Institute of Chicago, and introduced himself afterward. Calatrava took out his pad, sketched a dove, and handed it to Carley as a gift. A few months later, Carley flew to Zurich, where Calatrava has his headquarters, to plead with the architect to design an apartment building for him. Calatrava rejected the sites that Carley proposed until the developer came up with some prominent waterfront land, opposite Navy Pier. Architects have long fantasized about being approached with such deference by real-estate developers; usually, they are treated like hired hands and ordered to cut the frills. Calatrava is one of the few architects living the dream.
Calatrava has had similar good luck in Sweden. The Turning Torso’s developer, H.S.B., generally builds co-ops aimed at middle-class tenants. But Johnny Örbäck, the company’s former managing director, let Calatrava create the kind of opulent tower that, until now, had been unheard-of in Sweden, a country generally suspicious of concierges and wine cellars. And Calatrava was offered a prominent open site along Malmö’s developing waterfront, assuring that his building will stand out. As you drive from Denmark on the Øresund Bridge, one building fully pierces the horizon: the Turning Torso.
Calatrava designs are ordered up as icons, and the architect proudly delivers. The Malmö tower has no relationship with the buildings around it. Whereas Gehry takes care to play his whorled-metal shapes off the older architecture nearby, Calatrava attempts to transcend his surroundings. His designs are abstractions, and strangely otherworldly. (As a Calatrava retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals, his building models are virtually indistinguishable from his sculptures.) A Calatrava building has none of the hard edges of many modern structures, but it isn’t lush, either. You feel as if you were looking at a mystical vision—something that might evaporate in the mist. Indeed, his buildings often look best from afar, when they appear most apparitional. Calatrava buildings don’t sit on the ground; they dance above it.
Dancing is not what skyscrapers are expected to do, and Calatrava’s Turning Torso takes some getting used to. Unlike most skyscrapers, which are designed to look immobile no matter how much they may sway in the wind, this tower looks strangely kinetic—as if it were poised to move horizontally. Usually, the thrust of skyscrapers is vertical: capped with fancy tops, they resemble castles or rocket ships. Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems: how to meet the ground, and how to meet the sky—the bottom and the top, in other words. Calatrava is interested solely in the middle. For him, the skyscraper isn’t a classical column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital. It’s all shaft—which he has made an object of propulsion and energy.
Calatrava is an engineer as well as an architect and a sculptor, and his work is undergirded by a strong structural logic, separating it from, say, the work of Daniel Libeskind, whose ill-fated initial concept for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero had an off-center spire intended to echo the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. Libeskind’s idea was pure imagery, a picture that the architect expected engineers to translate into reality. Calatrava’s Malmö design begins with a structural motif—the human spine—and builds from there.
The Turning Torso literally has a spine, since Calatrava has designed the building with an external steel frame running up one side of it. Although from a distance the sleek white tower looks simple, its shape is anything but straightforward. Calatrava likes to describe the tower as a stack of nine white aluminum-clad “cubes,†each of which is five floors high; the cubes are separated by recessed intermediate floors, so that the boxes appear to float atop each other. In truth, Calatrava’s cubes are imperfect: in order to make the form appear to spiral upward, the floor plan on each level looks something like a square with a small triangle affixed to one corner. And the entire east side of the tower consists of a triangular glass projection that is supported by the external steel spine.
Calatrava’s dancer, then, is more like a marionette—controlled by visible means of support. But this doesn’t detract from the design: the steel bracing is one of the handsomest things about this building. The frame curves right up the full height of the tower, highlighting the fluid, flowing form in a way that Calatrava’s pseudo-cubes don’t fully manage to do. This exoskeleton also connects the Turning Torso to a long tradition of skyscrapers whose form illuminates their structure. Louis Kahn once referred to the Seagram Building as a beautiful lady with hidden corsets, because its bracing was tucked behind Mies van der Rohe’s exquisite façade; Calatrava’s lady has confidently removed her dress. For all its surface delicacy, the Malmö tower is closer kin to a building like the hulking John Hancock Center, in Chicago, whose hundred stories are wrapped in huge X-braces.
Inside, the Malmö apartments are generally what you would expect—sunny living spaces with sleek, refined European kitchens. The rooms are small, the fittings are handsome, and the views are wonderful. What makes the apartments special—but also more difficult, depending on your standpoint—is that there are almost no rectangular rooms. Living rooms are shaped like pie wedges, or have the zigzag outline of a W. Some wall-height windows are raked nearly at the angle of a car windshield. Unlike in most apartments, a person inside the Turning Torso is always aware of the building’s exterior.
The Malmö tower is somewhat cluttered conceptually: the audacious stacked-box idea competes with the even more powerful notion of a twisting skyscraper. In Calatrava’s design for lower Manhattan, the concept of stacked cubes is expressed more cleanly and successfully. A vertical street of ten private houses, the four-story boxes are delicately offset from one another, so that each town house will have a garden and a terrace on the roof of the unit below. (Two cubes at the bottom will contain commercial venues.) The result is not at all anthropomorphic: it is pure geometry.
Whether ten people will want to pay between thirty and forty-five million dollars to live in a large box suspended in the sky line of lower Manhattan, however, is an open question. It’s not certain that the design will be built—although the developer, Frank J. Sciame, says that he expects to begin construction next spring, his financing is not yet complete. What is clear is that Calatrava—along with Richard Meier, whose glass towers in the far West Village went up in 2002—has helped create a more ambitious climate for apartment design in New York. Sleek glass condominium towers, once a rarity in white brick Manhattan, are going up even in Hell’s Kitchen.
Calatrava has had a similar inspirational effect in Chicago. Although the glass tower he has produced for Christopher Carley looks nothing like the New York project—Calatrava has essentially proposed the world’s largest and most beautiful drill bit—it’s a similar attempt by a developer to elevate a project above the real-estate fray. (Far above: the planned height is two thousand feet.) The building would add an elegant and memorable shape to Chicago’s sky line, but, as in Malmö, Calatrava has shown little interest in connecting to street life. The tower’s base is bulky and unwelcoming.
If the tower is built—and Carley doesn’t yet have all his financing, either—its status as the country’s tallest skyscraper will mark the first time that an apartment building has held this title. It would become a symbol of the evolution of the American city from being a center of commerce to a center of culture and entertainment. Nobody is clamoring to work in high-rises anymore, but plenty of people are willing to live in them, and the fact that the biggest and most interesting towers are being built to contain apartments is a significant shift. It means, among other things, that we will finally see very tall buildings that are slender rather than chunky. (Calatrava’s design will look like a needle in comparison to the Sears Tower.) Thin towers have more light inside, and, collectively, they would create a sky line less dominated by hulking masses—perhaps inspiring a renewed willingness to view the skyscraper in romantic terms. Calatrava is both a romantic and a rationalist, and his gift lies in his ability to find an equilibrium between these two poles.
The Chicago tower’s official name is a pedestrianone: the Fordham Spire. But it may well acquire a more glamorous title. Carley originally proposed naming the building for his famous architect. The offer was declined, Carley said. But, he went on, Tina Calatrava, the architect’s wife, said that it didn’t matter: “Everyone is going to call it the Calatrava anyway.â€
Santiago Calatrava redefines the apartment tower.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2005-10-31
Eero Saarinen’s swooping concrete T.W.A. terminal, at Kennedy Airport, has often been compared to a bird with outstretched wings. When Saarinen, who died in 1961, was asked if that was what he meant his building to look like, he responded that people could say whatever they wanted, but he had far more serious things on his mind than birds. The Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who has been greatly influenced by Saarinen’s forms, takes the opposite tack—he embraces analogies between his buildings and living creatures. If Calatrava had designed the T.W.A. terminal, he would have named it the Soaring Eagle.
And so Calatrava’s first high-rise apartment tower, in Malmö, Sweden, has been christened the Turning Torso. The title is a reference to a white marble sculpture, by Calatrava, of a human form in motion; in 1999, the five-foot-high work so captivated the building’s developer that he hired Calatrava to stretch the piece into a skyscraper—even though the architect had not yet designed one. The fifty-four-story structure, which has views of Copenhagen from across the Øresund Strait, opens in November. There are a hundred and forty-seven apartments—each of which has slanting windows, curving walls, and oddly shaped rooms—and all of them have been rented.
Calatrava is the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And, just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties, Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers. In 2003, he designed a striking apartment complex for lower Manhattan consisting of twelve four-story cubes stacked in a tall, open frame. And this spring a Chicago developer, Christopher T. Carley, announced that Calatrava will design a corkscrew-shaped, hundred-and-fifteen-story tower, along Lake Michigan, which will contain condominiums and a hotel; the building, when completed, will be the tallest in the United States.
At the press conference for the Chicago building, Calatrava, who speaks English with a heavy accent, began with an awkward description of the design. He called the shape of his building “helicoidal,†which is as arcane a term for “spiral†as there is. He then turned to his secret weapon: an easel-size pad. He drew a human body, torqued like a tennis player in mid-swing. He then sketched a tree trunk. Finally, he drew a lovely spiral, and explained that what he had in mind was a tall tower that rose organically, in a way that echoed natural forms.
Calatrava’s slick salesmanship helps to explain his success with real-estate developers, especially considering how little commercial work he has built. For years, he was best known for a series of magnificent bridges, including one in Seville, Spain, that resembles a giant harp. A Calatrava form tends to appear both delicate and powerful, like a futuristic version of a Gothic cathedral. It is almost invariably white, which emphasizes its lightness and modernity. His first American project, an expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum, completed in 2001, has a lacy, curving façade—a spectacular homage to Saarinen.
The museum addition, for all its allure, is not particularly practical: it’s basically a soaring entry hall, with little exhibit space. Still, when Christopher Carley went to see it shortly after it opened, he was smitten. “I said, ‘My God, even the parking garage is beautiful,’ †Carley told me. “I stumbled out in total awe. I thought, Chicago ought to have this, I have to get Calatrava down here.†Carley attended a lecture that Calatrava gave at the Art Institute of Chicago, and introduced himself afterward. Calatrava took out his pad, sketched a dove, and handed it to Carley as a gift. A few months later, Carley flew to Zurich, where Calatrava has his headquarters, to plead with the architect to design an apartment building for him. Calatrava rejected the sites that Carley proposed until the developer came up with some prominent waterfront land, opposite Navy Pier. Architects have long fantasized about being approached with such deference by real-estate developers; usually, they are treated like hired hands and ordered to cut the frills. Calatrava is one of the few architects living the dream.
Calatrava has had similar good luck in Sweden. The Turning Torso’s developer, H.S.B., generally builds co-ops aimed at middle-class tenants. But Johnny Örbäck, the company’s former managing director, let Calatrava create the kind of opulent tower that, until now, had been unheard-of in Sweden, a country generally suspicious of concierges and wine cellars. And Calatrava was offered a prominent open site along Malmö’s developing waterfront, assuring that his building will stand out. As you drive from Denmark on the Øresund Bridge, one building fully pierces the horizon: the Turning Torso.
Calatrava designs are ordered up as icons, and the architect proudly delivers. The Malmö tower has no relationship with the buildings around it. Whereas Gehry takes care to play his whorled-metal shapes off the older architecture nearby, Calatrava attempts to transcend his surroundings. His designs are abstractions, and strangely otherworldly. (As a Calatrava retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals, his building models are virtually indistinguishable from his sculptures.) A Calatrava building has none of the hard edges of many modern structures, but it isn’t lush, either. You feel as if you were looking at a mystical vision—something that might evaporate in the mist. Indeed, his buildings often look best from afar, when they appear most apparitional. Calatrava buildings don’t sit on the ground; they dance above it.
Dancing is not what skyscrapers are expected to do, and Calatrava’s Turning Torso takes some getting used to. Unlike most skyscrapers, which are designed to look immobile no matter how much they may sway in the wind, this tower looks strangely kinetic—as if it were poised to move horizontally. Usually, the thrust of skyscrapers is vertical: capped with fancy tops, they resemble castles or rocket ships. Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems: how to meet the ground, and how to meet the sky—the bottom and the top, in other words. Calatrava is interested solely in the middle. For him, the skyscraper isn’t a classical column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital. It’s all shaft—which he has made an object of propulsion and energy.
Calatrava is an engineer as well as an architect and a sculptor, and his work is undergirded by a strong structural logic, separating it from, say, the work of Daniel Libeskind, whose ill-fated initial concept for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero had an off-center spire intended to echo the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. Libeskind’s idea was pure imagery, a picture that the architect expected engineers to translate into reality. Calatrava’s Malmö design begins with a structural motif—the human spine—and builds from there.
The Turning Torso literally has a spine, since Calatrava has designed the building with an external steel frame running up one side of it. Although from a distance the sleek white tower looks simple, its shape is anything but straightforward. Calatrava likes to describe the tower as a stack of nine white aluminum-clad “cubes,†each of which is five floors high; the cubes are separated by recessed intermediate floors, so that the boxes appear to float atop each other. In truth, Calatrava’s cubes are imperfect: in order to make the form appear to spiral upward, the floor plan on each level looks something like a square with a small triangle affixed to one corner. And the entire east side of the tower consists of a triangular glass projection that is supported by the external steel spine.
Calatrava’s dancer, then, is more like a marionette—controlled by visible means of support. But this doesn’t detract from the design: the steel bracing is one of the handsomest things about this building. The frame curves right up the full height of the tower, highlighting the fluid, flowing form in a way that Calatrava’s pseudo-cubes don’t fully manage to do. This exoskeleton also connects the Turning Torso to a long tradition of skyscrapers whose form illuminates their structure. Louis Kahn once referred to the Seagram Building as a beautiful lady with hidden corsets, because its bracing was tucked behind Mies van der Rohe’s exquisite façade; Calatrava’s lady has confidently removed her dress. For all its surface delicacy, the Malmö tower is closer kin to a building like the hulking John Hancock Center, in Chicago, whose hundred stories are wrapped in huge X-braces.
Inside, the Malmö apartments are generally what you would expect—sunny living spaces with sleek, refined European kitchens. The rooms are small, the fittings are handsome, and the views are wonderful. What makes the apartments special—but also more difficult, depending on your standpoint—is that there are almost no rectangular rooms. Living rooms are shaped like pie wedges, or have the zigzag outline of a W. Some wall-height windows are raked nearly at the angle of a car windshield. Unlike in most apartments, a person inside the Turning Torso is always aware of the building’s exterior.
The Malmö tower is somewhat cluttered conceptually: the audacious stacked-box idea competes with the even more powerful notion of a twisting skyscraper. In Calatrava’s design for lower Manhattan, the concept of stacked cubes is expressed more cleanly and successfully. A vertical street of ten private houses, the four-story boxes are delicately offset from one another, so that each town house will have a garden and a terrace on the roof of the unit below. (Two cubes at the bottom will contain commercial venues.) The result is not at all anthropomorphic: it is pure geometry.
Whether ten people will want to pay between thirty and forty-five million dollars to live in a large box suspended in the sky line of lower Manhattan, however, is an open question. It’s not certain that the design will be built—although the developer, Frank J. Sciame, says that he expects to begin construction next spring, his financing is not yet complete. What is clear is that Calatrava—along with Richard Meier, whose glass towers in the far West Village went up in 2002—has helped create a more ambitious climate for apartment design in New York. Sleek glass condominium towers, once a rarity in white brick Manhattan, are going up even in Hell’s Kitchen.
Calatrava has had a similar inspirational effect in Chicago. Although the glass tower he has produced for Christopher Carley looks nothing like the New York project—Calatrava has essentially proposed the world’s largest and most beautiful drill bit—it’s a similar attempt by a developer to elevate a project above the real-estate fray. (Far above: the planned height is two thousand feet.) The building would add an elegant and memorable shape to Chicago’s sky line, but, as in Malmö, Calatrava has shown little interest in connecting to street life. The tower’s base is bulky and unwelcoming.
If the tower is built—and Carley doesn’t yet have all his financing, either—its status as the country’s tallest skyscraper will mark the first time that an apartment building has held this title. It would become a symbol of the evolution of the American city from being a center of commerce to a center of culture and entertainment. Nobody is clamoring to work in high-rises anymore, but plenty of people are willing to live in them, and the fact that the biggest and most interesting towers are being built to contain apartments is a significant shift. It means, among other things, that we will finally see very tall buildings that are slender rather than chunky. (Calatrava’s design will look like a needle in comparison to the Sears Tower.) Thin towers have more light inside, and, collectively, they would create a sky line less dominated by hulking masses—perhaps inspiring a renewed willingness to view the skyscraper in romantic terms. Calatrava is both a romantic and a rationalist, and his gift lies in his ability to find an equilibrium between these two poles.
The Chicago tower’s official name is a pedestrianone: the Fordham Spire. But it may well acquire a more glamorous title. Carley originally proposed naming the building for his famous architect. The offer was declined, Carley said. But, he went on, Tina Calatrava, the architect’s wife, said that it didn’t matter: “Everyone is going to call it the Calatrava anyway.â€