Santiago Calatrava Quotes

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Santiago Calatrava

Profession : Architect

Birth : July 28, 1951

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.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

Santiago Calatrava

What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.

Santiago Calatrava

Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.

Santiago Calatrava

Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.

Santiago Calatrava

A railway station is something that can generate a city.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava

There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.

Santiago Calatrava

I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.

Santiago Calatrava

Being an architect is like playing piano, you learn to play to admire how well the other guys play piano.

Santiago Calatrava

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

Santiago Calatrava

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.'

Santiago Calatrava

What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.

Santiago Calatrava

Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava

We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava

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.

Santiago Calatrava