Santiago Calatrava

In 2013 the Vatican Museums held a major exhibition entitled “The metamorphoses of space” celebrating the work of the great Spanish architect and revealing the multiple facets of his career: not only an architect, he is also an engineer, ceramist, set designer, painter and sculptor. Each one of his projects is accompanied by watercolour paintings explaining the thinking behind his work and his poetics. Calatrava was born in 1951 in Valencia, where some of his best-known and most popular projects have been built: the auditorium and the planetarium for the City of Arts and Sciences. He graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in 1974 with a degree in architecture, and in 1979 he took a diploma in civil engineering at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His graduating thesis in engineering, entitled “Foldability of space frames”, discusses models of geometric compression in space and marks an important turning ....

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