It is very important to visit the Oculus at a moment in which the skylight is open. Through the enormous 240′ x 20′ opening, we are framing a piece of Manhattan's sky.
— Santiago Calatrava
I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience.
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.
Many architects say that they will never do a bridge. But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century.
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.'
The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.
My ambition is to give Oakland's cathedral a universal character independent of the Catholic Church.
The idea of spirituality is difficult to discuss.
I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.
I don't see any difference between architecture and engineering. It's the same profession.
I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.
Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.
I've always had a dream about New York. New York is an island… those bridges… the skyline… the dynamism.
When I found I could not figure something out, I decided to learn about it, until I knew as much as I could. It's my way.
I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.
What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.
We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.
The two most important functional aspects to be fulfilled in a transportation facility are ease of wayfinding and easy orientation.
My personality is more the personality of a painter.
If I was not born in this lifetime in New York, certainly in a previous life, I was a New Yorker.
Bridges with cables very easily resemble stringed instruments.
My architecture is very much place-related.
The function of arts centers goes far beyond being places for performance. They might not be explicitly religious, but they are civic and social spaces.
The Taj Mahal is a monument to love in all cultures.
Chicago is a beautiful city with a wonderful skyline.
There is a change in the view about how condominiums are designed. People used to make prototype apartments and reproduce these boxes hundreds and even thousands of times, and then ask people to conform.
Not only did America invent the skyscraper, it invented the skyline.
I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.
New York is the city of the 21st century.
Airports need an identity, a main hall that defines the dignity of the space and allows people to move fluidly throughout its ancillary parts.
I did not want to do stereotypical buildings.
Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.
The best is to go into a train station that I've built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn't and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it's held up.
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.
I have always tried to create bridges that are more than a connecting structure - places in their own right.
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.
Bridges join places that were separated. They are built for the sake of progress and for the average citizen. They even have a religious dimension. Even the word 'religious' comes from the Latin, meaning 'creating a link.'
New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it.
I don't go running after publicity.
Rio de Janeiro has captured my imagination.
It is an exceptional event to build a cathedral - it must withstand several lifetimes.
In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.
What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.
Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.
Working with artistic people is very special, especially when they are so professional.
New York is not a place that lets you be indifferent. New York is this kind of place that, wherever you go, wherever you move, you are always confronted by your own time.
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.
Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.
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.
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.
