40min interveiw with Santiago Calatrava at BBC

(watercolor by calatrava, out of this book)

Check it out. (realAudio or text)

I love interviews, I've been reading a lot of them lately. A lot of interesting things explored in this one:

• metaphor and symbolism in architecture
• biomorphic architecture
• importance of drawing
• his love of Bach

To continue the thoughts of my last post on Calatrava, Leithart pointed out how Calatrava has been criticized for being too natural, too imitative of nature.

Calatrava's architecture is, as he says, symbolic and metaphoric; consciously or not, (and from his familiarity with the Bible, I would guess consciously) part of Calatrava's imitation of nature, (of God's art and architecture) is that it is symbolic and metaphoric, just as trees and mountains are (and they really are) symbolic and metaphoric.


Edit: Also if you're in Dallas, you can check out his kinetic sculpture at SMU, where I heard him speak at my sister's graduation.