Santiago Calatrava -- see him NOW at a cinema near you

The man's a genius. An artistic and engineering genius.

I've only had the the pleasure of being in one of Santiago Calatrava's magnificent buildings -- many of which bring to architecture the novel concept of seeing buildings as mechanisms, or as organisms that change as a living thing would during the course of the day -- so the film on Calatrava and his work currently on show at the JASMAX Architectural Film Festival was a delight. A real delight. (That's him above with another of my heroes, architect Felix Candela.)

A building that changes and grows as an organism does is a difficult thing to convey in a photograph, particularly when they change with the grace of a Calatrava building (often reminiscent of the scillia of an anenome, or the windswept movement of of a field of corn), so film offers the rare opportunity of capturing this delight.

The photographs here of Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum for instance give you an idea of the elegance of the construction when it's embrature is both open (above), when it seems to soar like a great bird, and closed (below), but not of the grace of its movement or the sheer 'organic' ingenuity of its mechanism. If you are at all interested in either architecture or engineering, I would urge you to try and get to one of the remaining sessions of the film showing over the next few days in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to see these buildings and the man's work as close to 'in the flesh' as you can see in this country.

And just as a contrast, to help you see how lucky are the people of Milwaukee to have a Calatrava creation for their Art Museum, I've selected a few other recent Art Museums produced by architects fashionable only for being fashionable, all of which have been, not to put too fine a point on this, expensive failures. I give you, Frank Gehry's monumentally ugly (and inordinately expensive) Columbus Art Center, resembling nothing so much as an expensive pile of used tin cans:

Zaha Hadid's disastrous Cincinatti Art Museum (below), erected at huge expense to help revitalise Cincinatti and the arts in that city, only to see patrons staying away in droves:

And Peter Eisenman's recently expensively rebuilt Wexner Art Center (below); at the time of rebuilding "director Sherri Geldin took the opportunity to list, to the obvious chagrin of an increasingly crimson Peter, exactly why the building sucks [and needed reconstruction]: lost patrons, damaging sunlight, useless spaces, etc. 'It would have been easier to start from scratch,' she said, and not in a nice way. Eisenman fled mid-speech." [Reported here at Not PC.] Her comments could just as easily have been reflected by the curators of the other museums above.
In fact, it would have been "easier" and infinitely more delightful if all those Art Museums had hired real architectects like Calatrava, instead of the posturing poseurs they did.

Go and see the film: 'Santiago Calatrava's Travels.' If you've read this far in this post, you'll love it. But be quick. The last showing at Auckland's Academy Cinema in Lorne St for instance is tonight at 6:45pm. Here's another link to the schedule for your city.

LINKS: Santiago Calatrava resources - Frederick Clifford Gibson
Milwaukee Art Museum,Quadracci Pavilion - description and story at the 'Galinsky' site.
Posturing poseur alert - Not PC (Peter Cresswell)
JASMAX Film Festival '06: Celebrating Architecture - JASMAX

RELATED: Architecture, Films, Heroes