From The International Herald Tribune: A visionary cast as a villain BY SUZANNE DALEY VALENCIA, SPAIN — For a while, this sprawling Mediterranean city embraced Santiago Calatrava’s architecture with gusto. In a dried-up riverbed, Mr. Calatrava, who was born here, built and built, eventually filling 34 hectares with his radical and, some say, awe-inspiring designs. But these days, Mr. Calatrava is often cast as a villain. One local opposition politician runs a Web site called Calatrava te la clava (loosely translated: ‘‘Calatrava bleeds you dry’’). Originally budgeted at €300 million, or about $405 million, the 86-acre complex called the City of Arts and Sciences — the largest collection of his work anywhere, including a performance hall, a bridge, a planetarium, an opera house, a museum, a covered walkway and acres of reflecting pools — has cost nearly three times that much, money the region never had. Ignacio Blanco, the member of Parliament who started the Web site, has unleashed a flood of information over the past year about the complex, concluding that Valencia still owes €700 million for it. Mr. Calatrava himself was paid about €94 million for his work. How could that be, Mr. Blanco asks, when the opera house included 150 seats with obstructed views? Or when the science museum was initially built without fire escapes or elevators for the disabled? ‘‘How can you make mistakes like that?’’ asked Mr. Blanco, a member of the small United Left party here, who said millions were spent to fix such errors. ‘‘He was paid even when repairing his own mistakes.’’ Along with architects like Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, Mr. Calatrava swept to prominence in an era of showstopping architecture. Across the globe, he has designed dozens of structures, almost invariably white, including the Liège-Guillemins railway station in Belgium, the ‘‘Turning Torso’’ skyscraper in Malmo, Sweden and the Milwaukee Art Museum, with its mechanical roof. Admirers say that Mr. Calatrava’s designs are both delicate and powerful. They liken his buildings to giant sculptures and praise his stubborn devotion to form. And they point out that star architects often come with hefty price tags, in part because their designs frequently call for intricate, complicated construction. Almost all have at least one project that seemed to spin horribly out of control — and it is rarely easy to determine exactly who might be at fault and for what. But in numerous interviews, other architects, academics and builders say that Mr. Calatrava is amassing an unusually long list of projects marred by cost overruns, delays and litigation. It is hard to find a Calatrava project that has not been significantly over budget. And complaints that he is indifferent to the needs of his clients abound. Just last month, a Dutch councilor in Haarlemmermeer, near Amsterdam, urged his colleagues to take legal action because the three bridges the architect designed for the town cost twice the budgeted amount and then millions more in upkeep since they opened in 2004. Mr. Calatrava is already in court over a footbridge in Venice, a winery in the Álava region of Spain and a massive exhibition and conference center in Oviedo, Spain. In Bilbao, there have been problems with a bridge and an airport. ‘‘What you see over and over again is that rather than searching for functionality or customer satisfaction, he aims for singularity,’’ said Jesus Cañada Merino, the president of Bilbao’s architect’s association. ‘‘The problem is that Calatrava is above and beyond the client.’’ The architect is likely to come under renewed scrutiny as building continues on one of his latest projects, the new PATH Station at Ground Zero in New York. It is expected to open in 2015 but is six years behind schedule and will cost $4 billion, twice the original budget. Critics of the project, which was commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, find the final price tag hard to believe. (In January of last year, an independent audit of the Port Authority concluded it was ‘‘a challenged and dysfunctional organization.’’ But privately several executives involved in construction at the World Trade Center site said Mr. Calatrava’s designs were problematic, too, calling for hugely difficult construction, including a vast underground chamber beneath existing subway lines. In addition, they said, he demanded that surrounding buildings house all the station’s mechanical elements like ventilation, which complicated construction and called for time-consuming coordination. The Port Authority declined to discuss the cost overruns and issued a one-sentence statement: ‘‘Early estimates for the transportation hub were based on conceptual designs and were therefore unrealistic.’’ Here in Valencia, the regional government’s spending spree and Mr. Calatrava’s work are being dissected and disparaged regularly, as local politicians fight over who is responsible for the pile of debt the region now faces. Regional officials had hoped that Mr. Calatrava’s work would transform this city into a tourist destination, in much the way that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao put that city on the map, and they continue to defend the investment. But they appeared to draw a line when it became obvious last year that the smooth outside skin of Mr. Calatrava’s opera house — some call it the Darth Vader helmet — began noticeably wrinkling just six years after it opened. Regional officials said they expected whoever was responsible for the problem — Mr. Calatrava, the construction companies or a combination — to pay for repairs or face a lawsuit. They are working to determine the extent of repairs necessary. When asked about his projects, Mr. Calatrava’s office in New York, where he lives, said he was unavailable for an interview. He did, however, issue a statement: ‘‘My goal is always to create something exceptional that enhances cities and enriches the lives of the people who live and work in them,’’ he said, adding, ‘‘It has been a privilege to work on these projects, all of which are completed to the highest standards.’’ In recent months he has defended his work in various publications, saying that his fees in Valencia were fair because they covered 20 years of work and included managing aspects of the building sites. In a brief interview in Architectural Record last year, he noted that clients were satisfied enough to come back for more. Among them are the cities of Dublin and Dallas. In that article, Mr. Calatrava called the uproar over his work in Valencia ‘‘a political maneuver by the Communists.’’ But other cities may be reluctant to hire Mr. Calatrava again. In Bilbao, he designed a footbridge with a glass tile surface that allowed it to be lit from below, keeping its sweeping arches free of lamp posts. But in a city that gets a lot of rain and occasional snow, pedestrians keep falling. City officials say some 50 citizens have injured themselves, often breaking legs or hips, on the bridge since it opened in 1997, and the glass bricks frequently crack and need to be replaced. The city tried to add a connector bridge that would take some steepness out of the span, a move that Mr. Calatrava sued unsuccessfully to stop. Two years ago, the city resorted to laying a huge black rubber carpet across the bridge. ‘‘It loses the beauty, ’’ said Ibon Areso, the acting mayor of Bilbao. ‘‘But we can’t keep paying people who slip and fall.’’ In a recent storm, the carpet flipped up, knocking several people off their feet. On the outskirts of Bilbao, Mr. Calatrava was also commissioned to build an airport terminal, that has been nicknamed ‘‘La Paloma’’ because of its resemblance to a dove taking flight. But when it opened in 2000, the airport lacked an arrivals hall. Passengers moved through the customs and baggage area directly to the sidewalk, where, if their ride wasn’t on time, they could wait in the cold. The airport authorities have since installed a glass wall to shelter them. In June, a Spanish court ruled that Mr. Calatrava and his team had to pay to €3.3 million to settle a dispute in Oveido, where the construction of the conference center at one point suffered a spectacular collapse. In the Álava region, a winery is suing Mr. Calatrava over an undulating roof he designed a dozen years ago. Problems with leaks — making humidity control that is vital to wine impossible — have never been resolved. The owners of the winery, Domecq, are now asking for €2 million to hire fresh architects and engineers to devise a solution. Auditors in Venice are taking Mr. Calatrava and several engineers to court because of cost overruns and what they see as an excessive need for repairs on Mr. Calatrava’s Ponte della Costituzione, a footbridge across the Grand Canal. The region’s audit court has asked Mr. Calatrava to return more than a million euros. The first hearing is scheduled for November. Meanwhile, the city of Venice is also asking the judicial authorities to find out whether Mr. Calatrava was responsible for some cost overruns because he failed to supply in a timely fashion the drawings needed to begin the process of finding a builder. As for Valencia’s cost overruns, Mr. Blanco said in a recent interview that one contributing issue might be that Mr. Calatrava’s designs appear to have a very low level of detail. ‘‘Other architects, they know exactly the door handles they want, and where to buy and at what cost,’’ Mr. Blanco said. ‘‘But Calatrava is the opposite. His projects do not have this degree of precision. If you look at the files on the aquarium, which was built by someone else, they are fat. But there are just a couple of pages on the Calatrava projects.’’ In the hands of the governing center right Popular Party, the region of Valencia has a lot to regret now that Spain’s economic boom is over. It spent, for instance, about $180 million on an airport that has not managed to attract any airlines. And some critics see Mr. Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences as another monument to the regional government’s extravagance, not his. Did Valencia really need an opera, they ask? But other critics scoff at Mr. Calatrava’s landscaped gardens beneath metal arches that become so hot no vines will entwine them. The roof of the performance hall leaks, they say. The opera once flooded in a storm. Didn’t he know he was working in a riverbed? One Valencia architect, Vicente Blasco, has taken Mr. Calatrava to task in a local newspaper for even trying to cover the steel sides of the Opera with a mosaic of broken white tiles. That may have been a nice idea, Mr. Blasco said, but it was absurd. The buckling that is now occurring was predictable. On days with a rapid change in temperature, he wrote, the steel and tile contract and dilate at different rates. ‘‘Maybe someone sold him on some special adhesive, but I don’t see it,’’ Mr. Blasco said in an interview. ‘‘It is so basic. No one would expect that to work.’’ Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting from Spain and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome. ◼ Get the best global news and analysis direct to your device – download the IHT apps for free today! For iPad: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404757420?mt=8 For iPhone: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404764212?mt=8
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 23:02:27 +0000
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