Hasta La Ideas

What is it with starchitect Santiago Calatrava and bridges? The guy can’t seem to design and build one without something happening crummy along the way. Last year there was his killer bridge in Venice that was inflicting damage on a score of clumsy tourist victims. Then just a couple of months back, his Peace Bridge in Calgary was catching all sorts of serious flack, with a good portion of the city calling it things like “a middle-aged man going through a mid-life crisis.” Now we have news from Dallas that Calatrava’s Trinity River Bridge, which had already been mired in controversies and miscellaneous slowdowns for the past decade, has run into yet another snag, this time with the Army Corp of Engineers who have said the bridge would be unsafe during a possible 100-year flood. While re-do plans are being scrambled together, this means that the bridge’s finish date will be pushed back at least another few years and possibly all the way out to 2016. For everyone’s sanity (and pocketbooks), we’re thinking a) Calatrava should be strictly land-based from here on out, or b) people should stop hiring him to build these things.

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