Hasta La Ideas

News: architect Santiago Calatrava is facing legal action from his home city of Valencia because parts of the opera house roof at his City of Arts and Sciences complex are falling off just eight years after completion.

Sections of the swooping mosaic roof of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia opera house at the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias de Valencia came away in high winds on Friday, forcing authorities to cancel performances and close the building to the public.

Regional government spokesman Maximo Buch announced on Friday that Valencia would sue Calatrava and his architectural firm for the cost of repairs, and said that the building will remain closed until it can be made safe again. A technical report on the state of the building is due next week.

The opera house is one of seven buildings that comprise the City of Arts and Sciences complex, opened in October 2005 and constructed on reclaimed land in the city’s former port. The white concrete opera house features a feather-like roof sailing over two outer shells that curl round the sides. These are clad in a layer of ceramic mosaic tiles or “trencadis”, which first showed signs of ageing a year ago when wrinkles appeared in the smooth white surface and is now coming away in chunks.

Calatrava has been heavily criticised for the cost of the City of Arts and Sciences complex and was accused of “bleeding Valencia dry” over alleged fees of €100 million for the showpiece cultural centre, despite it coming in four times over budget at over €1 billion.

The starchitect is no stranger to legal disputes over his buildings and had to pay €3.3 million to settle a dispute last June after a conference centre he designed in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo suffered structural collapse.

Meanwhile the owners of the Ysios winery in Spain have launched legal action demanding he pays €2 million so they can appoint a new team of architects and engineers to fix the building’s leaky roof, following repeatedly failed attempts by Calatrava’s builders to solve the problem.

His footbridge to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has also caused controversy, with the city having to pay compensation to dozens of pedestrians who slipped on the glass surface in wet weather, while Calatrava is also being taken to court due to his footbridge over the Grand Canal in Venice coming in three times over budget and requiring what the city sees as excessive repairs.

The post Valencia to sue Calatrava over falling masonry
at City of Arts and Sciences appeared first on Dezeen.

Santiago Calatrava is a whiz with bridges and transit hubs—his latest is Italy’s Stazione di Bologna e Reggio Emilia AV Mediopadana, a high-speed train station that debuted last month and allows passengers to zip to Milano faster than you can say “Stazione di Bologna e Reggio Emilia AV Mediopadana”—but did you know that he is also an accomplished painter, sculptor, and designer of things that cannot be categorized as infrastructure? The full, undulating, cantilevered spectrum of his talents will be revealed in the pages of Santiago Calatrava, coming this fall.

The new book is an Assouline production, which means that while there will be text (in this case, by Christina Carrillo de Albornoz Fisac, who will consider Calatrava’s references, influences, and inspirations) but it will only come into focus after you’ve spent hours ogling the lush, sure-to-be-full-bleed illustrations—all 180 of them. Of course, that’s even assuming that you can bring yourself to unwrap the hand-bound edition, which will come tucked inside a shiny box (pictured) designed by Calatrava himself.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dezeen Wire: Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has been accused of “bleeding Valencia dry” over alleged fees of €100 million for the showpiece City of the Arts and Science cultural centre in the city – The Guardian

Leftwing Spanish political party Esquerra Unida claims the architect had a deal with the conservative-led regional government to earn a percentage of construction costs for the complex, which have spiralled to a rumoured €1.1 billion.

Last month, Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett reported that Spanish ministers were blaming profligate regional administrations for Spain’s budget deficit, with showpiece architectural projects singled out for criticism.

Tremlett, the paper’s Madrid correspondent, seems to have a bee in his bonnet about extravagant Spanish architecture: in October he reported on the closure of the newly opened Niemeyer Centre in Avilés, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, and listed Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela among a string of other white elephants; while back in 2009 he reported on how a slew of grandiose schemes – including projects by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Alejandro Zaera Polo – were hitting the buffers due to the credit crunch and Spain’s looming economic woes.

Santiago Calatrava projects featured on Dezeen include the Liège-Guillemins station in Belgium and a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice.

Calatrava’s high speed rail station in Belgium. There’s a solid overview on Inhabitat here, or you can check out the company site here (tons of excellent work to peruse). If the style looks familiar, he was the designer behind Toronto’s BCE Place.