It seems Santa Barbara, California, may have landed the exhibition New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art should have considered. “Santiago Calatrava: The Architect's Studio” opened January 11 at the University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum to superlatives like “stunning” and “exciting.”

 

Perhaps this is because the Santa Barbara exhibition, curated by Kirsten Kiser (who is also editor-in-chief of ArcSpace.com), traces and ties Calatrava’s drawings and sculptures to his architecture rather than treating them as completed objects d’art. The exhibition presents the architect’s creative working process through drawings, sculptures, and models (displayed atop their shipping crates).

 

The models and sketchbooks selected for the exhibition include: Lyon TGV Station; Milwaukee Art Museum; Tenerife Concert Hall; “Turning Torso” in Malmö, Sweden; Olympic Sports Complex in Athens; two of his extraordinary bridges, and his continuing work on the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. Walk-through videos add an experiential perspective and sense of scale to his built projects. “Visiting his buildings and walking across his bridges, both familiar and new, has been a joyful and inspiring experience,” Kiser says.

 

Calatrava's skeletal structures, inspired by the forms and movements of humans, animals, trees, and flowers, combine natural forms with high technology. Walls open and close, shutters lift, and roofs spread open like the wings of a bird. A constant in his many sketchbooks, among buildings, bridges and engineering details, are figures in motion, birds in flight and, true to his Spanish roots, charging bulls.

The catalogue, “Santiago Calatrava: The Architect's Studio,” is presented as a sketchbook with more than 50 color sketches, and a CD-Rom that documents 30 projects, including sculptures and furniture, with color photos, complete texts, and five QuickTime videos.

 

The exhibit, on view through March 5, 2006, is one in a series of three exhibitions Kiser organized for the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.