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Architect, artist and engineer Santiago Calatrava Valls is globally known as Santiago Calatrava. Calatrava attended primary and secondary school in Valencia. At age 8, he entered the school of arts and crafts to learn drawing and painting. When he was 13, his family took advantage of the opening of borders to send to Paris as part of a student exchange. Later, he traveled and studied also in Switzerland. After high school in Valencia, he moved to Paris with the intention to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts, but when he arrived in June 1968, he must renounce his project. He returned to Valencia and enrolled at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, a relatively new institution, where he earned an architecture degree and a course planning. During his schooling, he also undertook independent projects with a group of classmates, publishing two books on the vernacular architecture of Valencia and Ibiza.


Attracted by the mathematical rigor of certain great works of historic architecture, and feeling that his work in Valencia did not give him clear direction, Calatrava decided to pursue 3rd cycle studies in civil engineering and registered in 1975 ETH Zurich (ETH Zurich). He received his engineering degree in 1979. It was at this time that he met and married his wife, who was a law student in Zurich.

After his studies, Calatrava occupies an assistant at the ETH Zurich and begins to accept small orders for civil engineering, such as the roof design of a library or a balcony for a private residence. He also began to respond to competition, convinced that this is the best way to secure orders. He won his first competition in 1983 for the design and construction of the station Stadelhofen in Zurich, the city where he set up his office.

In 1984, Calatrava designed and built the Bach de Roda Bridge, commissioned for the Olympic Games in Barcelona. This was the beginning of the bridge projects that established his international reputation. Other notable bridges that followed, there was:



Alamillo Bridge, commissioned for the Universal Exposition of Seville (1987-1992);

Campo Volantin Footbridge in Bilbao (1990-1997);

Alameda Bridge and metro station in Valencia (1991-95).



Calatrava inaugurated the second office of his firm to Paris in 1989, while working on the project Lyon-Saint-Exupéry TGV (1989-1994). Since May 2004, the Paris office is closed after the dismissal of all employees. He opened his third office in Valencia in 1991 to facilitate its work on a contest, that the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (in progress), a very large project of cultural complex and urban intervention. Other important public projects in the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, include:



BCE Place mall in Toronto (1987-1992);

Station East Lisbon (1993-1998, commissioned for Expo '98);

and restraint, but the project was not realized, for John the Divine Cathedral Saint in New York (1991) proposal



The exhibitions of Calatrava began in 1985 with the presentation of new sculptures in an art gallery in Zurich. A new stage in recognition of his art was marked by two solo exhibitions: a retrospective at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Royal Institute of British Architects) in London in 1992, and the exhibition Structure and Expression at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993. The last exhibition included the installation in the Sculpture Garden of Shadow Machine Museum of monumental sculpture with 'fingers' undulating concrete. The most comprehensive exhibition of his work was Santiago Calatrava: Artist, architect, engineer, presented at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy (2000-2001). Similar exhibitions were mounted in 2001 in Dallas, Texas (on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Meadows Museum) and Athens, the National Gallery, Museum Alexandro Soutzos.