Top 50 Santiago Calatrava Quotes

I don’t see any difference between architecture and engineering. It’s the same profession.

When I found I could not figure something out, I decided to learn about it, until I knew as much as I could. It’s my way.

I always considered the role of teaching to be very noble and relevant.

I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved.

The Huashan project is a clear example of how an urban element, key to the successful growth of the city, can at the same time improve the quality of life for its citizens, thanks to an integration of all three bridges and the creation of boulevards on the banks of the canal.

The Taj Mahal is a monument to love in all cultures.

I have always tried to create bridges that are more than a connecting structure – places in their own right.

In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.

The best is to go into a train station that I’ve built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn’t and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it’s held up.

I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I’ve always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.

Many of the architects I admire have given the best of themselves as they mature. I’m hoping to do the same.

If I was not born in this lifetime in New York, certainly in a previous life, I was a New Yorker.

There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.

My ambition is to give Oakland’s cathedral a universal character independent of the Catholic Church.

The Freedom Tower has a cost overrun. A significant cost overrun.

I always admired the U.S. as the country of the space shuttle, of technological achievement.

I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.

The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.

The two most important functional aspects to be fulfilled in a transportation facility are ease of wayfinding and easy orientation.

Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.

When I moved to Switzerland to study at ETH Zurich I became fascinated by Swiss architecture.

New York is not a place that lets you be indifferent. New York is this kind of place that, wherever you go, wherever you move, you are always confronted by your own time.

We’re used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration.

Architecture, like dance, is also a language – one that everybody understands.

A first building is like a first novel, it is always autobiographical.

Like Grand Central Station, which is a marvelous building, the design and engineering of the Oculus will endure for many generations to come.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is for the community of San Francisco. And the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the most magnificent bridges ever built, is also a monument to the community, you see.

Being an architect is like playing piano, you learn to play to admire how well the other guys play piano.

I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music.

The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It’s a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.

The architect works for so many years building it, and the moment you deliver it to the people is the moment when you are unnecessary.

I like the word monument, because the word monument is a Latin word.

I have built already seven very large railway stations: one in Italy; two in Belgium; and in France, and in Switzerland, in Portugal, and also in the United States. And what happens is that stations are not things that come from one day to another, it takes many years.

I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience.

Airports need an identity, a main hall that defines the dignity of the space and allows people to move fluidly throughout its ancillary parts.

I’ve always had a dream about New York. New York is an island… those bridges… the skyline… the dynamism.

In my opinion, as an engineer, a bridge is the most difficult thing you can do. You are not working in the direction of gravity but against it – so the problem opposes the solution.

My personality is more the personality of a painter.

Something that’s very important is to preserve the sense of surprise, the sense of discovery. The eye of the person you are talking to, your shadow on the ground. It’s important not to get suffocated by all the things in life and lose that sense of surprise.

Building a bridge, in my opinion, is a symbolic gesture, linked with the needs of people who cross over it, and with the idea of overcoming or surmounting obstacles. A modern bridge can also be a work of art. It helps to shape our daily lives and becomes a vital experience for all the people who use it.

As a student I travelled around the Mediterranean – the Greek islands and Salerno on the south coast of Italy.

For people of the younger generation, the 21st century has started for them with a positive sign that Valencia is and will continue to be a very modern city.

The reality is that throughout my career I’ve tackled projects in Spain that I’m proud of.

Bridges join places that were separated. They are built for the sake of progress and for the average citizen. They even have a religious dimension. Even the word ‘religious’ comes from the Latin, meaning ‘creating a link.’

Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.

You need to know a lot to become master of your profession.

My architecture is very much place-related.

Many architects say that they will never do a bridge. But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century.

New York is the city of the 21st century.

Architecture is a code. It’s a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.