Quotes from Santiago Calatrava

Women are the salt of our lives. They give it flavour.

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.

My personality is more the personality of a painter.

Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.

It is very important to visit the Oculus at a moment in which the skylight is open. Through the enormous 240? x 20? opening, we are framing a piece of Manhattan's sky.

I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.

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.

There is so much vulgarity in the everyday, that when somebody has the pretension to do something extraordinary for the community, then you have to suffer.

What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.

As an architect, you do not have control of who will build the building and who will have the capability.

Rio de Janeiro has captured my imagination.

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 closest partner and the person I have been working with for 35 years has been my wife. She not only supported me and helped me but also framed my life.

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.

What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.

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

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.

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

You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.

The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.

Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines.

You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.

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