Quotes from Santiago Calatrava

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.

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

The idea of spirituality is difficult to discuss.

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

You have to live with the necessities of other people.

A railway station is something that can generate a city.

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

The first significant work I did was a railway station in Zurich called Stadelhofen.

New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it.

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

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've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.

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 city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

The way is not always easy, but in order to bring a work through to completion, you will need a strong character, a broad foundation of knowledge and an enormous force of persuasion.

I did not want to do stereotypical buildings.

Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.

I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.

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

When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.

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

My architecture is very much place-related.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.