PERSON
Santiago Calatrava
Spanish architect and engineer (b. 1951) whose skeletal, biomimetic structures exemplify spatial intelligence operating at the highest level of creative performance.
Santiago Calatrava (b. 1951) is a Spanish architect and civil engineer whose career has produced some of the most visually arresting structures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — the Turning Torso in Malmö, the Burke Brise Soleil at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York. Holding degrees in both architecture and civil engineering, Calatrava designs through obsessive sketching — thousands of watercolors and pencil studies, many of the human body in motion — because the principles governing how a building stands are, for him, the principles governing how a skeleton supports a body. In this book's argument, Calatrava is the paradigmatic case of spatial intelligence at creative peak: cognition operating natively in the spatial domain, generating forms that linguistic or logical-mathematical reasoning alone could not produce.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Calatrava's training at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (ETH Zurich) combined architecture with structural engineering, producing an unusual capacity to design forms that look impossible but