Santiago Calatrava

The exhibition ran in the Braccio di Carlo Magno (Vatican City) from 5 December 2013 to 20 February 2014 was promoted by the Vatican Museums and the Pontifical Council for Culture, and it showed a collection of some 140 works opening up the complex and multiform artistic production of the famous Spanish architect and engineer, Santiago Calatrava, Consultor of the Pontifical Council.

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A nucleus of architectonic models was flanked not only by preparatory studies, but also by watercolours, which had separate origins, as well as a rich anthology of sculptures, both monumental and more reduced formats, in bronze, marble, alabaster and wood. The criteria binding works seemingly belonging to different artistic genres led the viewer to observe the diverse levels of possibility of reading architectonic volumes, from the vision of space to the forms that were the heart of Calatrava's work.

The following models were present: the Greek-Orthodox St. Nicholas Church, New York, the Path Terminal from the new World Trade Center, designed for Ground Zero; the project of the Palasport dell’Università di Tor Vergata, Rome; models of the Towers di Malmö and of Chicago, of the Opera House, Tenerife, the bridges of Venice, Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, the audacious project for the completion of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York and for the Los Angeles Chapel, dedicated to Fr Junipero, Franciscan brother sent in 1767 to the missions of the “Baja California”.

The protagonist of the exhibition was movement in space, which opened, as petals of a flower, the joints that make the two vortex columns in bronze, modified the chromatic aspects of the Moving Painting, and overhung the emptiness of the bridge of Buenos Aires. It was a visionary movement, and not for this any less true, within the threading of the amassed bulls' horns or in the dry branches of wood without light or body that made phyical, psychological and spiritual spaces with their movements.