‘Architecture is frozen music’
There’s a place in Valencia, Spain, where, for a vast 2 kilometers, you feel you just landed in the future. In the mystical, supernatural world of Santiago Calatrava, where —as far as your eyes can see— your surroundings create a ‘city within a city’ feel, a playful and inviting environment.
‘Queen Sofía Palace of the Arts’, a majestic opera house shaped like a fish-spine arch. Pic by ©Keith Isaacs
With a solid Mediterranean blue and pristine white theme, The City of Arts and Sciences is a monumental project that started in 1989 with a €300 million budget —that ended up being tripled—and finished in 2005. Being the third-largest city of Spain, Valencia has the fifth busiest seaport in Europe and is one of the main tourist attractions on the East coast of Spain.
On the project, architect and artist Santiago Calatrava worked with his teacher and architect Félix Candela, who engineered many concrete structures using his own thin-shell design technique, and had a great impact on Calatrava’s work. For the The City of Arts and Sciences, Candela designed ‘The Oceanographic’, an oceanarium that holds 500 different marine species in a total of 1,200,000 sq ft.
Calatrava's geometry creating a sense of infinity. Pic by ©Keith Isaacs
The immense beauty and scale of this project can be explored through its 5 different buildings: ‘The Hemisferic’, an IMAX Cinema, planetarium and laserium shaped like an eye, the ‘Prince Philip Science Museum’ resembling a whale skeleton, ‘The Umbracle’ an open structure that holds indigenous plants, ‘The Oceanographic’, and the ‘Queen Sofía Palace of the Arts’, a majestic opera house shaped like a fish-spine arch with an extensive feather on top.
Its totality can be explored in an open, public space that revitalized a neglected area of Valencia, the bed of the Turia River, which was drained and rerouted after a massive flood in the late 50s.
Calatrava's project
The City of Arts and Sciences is a colossal cultural playground for everybody, visited by millions of tourists every year. Accessible by metro, bus, and car, it is a walkable enclave that visitors can also enjoy by canoe.
In a conpendium of sounds and noises; kids playing in the water, bikes crossing the bridges, people running across the parks, cars and motorcycles echoing in the multiple buildings, The City of Arts and Sciences has its own soundtrack (with a faster tempo in the summertime). And, in the words of humanist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote, "Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music" the notes sound clear and vivid when you explore it, to realize that Calatrava created a harmonious melody, a masterpiece.
‘The Hemispheric’: an IMAX Cinema, planetarium and laserium shaped like an eye. Pic by ©Keith Isaacs
Photography: ©Keith Isaacs Photo
Architect: Santiago Calatrava
