Of Things Calatrava…

I finally got around to watch­ing a doc­u­ment­ary I had pvr’d a week or so ago. The Social­ist, the Archi­tect and the Twis­ted Tower doc­u­ments (lyr­ic­ally I might add) the design and con­struc­tion of the Turn­ing Tower in Malmo, Sweden. I am fas­cin­ated by the inspir­a­tion behind the design by San­ti­ago Cal­at­rava who sought to instill this kin­etic human form to a 56 storey con­domin­ium office tower. The doc­u­ment­ary itself (in a mix­ture of Span­ish, Italian, Eng­lish and Swedish) is a behind the scenes sort of pro­duc­tion, but it cap­tures Cal­at­rava mus­ing about such things as the passing of the sea­sons and the import­ance of cus­tomer ser­vice. The par­ti­cipants deal with attempts to change the design mid-construction to cut costs. The cli­ents muse over the fact that the Archi­tect is so sens­it­ive to any cri­ti­cism, and yet I was struck by how strangely accom­mod­at­ing he seems over what are huge alter­a­tions to the concept. Cal­at­rava is prag­matic, hands-on and remark­ably open — good line: ‘the blood will arrive into the sea’. The engineer-architect is an inter­est­ing mix. This is a fine pro­duc­tion. The pro­ject in ques­tion is an intriguing one, and on which I have grown in appre­ci­ation for (the sub­tleties of the details) with this doc­u­ment­ary. I am more famil­iar with his bridges and the Mil­wau­kee Art Museum pro­ject although I have very often walked through his mag­ni­fi­cent atrium in Toronto at BCE Place. Cost over­runs led to the fir­ing of Johnny Orback, the gen­eral man­ager part way through the pro­ject. Cal­at­rava is frank and blatantly states his belief that Swedes are simply too used to only doing the com­fort­able thing and not being will­ing to risk or do vis­ion­ary things as the GM did. Inter­est­ing reflec­tion son Swedish culture.

I browsed around a bit to fol­low up on the pro­ject and came across this won­der­ful model of the tower itself that you can down­load in PDF form and assemble for your­self. Have fun! By the by, do check out the <a href=“http://www.turningtorso.com/” target=_blank”>official site. Its a fas­cin­at­ing piece of inter­face design in itself.