THE NEW SEASON/ARCHITECTURE; A Poet's Bridge, Pedestrian Only in Function - The New Y... Pagina 1 di 1
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September 9, 2001 THE NEW SEASON/ARCHITECTURE
THE NEW SEASON/ARCHITECTURE; A Poet's Bridge, Pedestrian Only in Function By HERBERT MUSCHAMP Correction Appended
THE bridge has become a highly compelling image for a historical moment suspended, as ours often seems to be, between Post- and Next. It has fallen to Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect and engineer, to give this moment a suitably exalted form. His designs for bridges and railway stations elevate urban infrastructure to supreme heights of poetic expression. Calatrava's first completed design in the United States, the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum, has been opening in stages and will be formally dedicated on Oct. 14. Occupying a privileged location on the shore of Lake Michigan, the building features a 250-foot-long pedestrian bridge suspended by skyward soaring cables from an inclined mast. The bridge leads from downtown over a lakefront highway to what has already become a city crown: a 90-foot-high reception hall enclosed within a truncated cone of glass and steel. The cone is surmounted by a sunscreen, an immense metal structure that resembles a gull with outspread wings. The new pavilion will contain 12,000 square feet of new gallery space, but it is mainly designed for museum services: a conservation lab, meeting rooms, a 300-seat lecture hall, a cafe, a shop and parking. Calatrava has the duende, as we say of certain singers, dancers and poets. A Spanish term whose literal meaning is ''spirit of the house,'' the duende derives from a culture rooted in the idea of land. Calatrava says that when the air on the hillside in his native Valencia carries the scent of oranges, that is the duende. We might use the word ''soul.'' Art that communicates powerfully draws deeply on the duende. But the spirit also has a darker side. Federico GarcĂa Lorca wrote that an artist must struggle with the duende, and the struggle is to the death. Modernity has largely detached culture from the land. And Calatrava is a modern architect. His projects express the reality of a mobile civilization. They convey people from one place to the next. They are grounded in air. And their interest chiefly resides in this tension between the mobile and the fixed. Photos: Inside Santiago Calatrava's pedestrian bridge, above, linking downtown Milwaukee with the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. At left, a view of the pavilion; behind it is the inclined mast that supports the bridge by cables. (Photographs by Jim Brozek/Milwaukee Art Museum)
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