Santiago Calatrava

“My private work is touched by this destiny of understanding that architecture and engineering have a social character and can serve the community.”

“Architecture is a wrapping for the human body, and dance is the finest expression of the body.”

“Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.”

“When I was in architecture school, I became curious about the exact mathematics, physics, and construction of the great structures I had been studying. I wanted to know how these amazing things would work: the Pantheon, the dome of Michelangelo, the dome of Brunelleschi. So I decided to study civil engineering.”

“Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.”

“Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.”

“I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art... If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.”

“I am an engineer, not just an architect, so I've always been motivated by technique or technology. As soon as technology moves just a little bit, it changes architecture.”

“There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.”

“The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.”

“My architecture is very much place-related.”

“The world of sculpture precedes by many years the world of architecture.”

“The bones of my architecture are very much related to the structure, to the physical fact of how a building can stand up; it's also related to geometry and a certain understanding of the architecture in which there is a balance between expression and function.”

“You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.”

“Though I love the arts with all my heart - paintings, sculpture, theatre, and music - and think they are among the biggest achievements we humans can do, I am really convinced that architecture is among the most important.”

“When I moved to Switzerland to study at ETH Zurich I became fascinated by Swiss architecture.”

“I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.”

“What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.”

“I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.”

“When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.”

“Because of the nature of the profession of architecture, the art of architecture nourishes itself from other disciplines.”