Santiago Calatrava Essay

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Architect, artist, and engineer Santiago Calatrava was born on July 28, 1951, in Benimamet, near Valencia, Spain. Calatrava family's hillside home was grand, with large rooms that Calatrava later named as an inspiration for his attraction to major projects and big spaces. He attended primary and secondary school in Valencia. From the age of eight, he also attended the Arts and Crafts School, where he began his formal instruction in drawing and painting. Calatrava's family had suffered during the political upheavals of the 1930s in Spain, and they saw an international future as their son's best chance. Therefore, when he was thirteen, his family took advantage of the recent opening of the borders and sent him to Paris as an exchange student. He later travelled and studied in Switzerland. Calatrava was initially interested in becoming an artist so he made plans to attend art school in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), but he arrived in mid-1968, with the student protests of that year at their height, and found that his classes had been cancelled. As a result, he returned to Valencia and enrolled in the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura, a relatively new institution, where he earned a degree in architecture and took a post-graduate course in urbanism. While at the school, he also undertook independent projects with a group of fellow students, bringing out two books on the vernacular architecture of Valencia and Ibiza. After graduation, Calatrava decided to pursue post-graduate studies in civil engineering for which he returned to Switzerland and enrolled in 1975 at the ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich. He reason behind this was the he was attracted by the mathematical rigor of certain great works of historic architecture and he felt that his training in Valencia had given him no clear direction. He received his Ph.D. there

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