Mastery (44 page)

After graduating in 1981 with an engineering degree, he finally began his practice as an architect and engineer. He was now well versed in the technical aspects of his job and in the basic requirements for completing a work, but no one had instructed him in the creative process itself. He would have to learn and invent such a process for himself.

His first big project came in 1983, when he was asked to design the façade of an already existing structure—an enormous warehouse for Ernsting, a well-known clothing manufacturer in Germany. He decided to cover the structure with untreated aluminum. This would tie the entire building together, but on each side the sunlight would create different, sometimes dazzling effects. To Calatrava the key part of the design was that of the three loading bay doors, each on different sides of the warehouse. Here he could experiment with his ideas of movement and foldability. And so, not certain where or how to begin the actual process, he started to sketch out various possibilities for these doors. As a child he had loved to draw, and he was constantly sketching. He had become so proficient with a pencil or brush that he could draw almost anything with great speed and accuracy. He could sketch as fast as he could think, his innermost visions translated with ease onto paper.

Without any sense of where he was headed, he began to draw in watercolors,
putting everything that came to him on paper, almost in a free-associative manner. For some reason, the image of a beached whale occurred to him and so he drew it. He took it further and metamorphosed the whale into the warehouse, the teeth and mouth of the whale opening into the bay door. Now he understood the image. It was as if the warehouse had become Jonah’s whale, disgorging trucks and materials from its mouth. On the margin of the drawing he wrote, “the building as a living organism.” As he stared at the sketch, his attention was drawn to the rather large whale eye he had painted to the side of the mouth/bay door. It seemed like an interesting metaphor all by itself, and indicated a new direction to take.

He began to do different drawings of eyes on the sides of the warehouse, with the eyes turning into the doors. Now his drawings took on more detail and became more architectural as he began to sketch out the actual sides of the building and the doors in a more realistic rendering, but still based on the opening and closing of an enormous eye. In the end, this would turn into the actual design of the folding doors that would raise themselves up in the curved shape of an eyelid.

By the end of the design process Calatrava had generated a large number of sketches, and as he thumbed through them in sequential order, he could see a most interesting progression—from the loose imaginings of his unconscious to more and more precise renderings. Even in the most accurate sketches of the façade, however, there was still apparent some kind of artistic and playful element. To look at the drawings was almost to see the gradual development of a photograph in a chemical tray. Taking this form of attack was immensely satisfying. It gave him the feeling of creating something that was alive. Working in this way, his emotions were deeply engaged as he played upon all kinds of metaphors, both mythical and Freudian.

In the end, his design had a strange and powerful effect. Working with only the façade of the building, he had created the look of a Greek temple, the aluminum undulating like silver columns. The bay doors added a surreal touch, and when folded up, looked even more like the entranceway to a temple. All of this blended perfectly with the functionality of the structure. It was a great success, and garnered him immediate attention.

As the years went by, one important commission followed another. Working on increasingly larger projects, Calatrava could see clearly the dangers ahead of him. Completing a design could often take ten years or more, from the initial sketch to the actual construction. In that time, all kinds of problems and conflicts could arise, which could end up spoiling the initial vision. With larger budgets would come more constraints, and the need to please many different people. If he were not careful, his desire to transgress the rules and to express a personal vision would get lost in the process. And
so, as his career progressed, something inside him made him return to the method he had developed for the Ernsting warehouse, and to elaborate it even further.

He would always begin with the drawings. Drawing by hand had become increasingly unusual in the era of computer graphics that had come to dominate so many aspects of architectural design in the 1980s. As a trained engineer, Calatrava knew the tremendous advantages the computer provided for running models and testing the soundness of a structure. But working exclusively on a computer, he could not create in the same way as he could with pencil or brush and paper. The intervention of the computer screen cut off the dreamlike process of sketching, the direct contact it gave him with his unconscious. His hand and his mind seemed to work together in a way that was primal and real, and that could not be duplicated through a computer.

Now his drawings for a single project would number in the hundreds. He would start out in the same loose manner, building up all kinds of associations. He would begin with a feeling or an emotion that the idea of the design sparked in him. This would lead to an image, however vague. For instance, when asked to design an elaborate addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, what first came to mind and then to paper was the image of a bird about to take flight. This image would go through the mill of his sketching process, but in the end the roof of the building he designed featured two enormous, ribbed panels that would open and close according to the sunlight, giving the impression of an enormous prehistoric bird about to fly over Lake Michigan.

Most of these early, free associations would revolve around nature—plants, trees, human figures in various poses, skeletal ribbing—and would be intimately tied to the landscape. Slowly, the shape of the overall structure would come into focus through this process, as he would make the idea increasingly rational and architectural. As an adjunct to this process he would build models, sometimes beginning with a completely abstract sculptural shape that in subsequent versions would become the design for the structure itself. All of these drawings and sculptures were like exteriorizations of his unconscious and nonverbal thought processes.

Inevitably, as he moved closer to the construction phase, he would come up against constraints, such as the materials to be used and budgetary considerations. But working from this initial strategy, he experienced these factors merely as creative challenges: for instance, how could he incorporate certain materials into the vision he had sketched out and make it all work? If it were a train or subway station, how could he make the platforms and the movement of the trains fit into the overall vision, even enhancing their functionality? Such challenges excited him.

The greatest danger he faced was that his energy would go flat over time as the design dragged on into years, and he would lose touch with his original vision. To combat this, Calatrava would maintain an attitude of constant dissatisfaction. The drawings were never quite right. They had to be continually improved and perfected. By pushing for perfection and holding on to this constant feeling of uncertainty, the project never froze into something rigid and lifeless. It had to feel alive in the moment, as his brush touched the paper. If what he was designing began to feel dead in any way, it was time to start over. This not only required tremendous patience on his part, but a good deal of courage, as he wiped out the work of several months. Maintaining the edge and feeling of aliveness, however, was more important.

As the years went by and Calatrava was able to look back on all of his projects, he had a strange sensation. The process he had evolved felt as if it had come from outside of him. It was not something he had created through his own imagination, but rather it was nature itself that had led him to this perfectly organic and beautifully effective process. The projects would take root in his mind with some emotion or idea, and slowly grow through the drawings, always alive and as fluid as life itself, like the stages of a plant leading to a flower. Feeling such vitality during the work, he would translate this sensation into the structures themselves, evoking awe and wonder in the public that saw and used them.

Because the creative process is an elusive subject and one for which we receive no training, in our first creative endeavors we are most often left to our own devices, to sink or swim. And in these circumstances we have to evolve something that suits our individual spirit and our profession. Often, however, we can go quite wrong in evolving this process, particularly with the pressure to produce results and the fear this instills in us. In the process Calatrava developed for his work, we can discern an elemental pattern and principles that have wide application, built as they are on the natural inclinations and strengths of the human brain.

First, it is essential to build into the creative process an initial period that is open-ended. You give yourself time to dream and wander, to start out in a loose and unfocused manner. In this period, you allow the project to associate itself with certain powerful emotions, ones that naturally come out of you as you focus on your ideas. It is always easy to tighten up your ideas later on, and to make your project increasingly realistic and rational. But if you begin with a feeling of tightness and pressure, focusing on the funding, the competition, or people’s opinions, you will stifle the associative powers of the brain and quickly turn the work into something without joy or life. Second, it is best to have wide knowledge of your field and other
fields, giving your brain more possible associations and connections. Third, to keep this process alive, you must never settle into complacency, as if your initial vision represents the endpoint. You must cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work and the need to constantly improve your ideas, along with a sense of uncertainty—you are not exactly sure where to go next, and this uncertainty drives the creative urge and keeps it fresh. Any kind of resistance or obstacle that crosses your path should be seen as yet another chance to improve your work.

Finally, you must come to embrace slowness as a virtue in itself. When it comes to creative endeavors, time is always relative. Whether your project takes months or years to complete, you will always experience a sense of impatience and a desire to get to the end. The single greatest action you can take for acquiring creative power is to reverse this natural impatience. You take pleasure in the laborious research process; you enjoy the slow cooking of the idea, the organic growth that naturally takes shape over time. You do not unnaturally draw out the process, which will create its own problems (we all need deadlines), but the longer you can allow the project to absorb your mental energies, the richer it will become. Imagine yourself years in the future looking back at the work you have done. From that future vantage point, the extra months and years you devoted to the process will not seem painful or laborious at all. It is an illusion of the present that will vanish. Time is your greatest ally.

5. The Open Field

Martha Graham’s father, Dr. George Graham, was one of the few pioneering doctors in the 1890s to specialize in the treatment of mental illness. (For more on Martha Graham, see
here
and
here
.) Around the family he did not talk much about his work, but one subject he would discuss openly with Martha completely fascinated her. In working with his patients, Dr. Graham had developed the ability to judge much about their states of mind from their body language. He could read their level of anxiety in how they walked or moved their arms or fixed their eyes on something. “The body does not lie,” he would often tell her.

In high school in Santa Barbara, California, Martha developed an interest in theater. But one evening in 1911, Dr. Graham took his seventeen-year-old daughter to Los Angeles to see a performance of the famous dancer Ruth St. Denis, and from then on all she could think about was becoming a dancer. Influenced by her father, she was intrigued by the ability to express emotions without any words, strictly through the movement of the body. As soon as St. Denis opened up her own dance school (along with her partner, Ted Shawn) in 1916, Martha enrolled as one of its first pupils.
Much of the choreography was a kind of free-form ballet, with an emphasis on making everything seem easy and natural. There was a lot of posing and moving about with scarves, similar to the work of Isadora Duncan.

At first, Graham was not considered a promising dancer. She was shy, always staying toward the back of the class. She was not particularly built for the art (she did not have a lithe ballerina’s body), and she was slow to pick up the choreography. But when she was given her first solo, St. Denis and Shawn saw something that surprised them: she exploded with an energy they had not suspected in her. She had charisma. St. Denis compared her to “a young tornado” when she took the stage. Everything they taught her she had a way of transforming into something sharper and more aggressive.