Santiago Calatrava

You need to know a lot to become master of your profession.

I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.

Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.

The best is to go into a train station that I've built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn't and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it's held up.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

My closest partner and the person I have been working with for 35 years has been my wife. She not only supported me and helped me but also framed my life.

The Huashan project is a clear example of how an urban element, key to the successful growth of the city, can at the same time improve the quality of life for its citizens, thanks to an integration of all three bridges and the creation of boulevards on the banks of the canal.

Something that's very important is to preserve the sense of surprise, the sense of discovery. The eye of the person you are talking to, your shadow on the ground. It's important not to get suffocated by all the things in life and lose that sense of surprise.

I have built already seven very large railway stations: one in Italy; two in Belgium; and in France, and in Switzerland, in Portugal, and also in the United States. And what happens is that stations are not things that come from one day to another, it takes many years.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is for the community of San Francisco. And the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the most magnificent bridges ever built, is also a monument to the community, you see.

Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.

Being an architect is like playing piano, you learn to play to admire how well the other guys play piano.

As a student I travelled around the Mediterranean - the Greek islands and Salerno on the south coast of Italy.

I did not want to do stereotypical buildings.

Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast - but that's all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.

You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.

I like the word monument, because the word monument is a Latin word.

Like Grand Central Station, which is a marvelous building, the design and engineering of the Oculus will endure for many generations to come.

In my opinion, as an engineer, a bridge is the most difficult thing you can do. You are not working in the direction of gravity but against it - so the problem opposes the solution.

A first building is like a first novel, it is always autobiographical.

I always considered the role of teaching to be very noble and relevant.

For the first project I did in North America, I was asked as an artist, not as an architect, to collaborate on a big development in the heart of Toronto. I was working with other artists and was in charge of giving form to a street, and I proposed a galleria.

The first significant work I did was a railway station in Zurich called Stadelhofen.

Some have tried to use my work for politics, using inaccurate or out-of-context information that, repeated enough, becomes truth to some even though it is not.

Many of the architects I admire have given the best of themselves as they mature. I'm hoping to do the same.

It is an exceptional event to build a cathedral - it must withstand several lifetimes.

It is very important to visit the Oculus at a moment in which the skylight is open. Through the enormous 240′ x 20′ opening, we are framing a piece of Manhattan's sky.

I would like to be an artist who works in a very closed ambience.

I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved.

If I was not born in this lifetime in New York, certainly in a previous life, I was a New Yorker.

Many architects say that they will never do a bridge. But I think they will discover that just as Fallingwater is a piece of art, so Golden Gate is a piece of art of the 20th century.

New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it.

Beautiful is difficult. I admire very much the courage of the people who have said, 'Let's do something different. Let's try to see if our environment will be more beautiful and our city will be more beautiful.'

I don't go running after publicity.

The function of arts centers goes far beyond being places for performance. They might not be explicitly religious, but they are civic and social spaces.

Rio de Janeiro has captured my imagination.

My ambition is to give Oakland's cathedral a universal character independent of the Catholic Church.

The Taj Mahal is a monument to love in all cultures.

I understand and accept criticisms of my work, provided they are done with professional criteria and arguments.

Chicago is a beautiful city with a wonderful skyline.

In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.

There is a change in the view about how condominiums are designed. People used to make prototype apartments and reproduce these boxes hundreds and even thousands of times, and then ask people to conform.

What I do is the opposite of building walls. I build bridges. A bridge is something that connects instead of separating.

I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.

Working with artistic people is very special, especially when they are so professional.

New York is the city of the 21st century.

New York is not a place that lets you be indifferent. New York is this kind of place that, wherever you go, wherever you move, you are always confronted by your own time.

I've always had a dream about New York. New York is an island... those bridges... the skyline... the dynamism.

Airports need an identity, a main hall that defines the dignity of the space and allows people to move fluidly throughout its ancillary parts.

When I found I could not figure something out, I decided to learn about it, until I knew as much as I could. It's my way.