Santiago Calatrava

Santiago Calatrava is a Spanish architect who studied at the Institute of Architecture in Valencia and as an engineer at the Institute of Technology ( ETH ) in Zurich. He founded his first office in Zurich in 1981. He later opened other offices in Paris, Valencia and New York.

Calatrava creates many innovative works with a flair for design and structure. His work is based on the study of the drawing of the human body, the morphology of engineering structures and geometrically formulated sculpture. In 1979, he was awarded the Auguste Perret Prize for reviving the quality of Perret's work on structures and for re-emphasizing the importance of having an underlying structure to create the final form.