Architecture

For years people have been wondering what the cities of the future will be like. Will they be full of flying cars, with people living in huge sky scrapers to escape the pollution? Although it is hard to say what they will be like in reality, we can say with some certainty what they should be like – and the answer is they should be like the Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences in Spain.

This playful complex, fruit of the cooperation between Santiago Calatrava, the architect and engineer from Valencia, and the late Félix Candela, the architect from Madrid, is a center for culture, art and research and one of contemporary art’s greatest icons.

The City comprises four large buildings -– the Palau de las Arts (Arts Palace) Reina Sofia, L’Hemesferic, the Principe Felipe Science Museum and the Oceanographic Museum – connected to a spectacular promenade and landscaped gazebo known as L’Umbracle, the rear of which houses a huge parking complex.

Each of these areas fully complies with the requirements of aesthetic perfection, to the extent of becoming works of art in themselves. So the scenery and exhibits that they house become one with them in an innovative symbiosis, which bears ample witness to the potential for mankind’s technological and aesthetic achievements during the 21st century.

The City of Arts and Sciences, promoted by the Valencia regional government, first saw the light of day in 1998 with the opening of the first building, L’Hemesferic. Its structure represents a huge human eye, the eye of wisdom, symbolizing the view of the world from the point of view of the spectators witnessing the audio visual presentations shown here. These are magnificent projections thrown onto a 900 square meter concave screen, with extraordinary clarity and impeccable sound quality. All of this contributes to exceptional realism which literally embraces the spectator in the images.

Up to now a total of 32 large format films have been shown in L’Hemisferic Theater, and more than 5 million spectators have witnessed a total of around 30,000 hours of screenings.

The second building to open its doors, in the year 2000, was the Principe Felipe Science Museum, dedicated to presenting all aspects of the evolution of life, science and technology in instructive and entertaining ways. This is a building of grandiose proportions and organic shapes, housing almost 30,000 square feet of exhibition space. Its philosophy can be summed up as “Not touching, not feeling and not thinking are not allowed”, that could well be applied to the whole of the City of Arts and Sciences.

The museum’s structure is unique in terms of its geometry, the construction materials employed (white concrete and glass) and the fact that nature is incorporated throughout. Here, architecture, engineering and art establish a close relationship and combine in a common cause: the search for simplicity in the approach and elegance of architectural shapes.

2003 witnessed the next building to open, the Oceanographic Museum, which was the only building that was not designed by Santiago Calatrava, being the work of Félix Candela, whose hand can be seen in each of this magnificent marine complex’s areas. This is the largest of its type in Europe and houses 45,000 examples of 500 species that inhabit the world’s oceans and rivers.

Félix Cadena’s work is characterized by overstated parabolic coverings. These lotus shapes give the building his unique and individual personality, and combine with other innovative aspects of the building, which reflect the latest discoveries in marine flora and fauna.

The Oceanographic Museum has been designed to provide an environment for its rare inhabitants, which is as close as possible to nature. Its 110,000 square meter area is divided into two parts: one for fish, invertebrates and birds, and the other for marine mammals. These are housed in aquaria which have no visual barriers whatsoever and the submarine tunnels that run through them give visitors the feeling of being in the depths of rivers and oceans as they travel through eco systems including natural habitats from Mediterranean, Arctic, Antarctic, Caribbean and Red Sea.

The fourth building, and at 37,000 square meters the largest, that completes the Valencia City of Arts and Sciences is the Palau de las Arts Reina Sofía, which is a huge, performance complex. Its 4 halls are equipped with state of the art technology. Of particular note is the system in the Main Concert Hall controlling the movement of staging and scenery, which allows the configuration of sets to be quickly changed, and the screens in the back of the audience seating which display translations of the various languages used in the opera presentations.

Technological advances like these, added to the purity and vision of the architectural designs in the City of Arts and Sciences, combine to make this an example of harmony and aesthetic perfection, which surely brings architect Santiago Calatrava a great deal of satisfaction, as his whole career has been characterized by the search for perfection.

For more information visit www.cac.es