“Natural” architecture

In an overview of the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, Sara Williams Goldhagen (TNR January 23) cautions against the chimera of architecture grounded in “nature”: “Maybe the first architects needed to pay obeisance to nature’s designs, but that primal moment is long gone. Architecture – and ‘nature’ too – is a human construct. Whether or not designers need to acknowledge their buildings’ physical and material properties (and for reasons too complex to lay out here, I believe they do), they violate the essence of the art when they fail to design buildings and cities that reflect, accommodate, and symbolize who we are, how we live, and how we think we might or should live . . . . Shaping his architecture around long-established verities about the biological and natural grounds of the human condition, Santiago Calatrava seems to be afflicted with multiple blind spots that prohibit him from taking on architecture’s highly complex intrinsic and non-naturalistic challenges. Whatever its debts to our biological being, human civilization is cultural, social, political, and more. And its embodiment in our buildings, our landscapes, and our cities should say so.”