Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 65: Santiago Calatrava

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

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This shit is literally called basic hard seltzer. So I owe you one basic hard seltzer. OK. All right. Wait, are we going? Yeah, it's your dreams drinks are doing owns of him. But yes, we're going. Yeah. OK. Oh, it's all that's not lemon. What is that? Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem,

a podcast about engineering disasters and it has slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. Justin, what's your pronouns? Oh, my pronouns are he and him. Right. Disgusting. God, I forgot about pronouns. I am Alice Kudwell-Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns, she and her, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm your least favorite third of this podcast. Today, I'm going to be your least favorite fifth of this podcast, doing myself no favors. I've already started drinking and my pronouns are he and him and I hate you. Nice. Nice.

And we have guests today. Hello, guests. Hello, guests. Hey, how's it going? Hey, I'm Michael Nicholas, pronouns he and. Kevin Rogan, he's a. Why are you two here? What are you doing here? You can't answer my question.

Because we make jokes about buildings on the Internet. Yeah, it's a noble profession. Yes. That's nobody's ever said that before, actually. Nobody overruled. Buildings are an unending source of humor. People don't realize that architecture can be funny. Which is what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk about the funniest architect of them all

who doesn't even consider himself an architect. And I thought we'd start with this quote from a fast company article. This is from December 18th, 2018. And a recent symposium featuring the renowned architects, Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, talk turns to fellow architect Santiago Calatrava, Calafucking Trava. What a waste, says Graves, a frowning father of postmodernism and the man who brought high design

to Target. And then he does his best Calatrava impression. I will make wings for you and the subway station will cost four billion dollars. That's the best thing Michael Graves have ever done. Eisenman, best known for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, chimes in. When Calatrava came to Yale, he got up after a long introduction. He said, I'm going to draw. He had a camera over a drawing board. He turned on music and he drew for a whole hour.

He then turned the music off and walked off stage. OK, that was genuinely wrong. Actually, this reminds me of a thing that Zizek did once, which is he got cut off during a lecture for questions. And he said, all right, fine, I'll ask the first one. Professor Zizek, what would you say if you had more time? And then he went on lecturing. So I do like the idea of like buying a Porsche.

It's like, you know, it was made fun of Ludacris for appearing on Justin Bieber's hit single baby. And then he cried in his new Ferrari after we were done making fun of him. All right. So yes, today we're going to talk about the life and works of Santiago Calatrava, an architect famous for doing three or four different things, one of which is going over budget. Which are intolerable, Jesus Christ.

But first, we have to do the goddamn news. So. So. Oh, yeah, we got owned, right? Yeah, we made it real. He made it real. It's not just in vism anymore. No, it's the car hole is here. Elon Musk has created the car to open up the doors. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. What if I have to escape through the roof?

Don't worry about it. I kind of feel like I should. What if I want to record a tick tock? You will be you will be killed by the car holes own private police department. Oh, good. I have one more reason to hate Kiley Jenner or Kendall or whichever Jenner. Would the car hole would it would qualify for having railroad police? Oh, that's a good question.

Where's the rail, Roz? Well, it's on a fix. It's on a permanent way. That way. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. I don't know. Either way, though, it does have RGB lighting, which means it's a gamer hole. It is a gamer car. It's a gamer hole.

Elon Musk has made has made us a gamer hole. And we should all be grateful to him for having gifted us with the the the the bounty of his munificence. You know, that's what I usually say when I try to when I want to try pegging tail. But yeah, the gamer hole. I've been very interested because apparently a lot of a lot of they're paying the driver $17 an hour, apparently. But they've been having a hard time finding them because no one can figure out

no one can do the safety procedures, right? Because because they're that complicated procedures. There are apparently. Best is I can tell if there's like a car disabled in the car hole. Everyone who's stuck behind the disabled car has to back out of the hole. I say quickly, literal fucking genius. Yeah, I see no problems here. I know it's it's fine, right?

It's fine. Go back to the the Channel Tunnel Fire episode for an example of why when stuff's on fire in a tunnel, you can just just cool. Yeah, or the or the one the King's Crossfire. Yeah, tunnel fires, tunnel fires, they're nothing to worry about. No, they're fine, especially not when you have these the Tesla, you know, being as it is a trick candle car. Yeah, reignites after you put the fire out.

I'm just amazed that they've gotten this far. I don't think they're going to get much far. I mean, when the thing opens proper, that's when we're going to see sparks fly. Yeah, special bonus episode hastily recorded. Well, I'm going to be stoked. I'm going to be so I'm going to be so stoked. I want to see and that that guy on Twitter keeps saying we're idiots for thinking this is a dumb idea.

We're idiots for a lot of other reasons. Yeah, those things aren't related and they aren't related to Elon Musk doing towering inferno, but underground. I was like when people are just like, don't listen to these chuckle fucks. I'm like, dude, are you because you shouldn't be? Yeah, there was a guy who came on to the the Twitch stream for trash feature the other day to like yell about how we're not going to start the revolution. And it's like, if you thought that a podcast was going to do that,

if we thought that a podcast was going to do that, I don't know, I think we, you know, that's that's for that's for the Maoist rebel news guys to do. Yeah, yeah, there is one podcast that's going to start the revolution and the Imperial Corps is called Red Scare. Everything else famously, it'll be Red Scare. Yeah. One of these drivers could start the revolution if he just stops his car. Yeah, there's enough people in there.

Yeah, no more. I think that might be. I think it might be stopping the revolution of the wheels. Yeah, I was just like, he's not going to go for a joke. That's cheap, is he? And then you let me down. You didn't let me down. All right, I only had one news today because we're pressed for time.

OK, so I thought I thought we'd start by asking what is a stark attack? It's an architect that I've heard of. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's basically it. Yeah, because I I I take absolutely no interest in architecture or architect. So it's an architect that I can name. Yeah, and that's it for fucking Frank Lloyd, right?

Look who is the A. Frank Furnace. No, Goldfinger. I don't think Frank Furnace was a star. Well, I know him. Yeah, well, that's because you live in Philly. The guy with the super finished name, like Eco Sarenin or something. That guy, Aaron Sarenin, Aaron Sarenin.

Yeah, that guy. Well, you should get one of these guys to build something in Philly, put you on the map. Actually, yeah, we did. But here's some here's some examples. So here's Frank Gehry, we all know Frank Gehry because he designed stuff that like looks like a crumpled ball of foil. Yeah, because he designed stuff wrong.

And then we have like, I got here, Rem Coolhouse, who became a star, a star architect because of his name. Yeah, the inventor of the Coolhouse, the inventor of the Coolhouse. Yeah, the Bauhaus, the Coolhouse, the Coolhouse. Yeah, down here is Bork Ingalls. Famous for collaborating with Bolsonaro. Also, he did this building down in the Navy yard that looks like, you know, it's sort of bending inwards, which I guess is cool.

Who is the guy who did all of Brasilia? Now that we're talking about Brazilian dudes. That's a good question. How super modernist one that gets going to bug me. If I don't think about it, he designed all of the like Oscar Neemeyer. Yoska Neemeyer, thank you. Yeah. He was also famous for his wieners. Yeah, the constitutional course of Brazil shaped like a wiener mobile.

But it's all in very nice, like white concrete and they power wash it religiously. So it's fine. Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Neemeyer wiener. I don't wish that. It's not going to get any better for the rest of this episode, guys. Thanks for the warning. Yeah. So StarCutTech is just like it's a guy he gets. He's disproportionately famous, you know, maybe for particular building style

or Rem Coolhouse, you know, you wrote all those books that people like to buy to the extent that I own them. Yes, you do. Yeah. I wanted to toss you under the bus if you weren't going to toss yourself. You have to like exclusively wear black and gray. But he has very thin eyeglasses. Yeah, you have very thin eyeglasses. That's another one. I only ever see you in black turtlenecks talking about the necessity

of beauty or whatever stupid thing. So that's like the concept of the StarCutTech. It's a famous architect. So I have these kind of like tremendously overbuilt buildings. Yeah. Well, you don't you don't get this reputation by building cheap buildings. No, or like unobtrusive buildings that fit naturally into the social fabric. You want a statement building to be a StarCutTech. Definitely not like you're not going to get famous

by being like a reasonable, easy to work with person. So you're going to be throwing empty bottles of bourbon at interns heads. You also have to work with and for like local despots. That's a big deal. Like yes, you have to work for whichever Saudi fail son has the money to like decide that they want an airport in the middle of nowhere and they want it to look like a kind of like wavy, scrotum texture. So so I thought we but today's episode we're focusing on one StarCutTech,

which is ironic because he doesn't really even consider himself an architect. San Diego, Calatrava. Seen here. Looking, looking, looking cool, looking good. Yeah. Here he is doing some gestures. Here he is gesturing at a paper model he got paid 15 million euros for. I mean, nice work if you can get it. I was about to say, yeah.

Owns seemingly owns one tie. You only need the one really fair enough. Maybe he's like a cartoon character. He owns only owns one outfit. I also do like that he got his glasses from the three ninety nine rack at the local Walgreens. Well, he lives in New York. It'd be a Dwayne Reed.

Don't talk to me about New York. I go to Walgreens. Thank you. I go to CVS. I prefer CVS. All right. So I guess we'll briefly go over his life. He was born in 1951 in Valencia, in Spain. He went to architecture school in Valencia. Then after that, he's like, fuck this architecture shit.

And he became a structural engineer. He studied in Zurich and he got a PhD in structural engineering. He's one of us. He could have started a podcast. No, he got a PhD that makes you too smart to start a podcast. So we have to call him Dr. Calatrava. I guess we do have to call him Dr. Dr. Calatrava P.E.

A.I.A. Even worse F.A.I.A. And this is fun because, you know, he has like the zealotry of the convert when it comes to, you know, structural engineering. He like resolves to like reject all of his knowledge of architecture. I'm going to think about the pure structure of crap, right? And he starts his like practice and really quickly falls into a sort of niche, right?

He builds bridges and he builds train stations. Those are like his two big things. And he does it all with public money. Now they all have to look like fucked up bird bones. Yes. For bionicles or bionicles. They do kind of look like bionicles. Yeah, Dr.

Santiago Calatrava inventor of bionicle. Yeah. That was well, maybe the Lego company went to him for inspiration. But, you know, Lego has like cost control, so they couldn't actually. Bionicle was a little extravagant for them anyway. They called the consulting session. They'll be 40 million euro, please. So I thought that we'd start with the bridges.

He has two kinds. There's two genders of Santiago Calatrava bridges. Now, you may notice if you live in a city near water or that has water in it. If you don't have a Calatrava bridge, you have one or several imitation Calatrava bridges. Last year was lousy with these things. And it's just like, yeah, no, because that's that's what a modern bridge looks like. And it's like, there's no reason for you to have done it this way.

Are they all pedestrian bridges? To my knowledge, at least the ones here are. Yeah. He's not. Yeah, OK, that makes sense. He's not a few non pedestrian bridges, actually more than a few of them. But yeah, that the Calatrava Esk pedestrian bridge, I guess, is one of the cheaper things you can do. But they were even trying to put one up in Philly a while back.

It's a moneymaker. It's some moneymaker. It gives you a bit of a skyline if you don't have a skyline. Yeah. Exactly. The two genders of bridges he constructs are offset cable stay bridge and offset tied arch bridge. Right. Yeah. Because fuck symmetry.

Exactly. Symmetry is bad. That's that's what you learn in structural engineering school. Right. That's not what I learned from BioShock. I think what this guy learned in structural engineering school was just the shapes on every engineering textbook cover. I think these are moment diagrams and that's it. You just plastered it in the real life, I guess.

Yeah, if you just to the tune of like fifty million dollars. If you just take the graph in the book and build it in real life, that's what you're doing. Just badly misunderstood the captions on every illustration. Yes. So so his first his first bridge, his first project that really puts them in makes the architectural press interested in him is called the Ponte Bac de Rota.

It's in Barcelona, right? Yes. So like the Barcelona city fathers were preparing for the 1992 Olympics and they wanted, you know, some cool signature projects. Right. We want we want stuff that looks cool. Practicality is a secondary concern. I love the Olympics, man.

Yeah, you have a good reason to like move every poor person fifty miles out of your city, but also build how shameless they always are about it. Just like, yes, this is where we put the poverty disposal unit. We've given every carp a gatling gun. We have made all crimes punishable by death and we've spent fifty million dollars on a bridge that shooed over in one direction. Yes. Yeah, if you you will be checked for for credits.

You will be sure to make sure that you're not in possession of anything other than Coca Cola, the official beverage of. Yes, and if you are, you will be shocked. Yes. Yeah, wasn't it in Rio on the sort of main drive into the Olympic Village from the airport? They put up huge curtains on the side of the highway so you can see any of the neighborhoods.

Well, they did a bunch of like favela clearances, just fully like militarized invasions of these of these slums. So, yeah. Again, you got you got to kind of respect that, like, we're aware of the social problems and we've decided that a giant piece of canvas fabric is going to solve it for us. Out of sight, out of mind. That's exactly the technocrat. The Olympics are really kind of a mask off thing for capital, which I appreciate.

I just like to die in London where they gave dedicated lanes to Olympic. The Zill lanes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, they did that. Holy shit. So one of the projects they wanted is this relatively modest bridge over a railway, right? But they want some, you know, pizzazz to it, right? So they hire this upstart structural engineer, Santiago Calatrava to make it happen, right?

This is built in 1987. It's one of his first structures. And we can already sort of see some of Calatrava's proclivities coming out here, right? So I think I think maybe some of the things which are pretty common here, you know, he's got nonstandard structural shapes, which are difficult to manufacture. He built stuff out of the inscrutable white material. You call this renderite, right? Yeah, renderite.

Yeah, renderite. It's just like a sketch up thing before you put the bricks on. Yeah. And then I love it. I love a building with which is just texture missing. And of course, lack of accessibility. You can see these big staircases along the. Oh, boy, the bridge pierce here, right?

But I think when I want to Calatrava's big things that I think make some goal for budget is, you know, using renderite, right? I think, you know, so what one of the things I think you do as an architect, which I think is important is that you're supposed to be able to build the buildings, right? No, that's what I think. I think building buildings is a big part of architecture. You would think. No, not just designing them, you have to like build them as well, right?

So so like in concept architecture, a lot of times you see like sort of. You know, the buildings are made of white. You know, which is apparently a material that can do anything. Right here is something I ripped from design boom, right? You know, this is sort of in contrast to like boring old structural materials that have properties and limitations to what you can do with them. And then you need like guys to build them like this guy who's doing something with the wood and this guy who's pouring concrete, right?

Whereas the renderize is just beautifully extruded in these weird, cool shapes. All right, extruded implies that there's some sort of manufacturing process, though I believe they just appear out of thin air. It's a structures, PhD thing, I think, actually. We don't we don't have access to this sort of stuff. It's like Scientology, a structural engineering department. It's a lot like Scientology. Santiago Calatrava is able to do this because of how few seconds he has.

He can manipulate matter with his mind. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, no, he's rotating the cube around in his mind and turning it into. He's turning it into. I am pretty jealous. Now, all I have to do is pay 90,000 goddamn dollars. And soon Liam will have one of the telekinesis. Yeah. No, it's the buildings are actually made of

condensed body, Thedon's. Well, having a scoop this must be kind of expensive. But yeah, I mean, manufacturability is a big part of putting up buildings, especially unkind like unconventional ones, right? And Santiago is, you know, he's a structural engineer, so he should know all about these things, but he's decided he wants nothing to do with them, right? So, you know, he's big on the inscrutable white material, the render, right?

You know, just done in arbitrary shapes. So actually, if you go back to this bridge here, you can see what this looks like is there's the bridge, the bridge, the big arch member here. This seems to be some kind of triangular arrangement with like three tubes and then like a plate in between them, right? Which is not something that you can just go to a steelworks and say, yeah, give me a lot of that. I mean, all things considered, considering what he does later on, this is one of the easier things to manufacture.

I think that he's put in the specs. But yeah, this is positively sedate compared to when he actually starts enclosing spaces and building buildings. Well, just look how it looks like engineering. It's not actually engineering, but it just looks like there's engineering. Well, I'm not sure. Like there's one arch, which is straight up and down. There's another arch, which is leaning against that arch.

And I just wonder how much this art, how much work is this leaning arch actually doing? Because this main one seems to be holding up the road deck. And it looks to me like it's a tight arch based on this big member down here. I don't know what the outside one is doing other than holding up the pedestrian deck, which I assume is much lighter. But like, what do I know? You know, obviously, you know, since he insists on these weird shapes, of course, that means, you know, everything he does goes over budget and it ruins his career.

Right? No. No, Coletrava wins a whole bunch of awards for his first bridge. It gives him a bunch of recognition. Starts landing more clients, all of whom are governments, right? They want some kind of big statement bridge or building. Yeah, the guys who run the money printers. Does they want to feel special? Yeah. And everyone just doesn't everyone deserve to feel a little special?

Yeah, I deserve a four billion dollar subway system as a treat. Don't I deserve to be able to point to something and not something inscrutable, like lowering poverty or something like that? Like, don't I be able to don't don't I get to open something? Don't I get to cut the ribbon on something other than like a kid? No, it's not a read. Andrew Cuomo. Yeah. And I get to cut a red ribbon on something, which I love doing.

So so it gets this big break a few years later with the Puente del Alameo, right? That's this guy here. This is where he discovers his other thing, which is asymmetric cable state bridge with a leaning tower, right? Oh, it looks like a dog. It does look like a dog and like a penis, you know. Yeah. It's a very large penis hop. Yes, it is a penis harp.

So this is this is fun because it looks very, very elegant and so on and so forth. Very elegant penis. Well, my favorite thing about this one is I was looking a big selling point of it. Is that is that is at the same angle as the pyramid of Giza? Those fifty eight degrees exactly for that arbitrary reason. Cool. Come on, man. That's that's definitely something I associate with Spain, which is where this is or the Great Pyramids.

You want culture, you get culture. That's how you spend the culture wheel, folks. Well, it's like an obelisk at the same angle as the pyramids. Oh, true. Yeah. And make that connection. Wow, that is beautiful. This is this is a, you know, so it's an asymmetric cable state bridge rather than having cable stays on the other side of the tower anchoring it in place.

The sheer mass and the angle of the tower are what holds the bridge up, right? And one of the results of this is that instead of it being very light and elegant, it is, in fact, extremely heavy. But it looks so light. The materiality. Yeah, you can you can tell from the materiality as well. You know, screams like lift up. Like a bird. Yeah, it's a big concrete bird. Wonderful to see that sort of motif again as we go through this work.

What's interesting, because this thing is about 10 times heavier than an equivalent cable state bridge in Rotterdam because it has because that one has backstays and this one does not. It's it's it's it's elegant in quotes. But, you know, it's just a big fat tower, big fat dong. So the architectural press loves this one. And so he starts getting more and more commissions for bridges like this, which we'll go over a few in a minute.

He does eventually get better at this stuff, keeping things light. This is in Jerusalem. Shapes. Yeah, shapes. Shapes. Shapes. Bend. Bend. Info statistics textbook. How does this make us feel? Are you going to ask us how it makes us feel?

How does it make you feel? It makes me feel like I'm about to study statistical mechanics. Yeah, it makes me feel like I would be crying in in in in Paley for about six hours. That said, it also makes me think of bending and that I associate with future Rama, so it makes me happy. How you really do art really does make you feel something. Makes me feel good and proud to live in Jerusalem.

I can take a lot of civic pride because of this. I'll say that you should take civic pride, of course. Yeah, right. It says so much about Jerusalem and about our societies and about our ways of living, I think. Well, piggybacking off of that, I just want to say I have more of a question than a statement than a question. Raw success next. OK. I was trying to do a college lecture thing, but I'm old now.

Oh, OK, yeah. So, you know, this is this is a later bridge of his. This is the Cords Bridge in Jerusalem, where Calatrava starts to perfect his extremely expensive, impractical and barely balanced bridge sort of type, right? I look like I like that it looks like a cruise in USA track, though. And it does. Yeah. So there's a little speed boost on the top, right?

You know, when you bank at a certain angle, you really go for it. This looks like if you download a sketch up model of the Brooklyn Bridge and it's like about the same quality that all of them are. Like that. Where are you? Dr. Santiago, Trackmania, Calatrava. I was a track maniac. That was the game I wanted.

Thank you, Alice. I don't know. Has the guy ever seen a bird or a stringed instrument that he didn't immediately try and incorporate into a bridge? Ah, no. No, he only does. He only does birds and harps. You really can't stop yourself, actually.

Exactly. A bird harp. A bird harp guy. This has got this large slender leaning tower holding up this bridge. Now, this bridge is a small overpass for the Jerusalem Light Rail, right? It goes over one intersection and it costs the city of Jerusalem seventy million dollars, which was twice the amount budgeted. Sucks to suck. I guess that's tough.

Yeah, it's actually pretty low for Calatrava. Yeah. And I guess if you're fleecing the Israeli state, that's not so bad, right? Yeah, I thought that he was doing BDS. This is actually one of the things I when I was looking at this thing, I was I was just looking at it and like, how the hell would they build this? How the hell did they build this? Well, you have a nice long piece of white stuff and you bend it. Now, I just sort of I guess.

Yeah, he just you've got to turn the server gravity off when you lower this thing into place and then you freeze it. But a bunch of welds on it and then you turn the gravity back on. It's just extruded from Calatrava's mind, you know. Calatrava is now like every time I look at a Calatrava design, I'm going to be hearing the Garry's Mod sound effect. I'm just crashing into others. All right, so those are those are some of his bridges.

But I had the big one, big one he does now are train stations, right? So I thought we'd start by asking what is train station? It's a mall. You never you've never managed to do an intro to any concept without going. First, we must ask what is concept? Yes, I do the Socratic method. Yeah, he actually gets annoyed at me in one of the episodes because I read the notes ahead of time for once in my life.

And then I answered the question. I think it was Kings Cross and he was like, yeah, yeah, you read the notes. Thank you. I'm trying to apply the Socratic method. Yeah, Ross is. Ross is so crassical anchors about what the qualities of a train station are and aren't. Boy, we can agree. What is train station is somewhere that would you catch a train? Is it not?

No, you there's a Pizzeria Uno there, too. We must keep that sacred. That's a good point. OK, so there's like parts of a train station, right? You have the platform. Here's an example at Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Oh, that's that's right. Well, we really went straight for the top one.

You know, I'm sharing a platform. Oh, yeah. Thank you for that. Well, I figure we get the train station. It's most basic, you know, the season and it's nudist and it's most naked for. Yeah. Yes. Well, I've had to use the station multiple times. That's that's a bus stop next to a train line is what that is. Stop. It's just a bus shelter.

You know, when the train stops there, you get on the train. That's the platform at its simplest, right? And then, you know, you have something called the concourse. If there's multiple platforms, then it lets you get from one platform to another platform, right? And then there's a building next to the train station called the headhouse, right? And that's where everything is, right? So you've got a waiting room, you know, it can be something really simple.

Like this is the Wallingford station on SEPTA. It just has a waiting room. When it was built, the upstairs was an apartment for the station master. Well, that's sweet. It'd be nice to live in a little station apartment. But yeah, no, at the far end of that, you've got a gigantic city thing where there's a bunch of like railroad cops with submachine guns and shit. Yeah, like the far end is like old Benz station here.

It's got facilities for local long distance trains. It's got facilities for like handling baggage, mail, express freight, you know, it's like interior taxi stands, you know, there's like multiple concourses with like shops and stuff. I don't want to simulate a game. These coasts had a giant main post office next door for mail trains. Kind of want to simulate a game where you build a train station. I know that is one, but like I want a new one.

And then even like, you know, major transfer stations like this is 69th Street. Nice. Yeah, nice. You know, this is just for transferring from the subway to some trolleys and the Norris Town High Speed Line. This also has like a big head house with a waiting room with seating. Seating is very important in train stations. We're going to come back to that. You know, but a lot of these these big train stations, you know,

one of the things which holds them all together is, you know, the main purpose of them is to catch the train, right? But relative. Yes. The place for you to exist while you wait for train to be there. Yes. A liminal space. Is a liminal space, yeah. And because we because we live in capitalism, it is therefore also a place to have money extracted from you

while you wait for train to be there. Yes. Yeah, we're going to we're going to get to that. Now, one of the things about Calatrava's career is that in his early in the early part of his career, he actually did some good stuff. Here's now we've got to go to somewhere that doesn't know anywhere about extracting money from you while you're waiting for stuff. Zurich. Yeah, Zurich. This is the Stadelholfen Railway Station in Zurich.

And I think this kind of travel was pretty, pretty good at this in his early years. They were expanding the station for a third track. So what he did was he put this roof over the third track that was built in the hillside and then there's sort of some green space above it. So it doesn't like alter the hillside too much. I kind of like I kind of like the architectural treatment of like the catenary poles and like, you know, the standardized signage, which has that curvy thing on top. I think that's nice.

This one came in like your budget to developing his architectural vocabulary of three things. Having that L shaped bracket, the the ribs at a like sort of, you know, curvy. What do you have? Respect that he kept it to real fun this time, though. And so they were able to make, you know, like 20 of his little L shaped bracket as opposed to 300 slightly different ones. Yeah. Yeah. And I forgot what I was going to say now.

Oh, he hadn't figured out how to paint everything white yet. I mean, yeah, compared to the path station at the Oculus, this is a vastly like he seems to actually give a shit that you might be sitting there on the platform for longer than like thirty seven. Yeah. As far as experiential. It's nice. I kind of like it. It does have some issues with accessibility, though, because, of course, it's in Europe and they don't care about wheelchair users.

Right. At least they're honest about it, I suppose. This is true. Yeah. Accessibility is another theme in Calatrava's work. Oh, he's really good at it. No. Hey, it was going to be there. It's just, you know, budget that is just the first thing to go. I spent all of my wheelchair ramp money on five hundred variations of this bracket. Well, that's what the white material is.

That's why it's so expensive. It's harder than cocaine. You never know what you might need it, folks. So this is built sometime in the early 90s. Another one he does in that same era is the main railroad station. Yeah, Lucerne. Yeah. Oh, God, that's not a pretty city, which is funny for Switzerland, but just in general.

So this did not add much to it. I was about to say, I've been here. All I can say is for a main concourse made entirely of glass. It's incredibly grimy and dingy, which I think is kind of a theme with glass trans stations. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, there's something about Lucerne in general, man. It just kind of sucks the color out of stuff generally.

It's kind of like I like the nice wooden bridge there. And that's that's cool. The little like lion memorial. That's cool. Yeah, it is cool. So we're just reminiscing about times we have been to Switzerland here. Yes. And to the Switzerland episode. Well, there's your problem with Switzerland.

Well, there's your problem with Switzerland. Please give us our gold back. I need it for stuff. I don't have anything to say about this, except it's, you know, dingy. I like the spoiler in case the train station needs to take off. Downforce, man. You can never have too much of it. It reminds me of Washington Dulles.

Yeah, respect. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe maybe this this is before his bird stage and in his airplane stage. Yeah, it doesn't look like a harp and it doesn't look like a bird. Yeah. Surprising.

He's done a few train stations since this other than the main one we're going to talk about, all of which have the same theme, which is. Big open air concourse with glass roof with many opportunities for leaks. If it worked for the Victorians, there has been no, like, no need to go any further than that. We could start. But yeah, this is kind of it's kind of fun because these are all like exposed to the elements.

So there's lots of expansion and contraction, you know, which is not great for skylights. No, you get a single. He's famously good at a single beautiful pane of perfect glass dropped on your fucking head from 50 feet up. What a beautiful way to go. Just flattened by like a giant. Yeah. Annihilated by a two inch thick pane of glass, you know, six centimeters.

I don't know. Yeah, it's Europe, so it's metric. Yeah. I don't I try not to think about that stuff. It's against the Lord. So, you know, this is this one's up here in Lisbon. This one is in Lige and Belgium down here. This is the airport station in Leon.

I don't know anything about these except they look expensive. All I can all I can apply here is the same test as the Victorian concourse is like this, which is leaving for 100 years, run a bunch of steam trains through them. And like wait for them to become a rich ecology of certain stuff that eats certain pigeons. Oh, yeah, the carbon will actually solidify on the pains and act as a secondary structure once you get to the point where where sunlight does not penetrate. These will probably be great.

It's like when paint dries at the bottom of the cup and you can like pull it out. The exact form of the cup. Yeah, the entire structure decays and rusts into nothing. And the soot is the only thing holding it up. That's beautiful. Yeah, we got to start neglecting more Calatrava buildings, Phyllis. Time to get some ruined value going. Come on. Never, never once done maintenance on a Calatrava building personally.

Oh, they looked like they were in the ass. You know, whose buildings I have done maintenance on is Michael Graves. Sorry. Yeah. No, actually, we had trouble during the facade report on the Michael Graves building because of 17 years old and there was nothing wrong with it. Nice. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's fine to clean this shit, any of that. You should do like the real start detecting where he designs the actual

like maintenance, like they're they're sort of uniforms, a special lift that will allow them to get up into the and clean it and everything like that. A brush that of course, sounds perfectly for the joints and sealant. Oh, yeah. That that'll accept that will make things much easier. It's a little lifestyle design, you know. The Gossam Kunstwerk. All of these guys really do want their buildings to be occupied by and traveled through by and maintained by monks, right?

Yes, it's a kind of sort of wandering architecture monk who's going to like have no needs, be totally ascetic. And then also, yeah, but like also appreciate all of your vision. Their architecture Ronan. Like, I have I have no needs. I have no desires. I am I am totally on the eight fold path other than I like seeing the curvy shapes because they make my brain do pleasant things.

It reminds me of nature and I don't see that sort of thing. Instead of looking at a bird, I'd rather look at the underside of the terminal and be reminded of the bird. Yes, all of the guys like this in the Middle Ages, who wanted to design cathedrals when they started getting like this, were simply thrown from a belfry by their colleagues. Oh, you want to be like you want the building to be like a bird? You want to be like a bird?

That's what that's what that's what Freemasonry was originally about, was murdering your stark attacked colleagues. Wait, I should they still do that? I don't get it on that. I like the Masons do anything interesting anymore. No, no, it's just just like a charitable organization now. Yeah, that's boring. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Where's the shadow government when you need it? It's us now. You need anything? How's the how's the Jewish space laser going? It's in the shop. No. It's always in the fucking shop. Now, this is where we get into his other trick with buildings.

Famously, so the Milwaukee Museum of Art, right? Did you say sploosh? I said, sploosh, the fucking bird thing. That's right, he does the fucking bird thing. Yeah, you can see this. The regular bird thing. Yeah, the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

He designed and I forget when 2000, some maybe late 90s, something. I don't know. The idea is these big wings on the building, they fold down as a sunshade when necessary, right? Very useful. Like a bird. Ah, yeah. Because he also did an offset cable state bridge as the entrance.

Just I see that. Just to yeah, you know, because he does two things. So, you know, this this museum came in, I think, at least relatively on time and on budget, which gives Calatrava inspiration to do this on every single building he designs from here on out. Right. Which leads us to the big kahuna. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

Here we go. The second worst thing to happen to the World Trade Center. Looking like the Air Force Academy chapel, except more expensive and worse. Yeah. Infused with more religious fundamentalism, I think. So, all right, in 2001, Bush did 9-11, right? And as a consequence of 9-11, the towers fell down and crushed the path station, the Port Authority, Trance Hudson Railroad, right?

So New York City needed to build a new path station, right? And Santiago Calatrava comes to the rescue. Like all of the World Trade Center rebuild was absolute star fucker shit. I mean, at some point, we'll have to get into the Freedom Tower as well. Oh, yeah. And the memorial in and of itself. Yes. It's such a miserable place to be for

for all those reasons that you just listed. But I've never seen so many bollards in one place in my entire life. Yeah, because they don't want anyone to car bomb the beautiful commercial temple. Right. Yes. I mean, yeah, it's this this had to go through a number of redesigns just for security reasons, but also because Calatrava's design was stupid. We've also at some point got to talk about security architecture in general

because Calatrava's not immune to it. But like all of this shit that requires you to have this setback and that requires you to have the bollards and so on and so on and so on. Well, this one actually like half of the ribs are there just because Bloomberg thought it needed blast resistance. Like, this is not a joke. He put it through like review of the M.Y.P.D. and they said there was not enough ribs on it.

Fucking fat Staten Island carp looks didn't go. Maybe you're going to like double the columns. Wanted to look like the inside of a deer caucus. I don't understand like how that adds blast resistance when in between the ribs is glass. You know, it's because the M.Y.P.D. It's just for special effects. It's because the M.Y.P.D. hate and fear the FDNY and want them to get as much concrete rained on their heads as possible.

Yeah, it's part of the longstanding feud. You know, once you understand that, it all snaps into place. So they start out. This building starts out budgeted for two billion dollars, which is already too much, right? And then, you know, two billion dollars in 2004 when they budgeted this, that would be like the cost of building the subway line, like not just one station, like a whole line, right? And over the course of the construction of this project,

the cost balloons up to four billion dollars, right? For quite a number of reasons, which we'll get into here. So one of the problems is, of course, Calatrava always wants these impossible to manufacture structural shapes, which he creates by, you know, rotating a cube in his mind, right? Yeah, I've done I've done brain magic to my L shaped bracket again. And what I've come up with here is this fucking cathedral. All these ribs are a different size, every single one of them.

Cool. They're all supposed to be manufactured to be completely seamless. Cool. I'm sure that the structure was really happy about. Um, he wound up having to cut a bunch of his features, you know, so they were supposed to be giant wings that moved as a sunshade. Those wound up being static, right? Again, they doubled the amount of ribs on account of security reasons. Making it look more like fucking a view down a corridor in Alcatraz. Yeah.

Um, there was some drama over the one train, right? So behind the camera in this image is the one train and the World Trade Center, Cortland Street Station, right? And Calatrava was very insistent during the design process that this station was to be supported without columns, right? Why no columns interrupting the view towards the path concourse, right? Why? Because can I just say really quick

that the view across the the concourse to the where the path is is now interrupted by those weird little kiosks you get in malls that sell handles or yes, that's a way better use of space. Yes, it's amazing. So this meant the MTA wanted to keep the one train open at all times. They were reconstructing the station at the same time because it had also had the World Trade Center fall on it, right? This meant the whole building was delayed for several years,

owing to a very expensive and slow process of underpinning and installing massive beams underneath that particular subway platforms. The the the Port Authority kept trying to convince Calatrava to put a column there because it'd be much, much easier. And he just said, if you put a column there, I'm leaving the project, which I think would have been a good thing. Artists or the architects are for the fucking worst, man.

Yes, it's it's insane. Yeah, they're all fucking like that. And they all think that's a virtue also. Well, let's let's say you build a place for a train to stop without my fucking genius. All right. Well, in the temporary station that was already there, the temporary path station was built for like like an eighth of the amount function perfectly fine.

Yeah, all of that. And then they're so like, I mean, at one point, I remember and they like flew Port Authority guys out to Milwaukee to see the opening roof and stuff like that thing. And they were going to cut it out. And they're and basically they ended up being like, God damn it, Santiago, like, it's too fucking cool. We got to keep the opening roof.

Like it's so like it's just all over the fucking map, you know, it's inferior. It's just such an incredibly expensive project for, you know, what ultimately turns out to be, you know, kind of a mall. And it's as a subway station, it's not that busy, right? Like the division for the sort of World Trade Center Campus was it was going to be like the new heart of Manhattan, right? And it just kind of has not been for many reasons,

including the fact that it took 25 years to build a series of malls on it. Yeah. And like if you take two steps there, then like the NYPD kill you with a sniper rifle because you look too poor. On any given day, I see more people sitting outside, sitting up against the building, trying to eat lunch. Then I do actually inside the concourse. It's horrible outside too.

It's extremely inhospitable, but even so, it's better than being inside. This is true. Another thing which is interesting is I used to think this was supposed to be some kind of grand entrance. I guess it isn't because you can see up here, there's just like three, six doors. And then, of course, in again, another accessibility theme, there's this complex staircase to get down to train level.

Oh, you're self-downer. Yeah. Take the brakes off the wheelchair and just fucking let it ride. And send the bill to the city of New York. There's this big platform here for taking Instagrams though. Oh, cool. Okay. That's all I need.

Another thing about the entrance is the actual doors in. Like you're totally right. There's that platform like down like a split level or whatever. But the actual entrance is the most underwhelming, unassuming, like unenthusiastic entrance I've ever seen. It's just like a few little shitty aluminum doors. And that's it, like a little vestibule. I've seen sheds with more dramatic entry.

So I guess it's supposed to be for people transferring. Of course, the main action of the station is the path concourse, which is not underneath the Oculus. And then Fulton Street Transportation Center, which is where the subway is. And that was completed on time and under budget. And then they just sort of waited for this to be finished for another, I don't know, 10 years or some crap.

Yeah. And this whole thing is, again, it's a big mall, right? Now, I'm going to say if I'm transferring from one train to another, right, maybe it'll be useful to have a few stores, right? Maybe I want a Dunkin' Donuts, right? So I can pick up some food in the morning. Maybe I want like a place to get a... A sandwich place, a beer place, sure.

A sandwich place, yeah. Maybe a little beer store. I can pick up some beer for the way home. Some way you can get like a magazine or something. Sure. Your phone dies. Basically what they have in beautiful Wilmington, Delaware, at Diamond Hill, Biden Station.

Or even 30th, like... The Westfield Shaps, as they call it, seems to cater to a different kind of customer, right? The shops at Westfield. Yeah. So I can go to... I can, on the way home from work, I can stop at the Hugo Boss Store. Yeah. For when you want to get your fucking nuts and uniforms.

Yeah, that's beautiful. All right, yeah. I can go to London Jewelers. I can go to London Jewelers. I kind of like the idea of a jeweler just in case like you really fucked up. I forgot to get your wife or to give her another present. I got to go to the jewelry store at the train station. Yeah.

I want to go to the fucking Breitling Store and get a $2,000 watch. A full quarter of the retail space on two floors of the Oculus is an Apple Store. That works for them at Grand Central. There's a Kate Spade. Oh, that's cool. There's a Kate Spade, yeah. Okay.

Handbag store, I also understand genuinely. Yeah, because it happens to handbags. It's also not the most expensive handbag you can get, right? So that's surprisingly middling. They're up there. Yeah, I guess the thought is if you're working in Midtown or Lower Manhattan, you could probably afford a Kate Spade bag as an impulse. Purchase.

Yeah, I guess so. Like, I don't think that's a correct thought, people. No, you're talking about a handbag that's a sizable proportion of my rent, right? But at the same time, it's less grotesque than the Hugo Boss, I think. But there's not even like a Starbucks in the Oculus pick up a coffee or something. Is there Dunkin' Donuts? There's no, there's a Dunkin' Donuts somewhere else in the mall.

Luxury goods stores. And what's really funny is that like all of these luxury good brands are almost certainly owned by the same company because luxury goods are largely the preserve of, yeah, of LVMH and a couple of others, but like hedge funds will just like accumulate them into portfolios like that. Wait, is there a Mont Blanc one? Am I going to buy a fucking fountain pen in a train station? I don't even need a fountain pen.

I am not ironically defending the mall. The Casper store. The Casper store. Are you buying a mattress in the mall? Here's a Casper. Yes, it's like their showroom. It's the mattress showroom. I withdraw my praises of the mall.

You can probably bring like a twin mattress on cash. You would be sick to buy one though, right? And just take it on path and get home. Like that's innovative use of public transportation. They're an Ugg store? In case you forget your share. The slippers are good. Oh, wow.

I actually don't own Ugg slippers. I have an LLB man, but my friend Derek owns Ugg slippers. He never fucking shuts up about it. This town's really been going downhill since GM shut down the doughnut plant. This is supposed to be like a grand public space. And it's like, well, who's this grand public space for? People with money rise. That's what all of Manhattan is now.

The playground for rich white people rise. And then the actual trains are shoved into a corner, right? But even the rich white people with the playground for don't seem to enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. You don't hear me disputing that. They don't seem to like it. They seem to like more authenticity and which, yeah, whatever.

All right. They should have just shoved it full of bodegas. Yeah. Yeah. No, they want the opportunity to push over a nice Mexican grandmother on the way to buy, I don't know, an orange at the farmer's market. Because they like to joke themselves off about living in New York and how tough it makes them.

And like, it'd be crazy to share. You're disgusting and the islanders suck. Like, yeah, I saw a rat one. So it's like I'm poor. Yeah. I love to put on the trappings of poverty in my 2,900 a month, two bedroom apartment overlooking the Hudson. Yeah.

No, it's a living. You know, you gotta do what you gotta do. Part of that is part of that aesthetic is you don't go to glove works at the Westfield. What is glove works? I have never even heard of it. It's works for gloves, man. I think it's must be like a build a bear a workshop, but for gloves. That actually would be pretty tight.

If I could get like any line. Now I'm going to go to glove works. No, we're wrong. Glove works is a state of the art boxing studio and athletic performance facility. Oh, come on. Combined boxing training. What state of the arts?

Crossfit stuff. It's crossfit stuff is what it is. You'll be punching each other for thousands of years. There's no technological improvements. Now, I mean, I'm going to look at the membership options here. And who? Boy, yeah, you can't afford it. How much is it?

You can't afford it. I might be able to. No, he begs you over here. Tell me how much it is. Well, anti semitism, Alice. All right, hold on. Now you say are you booking like a one on one session? Yeah, I want to book a one on one session for my wife.

Oh, it makes me want to fucking give them my email. I'm not giving you my email. Oh, never mind. Sorry. We'll never know how much it takes for my wife to punch me in the face. Glove works. Glove works prices. $169.

For eight sessions per month. It's not that bad. I guess it's like $30 a class. That's not that's not crazy. All right, so we've done a fair evaluation. Although again, just like you can find your friend and spar with them. Like I guarantee you've got at least one friend willing to punch you in the face. Imagine going to the gym and your subway transfer.

That's the only thing the Oculus is really good for, though, is like sparring because there's lots of open space because there's no seating. It's true. Yeah. Ross, seating is for pores. Awesome. True. Go lay down in the Casper store.

Yeah. There you go. I feel like it's sort of like the prototype for Moynihan Station, also with no seating unless you're going to sell a lounge. Oh, they jacked the prices up for this one. The one in the Oculus is like $45 a session. Oh, thank you, man. So this is location, location, location.

You know? This is Calatrava's grand public space, complete with boxing gym. Why? Suffer for other people's art, Alice. He's gone on. He's gone on to bigger and better things, though. Oh, boy. This is the city of arts and sciences in Valencia.

He went back to his hometown. The prodigal son returns to shit all over the floor. A lot of the information on this was in Spanish, so I didn't quite get everything that's going on here. Yeah, no one speaks that. Yeah. It's a big cultural center type thingy, right? It's built on the bed of the rerouted River Turia, right?

Calatrava was buddies with high-ranking Valencian government officials and convinced them they needed that sort of thing, and then he would build it for them. Genius. That is absolutely brilliant. That's part of being a circuit. Why is there no option? Why is there no Mod for Cities Skylines?

It places one of these on the map for you, and you simply have to deal with the fact that you have been given. These are the pay for it, but you have had this thing, this mega project, dropped on your fucking lap. Now you have to build this. No, it's like a national priority or whatever. You have this thing, it's fine. There's a whole bunch of things going on here.

I think this thing is like a science museum. I don't know what this is. This is like a sculpture garden on top of a parking garage. 01:03:57,520 --> 01:03:59,280 There's an opera house back here. What? Yeah, it's all in this big pool. Where's the box?

That's a 28-in-1 public use development. It's like one of those city halls you get in really tiny towns where it's like, we have a conference center, we have a cafeteria. You're game-waying station, your liquor store. They have too much civic pride, but it's for something pathetic, so it'll be like... Yeah, it's the gateway to the Poconos, right?

Or it's the friendliest little sissy in Newton County or whatever. Made by somebody who should not have ever painted anything. No, no, no. The Instructivist Art Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. Yeah, Valencia is a little bigger, but not that much bigger. The whole complex is still unfinished. It's come in at 1 billion euros so far,

which is four times its budget. Yeah, had some structural engineer issues from the beginning. It's the big opera house. The roof came off during a storm. You don't want that. Yeah, that's not good. They had to cancel a whole bunch of performances. There's one building back here behind the, again,

asymmetric cable state bridge because he does two things, and that's one of them. This opera house back here, it's partially abandoned already, having never been finished. They fabricated a whole bunch of custom roof pieces, same sort of shit. It opens up like a bird, right? They fabricated all those pieces and then dumped them

in a vacant lot next to the project, and they never installed them. Yeah, so a bunch of those got looted by scrap dealers, apparently. Hey, at least somebody got something out of it. I thought it was about to say, yes. This is not the worst day you can have as a scrap dealer. Go back to the Guyana episode. Well, it turns out that the Calatrava mind material is actually highly radioactive.

No one knows that. Way back in the first slide, we showed Calatrava looking at all of those tall buildings, right? Those are a pair of skyscrapers or a couple skyscrapers that were supposed to be built back here, right? Which is where the vacant lot is, where all the building pieces are right now. Those are not built, but Calatrava was paid 15 million euro to design them.

And apparently, as architecture studio, somehow is now in a situation where they own that land. So they stand to benefit if they are constructed. This dude's a fucking genius. And I mean that absolutely sincerely. Not about architecture, but about apparently just as a grifting people out of their money. He makes so much fucking money, yeah.

Very gifted, monorail salesman. He has, like, he's rich enough that he owns a townhouse on Park Avenue. Like, I didn't know there were townhouses on Park Avenue. Yeah, there's two and he owns one of them. Yeah, wasn't the other one Jeffrey Epstein's? Yes, it was. It used to be a school. There was. Hey, that is dead serious.

Jeffrey Epstein's house, because I watched an episode of VH1's Life of the Rich and Fabulous ones talking about hedge fund managers. Jeffrey Epstein bought a Manhattan schoolhouse and turned it into an actual house. That is a hundred percent trail. Yeah, Lord. Well, Calatrava actually owns two townhouses on Park Avenue. Are they glued together?

Yeah, they're next to each other. One is his house, the other is his office. Fuck off, man, you cannot buy with one. When the dictatorship of the podcasters comes, we will be redistributing the townhouses. We're going to expropriate Calatrava's office. Yes, I want, I want a, a, a, a, what's it called? The Russian invitations.

A dacha. A dacha, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, after the revolution, we will be podcasting, performing our essential function of podcasting from the Park Avenue dacha. Yes. Hero of the American Union.

Alice Caldwell Cavalier, everyone. That's right. Hi, yes, service. It's us. We're podcasters. We're going to cause the revolution. No, I want my dacha. So, yeah, the city of arts and sciences is still unfinished,

it's still very much costing the Spanish taxpayers a lot of money. But, you know, it's all worth it for that good Calatrava stuff. Brings a lot of civic prestige, I imagine. Yeah, apparently they don't actually get a lot of visitors to this thing. I love to build empty malls. I love to build empty bird walls. Yeah. I was doing research on this the other night.

And first of all, Calatrava is like the most fun architect to research because every single Wikipedia page has a controversy section that you could just scroll immediately down to for any project. But for this one specifically, there was an opposition party leader who made a website called Calatrava Bleeds You Dry, which detailed all the failures of the projects and showed how a bunch of was and detailed the failures and how everything was falling apart.

And Calatrava sued him and the judge declared that actually the site was all correct, but it was just a little mean. But they made him pay like some money because it was mean. Oh, God. Well, it was a good podcast while I lost it. Well, everything you said was true, but it's not about what you said. It's the way you said it.

That's pretty much it. He said I got the exact words. He said it was insulting and degrading. How dare you point out things which I did. I feel like it's about them, frankly. You heard it here, folks. Calatrava sues us over this. We're in America.

We're immune. We don't have. Thank you, Jesus. He's going to stop over in my place. He doesn't live too far. It's kind of like a Brooklyn Bridge. Shit. Fuck.

He loves the Brooklyn Bridge. Thank you for your sacrifice and advance there, bud. Thanks for taking a fall for us. All right. This is a slide I entitled Santiago Calatrava Doesn't Care About Wheelchair Users. The title? Yes.

So this is another fun project of his, the Ponte della Constituzioni. Oh, fuck off with this. Yeah. But it looks like the Italian flag kind of. Isn't that cool? I don't see it. I see it.

It's got some green. It's got some white. It's got some red. That's awesome. He's done the thing. He's being very witty. People love it when their architecture is witty. So this is the first bridge over the Venice Grand Canal

in over 125 years. It connects the train station, which is on this side, to the cruise terminal, which is on this side, as well as some public transit and stuff like that. It opened in 2008 with immediate major issues. First off, it was budgeted at 4 million euros and it came in at 15 million euros all said and done. I'm not sure that's correct.

You have 15 million euros over budget, which suggests to me that it was 19 million euros. Maybe 19 million euros. Yeah, that actually probably is right. The walking surface is glass. Cool. Which turned out to be very slippery. Cool.

And the idea is you could look down to the canal and the people in the canal, I guess, can look up at you. Yeah, you could piss off. Yes. Don't wear a skirt while crossing the bridge, I guess. Santiago Calatrava doesn't care about wheelchair users, comma, skirt wearers. Yes.

But yeah, it's steps. The whole bridge is steps. There's no provisions for wheelchair access. There were some. There was supposed to be some kind of lift on the bridge, but they had to scrap it because it went so over budget so early on. Oh, OK. So, you know, it's inaccessible bridge with a glass surface

that everyone slips on. They fall on their ass. And a lot of times it breaks the glass, right? It's a tourist spring wheeled luggage over the bridge and those hit the glass when they go down the steps. And then that can also break, right? They could do the sound effects. Oh, yeah.

But like that times a couple of hundred thousand. And it's a Calatrava bridge. So every single step is a different shape and size. Yes. Yes. Yes. Very, very, very... Each individual part, each individual pane of glass,

has to be delivered from a fucking monastery in northern Italy where it is handmade by a 97-year-old blind man. And when he dies, that's it. The bridge is condemned to ruin. I don't think I've ever heard you be so happy. I'm enjoying this a lot. This is the thing, right? As much as I hate a lot of, for instance, brutalism,

rare is the architect who is this openly contemptuous towards the people he expects to be using. Yeah, it does kind of roll to be honest with you. I haven't seen the likes of this shit since Le Corbusier, where he was just like fully on making a demolished French North Africa and make it a parking lot. Well, and also another plus in Calatrava's corner is he clearly cares very much about the 97-year-old monk.

Like he's keeping him in business. That's right. That's right. It's a jobs guarantee. Yeah. Universal basic income for Calatrava office mountains. I have a story about that actually happening. Close to there.

One of my coworkers worked on the restoration of Washington DC Union Station back in the 80s. And one of the problems in the main concourse has got all these old fashioned coffers up there with like the egg and dart and everything. You know, one of them was so rotted out they had to replace it. And so they wound up finding the 89-year-old Italian man who designed them and built them in the first place

and said, you've got to come out of retirement for one last job. It's like he was fly fishing in Montana and they land the helicopter next to the creek. MP5's drawn. They got him to build one last coffer so they could replace the rotted out one. And they hoisted it into place and he was there watching.

And then they installed it and then he realized it was just like half a degree off, you know, rotation wise. And he just started screaming and cursing. But it's still there. I believe you can still see it if you look closely. There's just one coffer that's slightly off. That's the last time a guy wasn't alienated from his labor. That's insane.

So another thing with Calatrava, super genius structural engineer, is that the foundation was done wrong for Venetian soil. Right. It's Venice. That no foundation works. The whole city is going to fucking sink in the wake of the next cruise ship that comes by.

It's a doomed fucking city that we've killed. It's a bad idea in the Middle Ages. It's a worse idea now. Right. All the render right in the world isn't going to make the like 300 year old wood piles the same place. It's like built on a fucking plague lagoon. And every year that crowd gets a little bit worse

because the sea level gets a little bit higher. And also we keep driving cruise ships with like 50 swimming pools and robot bartenders past. Fucking doughnuts in the lagoon outside. So because of the foundation design being wrong from the thrust of the arch, right, pushing against the foundations. The ends of this bridge walk outward about two centimeters each year.

They have to be constantly monitored. Venice is cool though. I saw this documentary about Venetian emergency services. Right. And being a firefighter in Venice is the closest you can get to living in Lego city. Right. Because all of these guys,

they just live in their fire station. Right. And then when an alarm goes off, they run into the basement, hop onto a fire speedboat with a siren on it. And just go blazing out under the fucking bridges. And I'm like, yeah, no, this is cool. This is, this is nice.

It's a shame that all of this is built on sort of dead serfs and rossing logs. I actually, that exact same thing this reminds me of a scene in the Italian job. I loved Venice ever since they saw the Italian job where they were safe like the third floor and falls into a boat. And then they just drive the boat off.

That's fucking badass. It's like the same thing. Only in, yeah, you can, you can now drive the boat underneath the pedestrian bridge you'll collapse on and you can drive away with it. Yeah. I steal at the bridge. Oh, it's astonishing to me how badly you can screw up

a pedestrian bridge. Like, well, that's what happens when you have contempt for the people giving you lots of money. Yeah. Which is this praxis? I think so. I think so. Contempt for the Italians.

Yeah. 01:18:20,160 --> 01:18:23,280 A proud tradition of which I'm happy to take part. So, I mean, you know, I, you could replace this with like a $50 prefab structure. No problem, I bet. But anyway. You know, it's nice to see Venice,

Venice's stature get raised a little bit more. I was about to say, yeah. There was nothing in Venice worth seeing. It's kind of on a job of putting Mark on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, those are the ones I was going to cover in depth.

Obviously, there's much more in his portfolio of works. The fucking turning torso thing. Turning torso, which in one of the few, one of the few projects he's built that didn't involve public money or like oodles of public money, at least to my knowledge. Yeah, it was like a bank or something, right? Yeah.

No, no, no. I think this one's, this one's in Sweden, right? Yeah. It's just like a housing cooperative. Oh, huh. Okay, so he did figure out how to build the public somehow. Yeah. Yeah.

Just the NPIC, not the government. Whatever. He built a big museum in Rio de Janeiro. It's like the Museum of the Future, I think, which I think is actually more on. I thought he went to museums to see old shit. So, also ripping off Neemeyer there, which is very funny.

It's like Calatrava does Neemeyer. Yeah. Yeah. There's, he built a couple bridges in Dallas for the interstate. Yeah. Plasti. Well, this one is fun because it's this amazing epic scale bridge,

which is about 20 feet off the ground. Not even over like a navigation channel or anything. It's over a pond. It is over a pond. He's got another pair of these, which are actually just pedestrian bridges next to the interstate highway. And those are like these enormous like,

must be like a 150 foot high arch, you know. And that's supporting the pedestrian bridge only. The bridges next to it are conventional, like post and beam bridges. That's splutted. Then what's the fucking cyberpunk alternate reality thing we've got here on the left? Well, good news.

Calatrava is going to Dubai. Oh, right on. You think you can get Seamus Malik absolutely back for another five hour episode about this? No, I don't think he ever wants to see us again. Sorry, Seamus. Yeah. So this is the Dubai Creek Tower.

It's supposed to be the tallest building in the world when it's finished. Notice it's so tall, the model pokes through the ceiling rafters. This was, they actually have the foundation poured for this thing. And then Dubai said they cancel it. They postponed the project due to COVID, right?

Which I still means they've postponed the project due to money. Were all the laborers died making the foundation? Unfortunate, yeah. Having some various financial problems in the Gulf states at the moment. They did not really consider the worker burn rate properly. Like everything else, Calatrava, that also went over budget. Blood and money are both over on this project.

Yes. I'm surprised you don't have the Chicago one on here. Do you know about that? Chicago Spire. I should have put the Chicago Spire, which is a hole in the ground. It's, yeah, it's a hole in the ground. But what he wanted was to have a perfect unicorn penis

coming out of the air like a mile high in the loop in Chicago. I'll put it in in post. Yeah, thank you. And it looks like a unicorn penis or a fucked up baguette depending on how low-brow your imagination is. It's another one they got as far as the foundation and then gave up. Yeah, that's Santiago Calatrava, built in the public, then building white things.

White fucked up bird guitar things. Yes. There may also be dildos. There may also be dildos. Yeah. He's got range. You've got to give him that. This is about to say.

Where is arts, dildos? No, dongs. When you get down to the whole architecture, it's dongs. That's true. Yeah. That is the truth. Incredibly true. Various kinds of dongs.

Oh, did you see Big has a new hole building that came out today? Oh, I saw that. Oh, yeah. He just keeps doing this thing. That's another type of building of the rapidly emerging genres of buildings, including blocks stacked on top of each other and buildings with a hole in it and unnecessary cantilevers. Putting wind turbines on top of buildings where you can't do maintenance on them.

I think safe to say architecture's future is bright. I think we should just give up on architecture at this point. I think you can't redeem it. We should just stop putting up buildings. Everyone living yards. The thing is, we've got to start with the architects. The start architects first and work our way down. Yeah.

It's one by one by one. But a bunch of ISIS guys taking a hammer to falling water because it's innovation. You don't have to take a hammer to that. You just stop working on it for a couple of minutes and we'll take care of it. All right, so architecture bad. Yes. Architecture bad. Well, we have a segment on this program called Safety Third.

Nailed at that time. Didn't go like 10 seconds early. We have a submission today from a mystery person. We have no idea who it is. Yeah, we have no clue. No clue whatsoever. No, no. Dear, well, there's your problem.

I'm a professional actress. And a few years ago, I was in a profit share production of William Shakespeare's Much A Do About Nothing. Profit share productions tend to be a little scrappier than full-scale shows at mainstream theaters. So a lot of corners get cut, especially when it comes to safety. Our show was open air and we toured around various outdoor theaters in the south of England until the fateful day came when,

until the fateful day we came to a venue on the banks of the Thames in central London. Picture unrelated. Picture unrelated. Could be any, could be any venue. Could be literally anything. Call it the Doge theater. Yeah. Yeah.

Our director, who is also our lead actor and producer and the owner of the company, good combination. Yeah, that's not gonna result in ego problems. In the theater? Oh my god. That's full of the most humble people I can think of. Had already alienated most of the cast with his dangerous and inappropriate behavior.

During a previous performance, he almost took out another actor's eye with a sword. Well, that sounds mess or so, I'm coming around on this guy. Called verisimilitude. In the first scene of opening night, he slapped me on the ass on stage in front of a full house. Something that I made abundantly clear displeased me during the interval. Oh, that's not so good. That's not so good.

He didn't react well since nobody had ever really stood up through him before. You're telling me that this guy who was directing a Shakespeare production in central London and was also the lead actor of it and was also producing it and also owned the theater company, was not used to people standing up to him? I could think of several places where I would have a good idea for someone to tell him, listen, you're taking on too much work. It's not it, but you don't have to say no. You just have to get the same result as telling him no.

That's a keen eye for dealing with rich people there, I think. Yeah, someone figure out how to say that to Calatrava. So on the day in question, our fearless leader had failed to call ahead and book any changing rooms, so we had to take it in turns, getting into costume in a closet under the stage. Oh. There was no water, no toilets, and it was the height of summer, so we braced ourselves for a difficult show. The stage had a small authentic Shakespearean smell.

The globe smelling as bad as it did for the original performances. The stage had a small lighting rig arching over at about 10 feet off the ground, designed to hold the weight of a few very expensive lights and not much else. This will become important later. Yeah, the little fucking hitman opportunity notification has just come up. Everything went smoothly until we reached a critical scene in which the lead role, Benedict, overhears three of his friends, including me, having a secret conversation. Our director was supposed to start the scene by coming out, monologuing a bit,

see the three of us coming, and then hide where the audience could see him. The obvious choice would have been to hide in the audience itself, something he'd done before, and which people generally loved, because it's a comedy, right? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Instead, he chose to hide behind the rig, and during the course of the scene, climb up onto it and shimmy along, hanging sloth-like over the three of us.

Oh no. I saw the venue manager leap out of his booth and run partway down the aisle before freezing in horror, as the rig bent and the very expensive lights wobbled, owing to the weight of a full-grown man hanging upside down 10 feet above the three actors. Hell yeah. None of whom were insured, and one of whom was a frail old man. The shock of this pointlessly reckless decision caused the old man to forget his lines, resulting in me having to hastily cover for him,

though by this point the audience was only watching the lighting rig. Still in character, we deftly edged over to another part of the stage, finished our lines, and got the hell out of there before the idiot half jumped and half fell down. During the interval, our fearless leader mysteriously vanished just before the manager came backstage to chew us out. Yeah, hiding in the closet. Yeah. I later relayed his words more or less accurately to the director,

adding a few choice expletives. He accused me of siphoning his creative vision. Oh, Dr. Kalatrava. I didn't know Kalatrava did theater productions. I didn't say another word to him outside of a scene until the end of the run. He's putting on another open-air Shakespeare tour this year, and has not invited me back to my enormous relief.

Good lord. Sincerely, an actress. Yeah, I'm gonna fucking do the splinter cell thing of like shimmying up to, like, Oh, man, I knew it for myself. One of my two greatest splinter cell games. But Jesus, though. I was about to say, I mean, you know, that one thing about theaters is, like,

there's all kinds of places where people shouldn't be. You know, all those lighting rigs, all everything. Just in terms of, like, industrial relations, you really don't want to piss off the technical side of the theater, because that's a lot of big dudes. And they're all like, they're all like knife guys, too. They're all knife guys, and they love showing off their knives. Yeah, no, 100%.

Like, this guy was lucky he was able to hide. Yeah. Just getting flayed by the fucking stage director here. Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, uh, folks, uh, when acting, uh, stick to the stage. Stick to the stage. Do not anger the people whose job it is to hold, like, sandbags up and down links of rope all day and, like, hoist incredibly expensive lights,

which you're then going to dangle off of. Yeah. All right. Damn, we're almost finishing on time. Incredible. Yeah. All right, that was safety third. Safety third.

Do you want the drop again? Yeah, I forget. Do we do the drop at the end? I forget. I don't remember. 01:31:38,400 --> 01:31:38,960 Okay, yeah. Shake hands.

Maybe not. I don't know. I don't listen to this podcast. I don't know. I don't listen to this podcast either. What's a podcast? Yes. What's a Leo?

Who am I? Hmm. Who are you people? How'd you get on my computer? Hello, Alice. Ah. Ah. All right.

Um, uh, our next episode's on the Tacoma and Harris Bridge Disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? We'll listen to Kill James Bond. Thank you. Listen to Trashy. Yeah. Hey, Kevin, Michael, tell us about your, your, your things.

You're sick. Yeah. We actually do have something to plug. We have an upcoming, uh, monthly stream on Twitch with, I think, another former guest, Kate Wagner, called Guest Crit, where we're going to make fun of buildings on Twitch. So check us out on Twitter. It's like at Guest Crit.

Oh, yeah. I'm excited for it. Yeah. You all should come on sometime. Oh, that'd be fun. Yeah. We'd love to do that. Love to make fun of buildings.

Yes. Yeah. It's fun. Buildings where we speak. Interesting. And you make fun of buildings and yet you live inside a building. Interesting. I'd live in an RV if they let me, Alice.

Is an RV a building? No. Leave me alone. Is an RV a technical building? This is my private domicile and I will not be harassed, bitch. What if you just, you're a sovereign citizen, but for zoning? Yeah, right. Oh, God.

I don't play by your rules. Showing up to the zoning board meeting with a, with a don't tread on me flag and just beating the, beating the, the, the board of zoning unconscious with it. I'll make my own rules. No permits. No masters. I'm not going to say anything about zoning. I'm going to get in trouble.

That's a good point. Yeah. I'm going to California housing policy. Yeah. No, no, no housing policy. Housing was a mistake. Yeah. Yeah.

All of these only. All of these and yes. Yes. That's, yes. That's what we must have. We must return. A yard is a kind of RV because it's portable. Bye everybody.

Bye everyone. So long. Thanks.