Page 4 of 9
Valencia, Spain
So wait for the stone on your window, your window, wait by the car and we'll go, we'll go
Madrid and Valencia are connected by a lightning fast AVE train, one that hurtles 186 mph and moves so fast that it is futile to put anything on your tray table and not expect it to move or fall. Once you get to Valencia after all of that hurtling, you are still two subway lines and a totally uneventful 20 minute walk just to get to this, the only good reason to go to Valencia, Santiago Calatrava's absolutely epic City of Arts and Sciences.
The City of Arts and Sciences is an architectural theme park, a purely visual composition with little or no context or weight- it's kind of like having dessert without dinner, although luckily it's one kick ass dessert.
This is the Opera House at the northwestern end of the complex (composition might be a better word), the piece of the puzzle that puts the "Arts" in the City of Arts and Sciences. Shockingly reminiscent of pieces of the Sydney Opera House, although original enough as well in a totally out of control kind of way. One example- those white solid areas on the side are totally covered with white mosaics, small five inch by five inch irregular tiles on every square inch of that surface- in person they shimmer and come alive under the late afternoon Valencian sun. As for that impossible to justify giant seemingly unsupported fin on its roof, that's a pure and unadulterated design statement, just like the rest of the complex I guess.
I spent all of my time (just like all of this page’s slides) in Calatrava's city, waiting out the warm afternoon sun and then the sunset, enjoying the early evening paseo with the locals and watching the buildings become overtaken by night, all the while looking for new views, new angles, new pieces of Calatrava's city that might otherwise somehow escape unseen.
There are things to do at the City of Arts and Sciences besides walk around with your mouth wide open and take way too many pictures. An Opera House, an IMAX theatre, a science museum, an aquarium, some kind of dinosaur exhibit and a still under construction "Agora" which I have no idea how it will be used. But what really matters is the buildings as a whole, as an uninterrupted and unedited Calatrava design, his stream of consciousness that has suddenly come to life.
This picture shows the aquarium in the background and the showier one of the two bridges that span the site. In between is the Agora, still under construction. Most notable in its design is that the area that I initially thought might be darker spandrel glass is really dark blue mosaics, not all that dissimilar from the mosaics in the last picture except (of course) the scale is far, far larger.
A last view (or six) of night shots includes a few pictures of the giant eyeball IMAX Theatre, with glass walls that can actually open up and a reflecting pool that most definitely serves its purpose.
