The Best Part of Calatrava’s Oculus

In the spring of 2008, I travelled to Europe to report a Profile of Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect who had been appointed to design a new PATH station for the World Trade Center site. I’d told Calatrava that I was eager to see examples of his work, and he obliged in style, inviting me to accompany him on a whistle-stop trip—by private plane, rather than by railroad—between several countries and cities in which he had been commissioned to build large-scale civic structures. One evening, we flew from Geneva, where Calatrava keeps his company’s European headquarters, and one of his homes, and where he designed his first railway station, to Liège, Belgium, where his monumental high-speed-train station was still under construction. The next morning, we flew south, to Valencia, Spain, his home town, where Calatrava has been responsible for designing several buildings that compose a cultural district called the City of Arts and Sciences. On the way, we touched down briefly at the airport in Lyons, the site of another of Calatrava’s soaring, spiny stations.