Santiago Calatrava

“The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.”

“The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.”

“New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it.”

“I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved.”

“The best is to go into a train station that I've built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn't and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it's held up.”

“There is a change in the view about how condominiums are designed. People used to make prototype apartments and reproduce these boxes hundreds and even thousands of times, and then ask people to conform.”

“There is one way that architecture is superior to sculpture, and that is scale. You can walk into a building and have it all around you.”

“The architect works for so many years building it, and the moment you deliver it to the people is the moment when you are unnecessary.”

“Bridges and stations are very strongly related to the development of a city.”

“I remember, many years ago, coming over the Brooklyn Bridge in the night and seeing the skyline of Manhattan, with the Twin Towers. This was, for me, a kind of religious experience.”

“I became a fanatic of the architecture of Le Corbusier and I visited almost all his buildings and read all his books. Only later on did I discover that all the things that impressed me in his books, particular his ideology, he had picked up from Auguste Perret.”

“Beautiful is difficult. I admire very much the courage of the people who have said, 'Let's do something different. Let's try to see if our environment will be more beautiful and our city will be more beautiful.'”

“A railway station is something that can generate a city.”

“Chicago is a beautiful city with a wonderful skyline.”

“I understand and accept criticisms of my work, provided they are done with professional criteria and arguments.”

“Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.”

“Bridges with cables very easily resemble stringed instruments.”

“The Freedom Tower has a cost overrun. A significant cost overrun.”

“The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.”

“You need to know a lot to become master of your profession.”