I have been making architectural pilgrimages since college, traveling specifically to experience buildings I wanted to see in person that I had read about or of which I had seen photographs. Architecture has always been a reason to go somewhere.
This week we traveled to Milwaukee specifically to see Santiago Calatrava’s addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has been on my must see list for a long time! Set against Lake Michigan, the building is immediately recognizable as Calatrava: soaring, white, skeletal, and somehow both monumental and light. Its enormous brise soleil actually moves, opening and closing above the building, changing its relationship to the sky, the water, and the light throughout the day.
Calatrava brought some of that same vocabulary to the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York. And both structures ask us to look up. The Oculus rises out of one of the densest and most complex parts of Manhattan with its white ribs extending into the skyline, and inside, those same repeated forms surround an enormous expanse of light.
Seeing both decodes the architect’s visual language: the white ribs, the soaring spaces, the relationship between structure and movement, the implied possibility of flight.
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