How Santiago Calatrava blurred the lines between architecture and engineering to make buildings move

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American author Robert Greene has shared with us an excerpt about the work of Santiago Calatrava from his newly released book Mastery.

We live in the world of a sad separation that began some five hundred years ago when art and science split apart. Scientists and technicians live in their own world, focusing mostly on the “how” of things. Others live in the world of appearances, using these things but not really understanding how they function. Just before this split occurred, it was the ideal of the Renaissance to combine these two forms of knowledge. This is why the work of Leonardo da Vinci continues to fascinate us, and why the Renaissance remains an ideal.

So why did Santiago Calatrava, now one of the world’s elite architects, decide to return to school in 1975 for a civil engineering degree after asserting himself as a promising young architect?