Calatrava's Troubled Bridge Over the Grand Canal

When part of the Biblioteca Marciana collapsed during its construction in 1538 its eminent architect, Jacopo Sansovino, was immediately thrown into jail. A group of his influential friends, Pietro Aretino and Titian among them, managed to get him released on the condition that the architect himself pay for the needed reconstruction.

The problems that have plagued the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's Ponte della Costituzione since its long-delayed opening in 2008 over the western end of the Grand Canal haven't resulted yet in its complete collapse--but that doesn't mean that more than a few Venetians wouldn't be happy to see him behind bars. Instead, on November 13 Calatrava will be in a Venice courtroom to defend himself against the city's attempts to recoup 3.8 million euros for which the Veneto's Court of Auditors determined he is partly liable due to "huge errors" in his design and construction of the bridge.

In fact, Calatrava's bridge has been controversial since the day in 1996 that his commission was announced. Critics claimed there was simply no need for a fourth bridge over the Grand Canal in such close proximity to its third, the Ponte degli Scalzi, and that the roughly 4 million euros budgeted for the project could be much better spent elsewhere. As it turned out, by the time the bridge finally opened in 2008 the total bill came to at least three times that amount--and perhaps as much a five.

In the distance is Venice's third bridge over the Grand Canal, the Ponte degli Scalzi, as seen from its fourth

In a September 24, 2013 article about Calatrava in the New York Times, Suzanne Daley points out that cost overruns aren't unusual for high-profile international "starchitects" such as Calatrava, but the Spaniard is racking up a particularly extensive list of such miscalculations, delays and litigation. In addition to a Dutch councilor in a town near Amsterdam who is urging his colleagues to "take legal action because the three bridges the architect designed for the town cost twice the budgeted amount and then millions more in upkeep since they opened in 2004," Calatrava is already in court in two different regions in Spain over faulty projects. Indeed, Calatrava's errors, overruns, and trials have become so extensive that a blogger has devoted an entire site to keeping track of them.

It's not just that Calatrava's works are expensive to put up, they are also--according to the charges against him in Venice--absurdly expensive to keep from falling down. Carmine Scarano, the Regional Public Prosecutor in the Court of Auditors, is quoted in the March 5, 2013 Corriere del Veneto as saying that Calatrava's Ponte della Costituzione is so badly designed as to be "suffering from a chronic disease." As an English bridge designer explains on his blog The Happy Pontist, "traditional Venetian bridge designs never venture beyond a span to rise ration of 7:1," as any greater ratio--resulting in a long, less humpbacked bridge--would place too much horizontal pressure upon the soft terrain on which the city is built. The long gentle arch of Calatrava's bridge in Venice has a span to rise ration of either 16:1 or 17:1 (depending on one's sources), and the mechanism he designed to compensate for this excessive horizontal thrust has proved inadequate to the task. As a result, constant monitoring of the bridge is required, along with expensive and unending maintenance.

Calatrava's broken "egg"

But, you may ask, how does the bridge work on a less technical level? Not very well, I have to say. Though it was specifically put in to provide another, faster route toward the historic center for tourists, it does not do so for everyone--and not without some danger. Five years after the bridge's opening, and ten years after the city council first demanded the architectural plan accommodate them, the bridge remains inaccessible to disabled people. Though a spherical red lift--derisively called "the egg" by locals--was tacked onto the design at great additional cost in 2008, it sits idly upon its track that runs along one side of the bridge, still not operational.

Moreover, while the bridge's low broad steps allude to the shape of steps on early (and much smaller) Venetian bridges, they are spaced so irregularly that stumbles and injuries have been a regular occurrence since its opening. Reports in the world-wide press in late September 2008 noted that no fewer than 10 tourists had sought treatment for twisted ankles and other minor injuries in the first 20 days of the bridge's use. City officials sarcastically responded by simply blaming the tourists, whom they claimed have always been staggered by the city's beauty. But though I've passed over the bridge countless times myself, I still find it requires all of my attention not to mis-step.

Even in dry weather many locals tend to avoid walking on the slippery glass panels

In fact, walking on the bridge gets even more challenging when the weather is the least bit inclement. Most of each very wide step consists of glass which, as everyone but Calatrava himself seems to know, becomes slippery in the fog that characterizes a Venetian winter, not to mention in rain or snow. The glass panels, whose pale-green-blue tint already suggests the surface of an ice rink, also freeze quite easily. These weather-related issues have caused such problems at another of Calatrava's glass-paneled footbridges in Bilbao that the city, much to the architect's dismay, carpeted it over to prevent more falls, injuries, and lawsuits.

This image from the Città di Venezia website might lead a few folks to think that the impracticality of glass steps is a fair price to pay for such a glowing vision of beauty--except, alas, I've never seen the bridge lit up like this

Finally, and ironically enough, this bridge whose entire raison d'etre is mass tourism, has turned out to be particularly unable to support it, as the wheels of rolling suitcases damage its glass panels. According to a report published last June in La Nuova Venezia, each glass panel must be individually made or repaired in an artisanal process, and there is no ready replacement inventory. At the time of the article, 14 of the steps needed to be replaced, at a cost ranging from 4,000 to 7,000 euros each, depending on the type of damage.

Given all of these problems, I sometimes wonder what the imperious directors of the old Republic of Venice would have done with an architect like Santiago Calatrava in the 16th century. No matter how unpleasant next week's trial may turn out to be for him, he should probably thank his lucky star that it's not taking place four or five hundred years ago. 

Two Images of Patience Beside the Lagoon

Seated about 100 meters apart, waiting for different things.

The Passion of the Long Distance Runner: Venice Marathon Today

Nearing the end of his long ordeal, a runner gives thanks

Some photos of the 28th annual Venice Marathon, in which 4,000 people participated.

I missed getting a photo of the first person to finish the marathon, but this is the 4th, which is still awfully impressive

Crossing the last bridge before the finish line

The runners weren't the only ones who prepared for the race

Sweat and blood

A supporter becomes a participant during the home stretch

The thrill of seeing a loved one approach the finish line

Approaching the finish together

Aeneas carried his father from the ruined Troy, this son pushes his own father toward the finish line

Completing the course in just a bit over 4 1/2 hours

Having completed the race, a runner passes by the crowd in his metallic mantle

This French runner was among the first wave of finishers

Lion-hearted

There's No Such Thing as "Regular Maintenance" in Venice

I walked past a renovation site yesterday on the ground floor of a large rather non-descript apartment building beside Palazzo Morosini Brandolin on the Grand Canal (near the Rialto Pescheria) and was reminded of Lidia Panzeri's observation in The Venice Report (Cambridge Univ Press, 2009) that "It is inappropriate to speak of 'regular' maintenance, as in Venice any maintenance is exceptional in character." And the same can certainly be said of renovations like the one pictured above as well.

The long oak piles (at least 3 meters long) upon which Venetian buildings were famously constructed were, as Deborah Howard writes in her Architectural History of Venice, so expensive that they were only used when absolutely necessary, and usually only beneath those structural walls of a building that had to carry the greatest load. In contrast, "interior walls," she notes, "had less substantial foundations, a fact that has led to subsidence in many cases." Looking through a window in a narrow calle at the work going on above I wondered if subsidence of the interior walls was an issue here, but not knowing when the building was even put up in the first place it was hard to guess exactly what was going on. At some point the base of the interior walls looked to have been reinforced with concrete, but how recently I don't know.

Venice was a city born of the most extraordinary engineering, and so the work goes on, out of sight, anonymously, but no less extraordinarily.

The covered exterior of the building under renovation, with Palazzo Morosini Brandolin at right

William Tell in Venice, This Afternoon

As far as I know this is not a Venetian tradition at children's birthday parties, just a spontaneous bit of inspiration.

I'm not sure how many parents would be willing to balance a small citrus (rather than the apple of the legend) on his or her head, but it did seem to hold the attention of 4 and 5 year olds even better than pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.

Addio to Marc Quinn's Inflated Alison Lapper (aka "Breath")

When it first appeared beside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore last spring I was intrigued by the many questions raised by the artist Marc Quinn's large inflatable "sculpture" of Alison Lapper. It wasn't just that here was an example of the human form that would not have been treated monumentally and heroically in the past, but whether the whole sense of heroism that was present in Quinn's original Carrara marble version of this sculpture (displayed in Trafalgar Square) was lost in its translation to a material more evocative of the floating cartoon figures in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade than Michelangelo's David.

Additionally, the office of the Patriarch of Venice raised the related question of whether this inflatable version was more advertisement (for Quinn's show on San Giorgio Maggiore) than art. I wrote about all this last May, and wasn't really sure what to make of the piece, though the subject herself and importance of depicting a fuller range of the human form and manner of being inclined me to think this piece did at least potentially do one of the best things art can do by making us see and think about things we often overlook (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/05/marc-quinns-alison-lapper-pregnant-on.html)

But after visiting the piece last week, I now think that it's time for it to go--as I suspect it soon will, as the Quinn show closed at the end of September.

Of course it's not that the subject of the piece has changed, but that the material in which it's embodied--always subject to questions about its suitability and the messages it carried--has now become so faded by exposure to the elements as to lose whatever capacity it once arguably had to convey heroic monumentality. Not only has the color of the piece changed from a vaguely marblesque mauve to a blotchy pink, but the seams in the figure have become so visible as to become themselves a primary focus of one's attention--which can't really be considered a good thing, unless somewhere in the world there's a culture whose heroic ideals are embodied by a beach ball.

A comparison of the appearance of Quinn's work at the end of May, left, and at the middle of October, right

Maybe I'm just being fussy, but if I were a visual artist I wouldn't want a work of mine to remain on display in such a compromised state.

And maybe I'm being unfair, but my visit to the inflatable piece last week reinvigorated all my doubts about an artist who bothered to produce a life-sized solid-18-carat gold sculpture of Kate Moss.

Description of Marc Quinn's large inflatable work attached to its large base

Just consider the description above now located on the base of the large inflatable figure. The idea that this depiction of Alison Lapper in Venice was in any way "held up by the breath of those talking about it" is both amusing and absurd to anyone who remembers reaction to the piece here last spring, when the only thing that both the Patriarch and the overwhelming majority of Venetian residents had to say about it was that it had no place on San Giorgio Maggiore. In fact, though I can't claim to have made a formal survey, I didn't speak to single person in Venice who liked it. I asked friends, acquaintances, and strangers: the most positive response I received was from a woman who lived on Giudecca and said that, though she was sympathetic to the subject matter, she didn't like the piece. Everyone else usually just said they hated it, it was ugly, and why did it have to be so damn purple?

The placard above states that "if people lose interest in [the work] and are unwilling to give it the attention and resources it demands the work will cease to exist in the physical world", but of course this is blatantly false. Venetians have had no more to do with the persistence of Quinn's sculpture in a place they don't want it, than they did with the long unwanted residence of Charles Ray's "Boy with Frog" at the tip of La Dogana.

In both cases I seemed to think the sculptures were of more interest and had more artistic merit than were generally accorded them by other residents of Venice, but it's the false self-congratulatory populist rhetoric by the artists of both works that finally irritates me. Neither "Boy with Frog" nor the pretentiously-entitled "Breath" depended upon the willingness of "people" to "give [them] the attention and resources [they] demand" (such as an armed guard), but on the largesse of private foundations who kept them in place in spite of Venetian response. And it's this in spite of that Venetians have gotten sick of: the billboards that remain for years on cherished monuments in spite of the fact that all work behind them is finished, the growing number of cruise ships and tourists who flood the city in spite of acknowledged dangers and damages....

Indeed, if "the collective consciousness" of the vast majority of Venetians were allowed to actually express its opinion of Quinn's work on San Giorgio Maggiore it would have done so long ago not by "holding it up" in any way, but in a simple quite literally deflating gesture. And but for the fact that the subject of the work merits thoughtful consideration, I'd almost be willing to say at this point that the artist's windy pretension might benefit from a good pricking--that would set it off on an appropriately frantic comic flatulent flight, like an overinflated untied balloon let loose over the basin of San Marco.

Autumn in the "Secret Garden", Giudecca

Some of the vineyards behind Le Zitelle, whose fruit was crushed at the cantina on San Michele I featured in 3 posts at the end of September

What I'm calling a "secret garden" isn't really a secret at all, though it is walled and well out of the way of any tourist routes. It's a large community garden behind the church of Le Zitelle that I first found out about (and posted about) last March (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2012/03/secret-garden-giudecca.html), when I was determined to become a regular volunteer there. It hasn't worked out that way. Jen and Sandro worked there a few times, until SpiazziVerdi--the excellent organization that runs the Giudecca garden--helped create another community garden in the large rather unkempt yard beside Sandro's pre-school near Sant' Alvise in Cannaregio, to which Jen and Sandro then devoted their energies.

I'm hoping, though, to work tomorrow in the garden behind Le Zitelle during SpiazziVerdi's "Aglio Day": a day devoted to planting that potent bulb. More information about the day can be found here: http://spiazziverdi.blogspot.it/.

What struck me about the Giudecca garden when I recently visited one late afternoon, was that the community that benefitted from the garden was not limited to gardeners. At the far end of the large walled lot in which the garden is located is a casa di riposo (rest home). There were no gardeners at work when I visited, but a number of residents from the rest home were walking with a family member or friend or caretaker among all the growing things. None of the residents I saw looked to be in any condition to garden themselves, but even those of diminished lucidity seemed to enjoy the plants and flowers, to enjoy being among the real tangible verdant world at a time in life when, unfortunately, it's all too easy and common for their world to shrink to the dimensions of their lodgings and a television. 

Of course at any time of one's life these days it's not uncommon for our world to shrink to the dimensions of our ubiquitous electronic devices. One's very standing in the world often seems to be reflected in the number and sophistication of the electronic devices to which one is wedded--or even welded, so to speak. It makes me appreciate organizations like SpiazziVerdi all the more, and their commitment to community which is not merely virtual.