Turning Torso and Ceruse Poisoning
from Rebecca Mead's essay (TNY, Sep 1, 2008) on Santiago Calatrava: The first completed Calatrava skyscraper, the Turning Torso tower, in Malmo, Sweden, which is fifty-four stories high and twists through ninety degrees, was derived from a sculpture that Calatrava first made in 1985, and this, in turn was prompted by his sketches of the human spine. . . . Calatrava's bridges, for which he initially earned his fame, often evoke the shapes of lithe human forms, bending or lunging with Olympian vigor. * More recently, he built a library for the University of Zurich's law school--an ovoid structure topped with a glass oculus--that fits snugly within the courtyard of the school's existing hundred-year-old building. A visitor standing inside the splendid skylit atrium will see no books or students; the workspaces are hidden behind five levels of pearwood-clad balconies, as if the library were a beehive in which all honey-producing activity had been cunningly concealed. The oc...