The twist is all the rage in architecture. Just look at the Irish-financed Chicago Spire, designed by Santiago Calatrava. The Spanish starchitect tells Emma Cullinanabout people-friendly buildings and taking inspiration from nature
Take a river tour in most cities and you will slosh through the urban environment, being shown this church and that government building, but in Chicago the main boat tour takes in historical and modern skyscrapers. It is run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which has a prominent office downtown, beside Millennium Park, with its Frank Gehry concert hall and Anish Kapoor sculpture.
Chicago is a city that takes its architecture seriously. There's even a style known as the Chicago School, involving the likes of Louis Sullivan, whose exponents were among the early pioneers of steel-frame buildings, in the late 1800s. They helped to change US architectural history by showing that American design did not have to be a slave to European classicism.
Residents of outlying, homely neighbourhoods went mad for Frank Lloyd Wright, with Oak Park being an astonishing showcase of his work. One homeowner is obviously so bored by architectural tourists passing slowly by his house that he has acquired two vicious-sounding dogs that bark as you dare to approach the front gate.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built here, too. His work includes a neat glass box that forms part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, on the south side of the city. It also has a building by Rem Koolhaas topped with a steel tube that sucks in and spits out passing trains.
In contrast to Chicago's low-lying gems are the downtown skyscrapers, dominated for years by the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, both created by the architectural practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in a part of the city that is pushing up through the troposphere. The Irish developer Garrett Kelleher, of Shelbourne Development, is now constructing the Chicago Spire - the tallest building in the city and the highest solely residential block in the world - and he has commissioned the New York-based Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to design it.
Kelleher made his money in Chicago early in his career, running a painting company, converting lofts and renovating buildings, before returning to Ireland as the property boom took hold. In Ireland, too, he has made a name in doing up old buildings, including, in Dublin, former Department of Justice offices on St Stephen's Green and the Virgin Megastore, on Aston Quay, which is now an apartment building. He has also joined up with the Government to redevelop Hawkins House, which houses the Department of Health and Children. He owns adjoining sites.
When Kelleher, who also has property and business interests in the UK, Belgium and France, bought the Chicago site, in July 2006, it had planning permission for a mixed-use tower that Calatrava had been working on. Kelleher wasn't required to take on the architect, but the pair hit it off and sparked ideas for the residential spire.
Attracting big-name architects has become akin to collecting art, and although many countries have talented architects who are acutely aware of what constitutes good design, it seems that cities are keen to make sure they have something by a world-renowned designer, such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind, Gehry or Calatrava. These are the David Hockneys, Jasper Johnses, Jeff Koonses, Lucian Freuds and Damien Hirsts of architecture - starchitects, as they have become known - and Dublin has commissioned work from three of them. The risk is that cities that pursue trophy buildings will be endowed with off-the-peg pieces that are not among the starchitects' best and that could be anywhere, as they don't relate to their surroundings.
So how has Calatrava related his 150-storey, 600m (2,000ft) twisting spire to Chicago? He has, he says, addressed the city's varying scales. "At the neighbourhood scale, a plaza and park at the base will make the impact of the building as neat and as human as possible. It will be slender, so that it has a small impact on the ground and liberates the area for the public," says Calatrava. "It is important to understand the pedestrian and neighbourhood scale to address people living and working around the building. The other scale is that of the city and its skyline. In a way this will become the centrepiece of the cityscape and part of Chicago's identity. We want it to integrate and give the surrounding area the same quality as the building itself, creating not only nice housing but a way for the building to relate to the city."
Calatrava has said that architecture is nothing without people, so how will he ensure that those living high above the city streets are content? Each apartment will be of an individual design, he says. The reason no two are the same could be a knock-on effect of the overall design, the way the building twists and tapers, but that is a good thing as far as the architect and developer are concerned.
"There is a change in the view about how condominiums are designed," says Calatrava. "People used to make prototype apartments and reproduce these boxes hundreds and even thousands of times, and then ask people to conform. We believe that every person is different, and the shape of this building means that each apartment is unique. I hope people appreciate that."
If the first decade of the century has been about the shiny, iconic blob, kicked off in 1997 by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, then it seems that the twist could now become all the rage. Dublin nearly got a twister with the first design for the U2 Tower, and Dubai's Infinity Tower - also designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill - will be a turner. Calatrava, who became famous for his bridge designs before moving on to buildings, constructed Turning Torso, a 54-storey tower in the Swedish city of Malmö that is like a stack of boxes rotating through 90 degrees, as opposed to Chicago's 360-degree pirouette.
You can't just jump into a piece of architecture, says Calatrava. "In order to arrive at the Chicago building you need a previous work, and Malmö was part of it: looking at how people live in a unit with an enormous amount of facade and light. I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art . . . If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty."
He seems to have passed the concept of switching between design disciplines to his 12-year-old daughter, who has expressed a wish to be a fashion designer. Calatrava would like her to study architecture, then use that training in the couture world, should she wish to pursue that dream. Two of his three older sons have studied engineering, with one going on to do architecture, just as Calatrava did (studying art, then engineering, then architecture); his eldest son has followed his wife's career in law.
The Chicago Spire was inspired by a shell, which naturally fits into the zoomorphic and botanical influences in Calatrava's work. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the geometric qualities of folding bodies; an example of how these can be incorporated into architecture is the folding stage canopy at the rear of the Ark children's cultural centre, in Temple Bar, which Calatrava contributed to the Dublin building, by the architects Shane O'Toole and Michael Kelly.
Designing buildings with floristic and faunistic forms is an inspired idea because, however large they are, they resonate with people. We find it easier to accept natural forms, yet, as buildings, they do make the heart flutter, because people tend to be moved by magnified nature. Some feel that Calatrava's James Joyce Bridge, in Dublin, is a tad overmagnified in its cramped setting. His next, in Dublin's Docklands, will have more breathing space. The Samuel Beckett Bridge is due to be finished in a year's time.
Nature is also very now. "In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different."
Calatrava says he respects Irish tradition; when he lived in Zurich, where he studied and met his wife, he would go to a restaurant frequented by Joyce. "The owner told me that I was sitting in the place where Joyce used to sit." But he also admires a more recent generation: his first visit to Ireland was 12 years ago, for a lecture in memory of Peter Rice, the great Irish engineer responsible for Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, among other buildings.
Calatrava likens Ireland to Spain in that both countries have had "a kind of renaissance in the past 20 years". Indeed, an Irish-American architect from Chicago says the Irish community there is amazed that the funding for the tower is coming from Ireland: they are just not used to that.
Although building work has begun, nobody will see the tower until the autumn, because the building is having a complex waterproof foundation prepared. Its underground car park will plunge seven storeys.
For Kelleher, the Chicago Spire is a chance to make his mark on the city he now calls his second home. For Calatrava it is an architect's dream, and he is realising it with a tall, elegant form.
"Chicago is a beautiful city with a wonderful skyline. This is a great opportunity to do a great building: something beautiful and unique." The world will judge when it is completed in 2011.
Calatrava: Complete Works 1979-2007 by Philip Jodidio is published by Taschen, €100