Turning heads

Santiago Calatrava’s reputation for groundbreaking architecture has been crowned with the Turning Torso apartment tower in Sweden – a building that turns 90 degrees over its 54 floors

Seeing Turning Torso for the first time – Santiago Calatrava’s 190m-tall apartment tower in Malmö, Sweden – it is easy to see why many developers are desperate to commission the 54-year-old architect.

The Turning Torso is the tallest building
in Sweden and a distinctive landmark

The building appears to leap towards the sky, turning 90 degrees from top to bottom like a dancer mid-pirouette. A steel frame running up one side – the only visible means of support – looks every bit like the dancer’s backbone and only adds to the beauty.

Calatrava may be best known for designing the main stadium at the Athens Olympics – its domed roof, supported by two 300m arches became the symbol of the Games – but Turning Torso could set the tone for the rest of his career.

He has already been commissioned to build apartment blocks in Chicago and New York because of it. While in June, he was given the Freyssinet Medal by the International Federation for Structural Concrete precisely because of the building’s “imagination and boldness”. Awarded once every four years to the most outstanding concrete structure built during that time, he could not receive higher recognition.

It is such accolades that make it hard to believe the building started life as a 1.5m-high sculpture of a “body in motion”. Especially one done for little other reason than Calatrava’s own amusement.

“Over the years, there has been much interplay between my sculptures and built work,” Calatrava told Host City from his New York office. “Sculpture permits me a great deal of freedom, and I can then apply this in my architecture. However, it is important to understand that the building is not simply the sculpture enlarged to 190m.”

Calatrava was actually commissioned to build Turning Torso in 1999 by HSB, a Swedish housing cooperative, as part of Malmö’s efforts to rejuvenate its western harbour. The area had been in decline ever since the city’s shipbuilding industry collapsed.

HSB approached Calatrava specifically because they had seen his sculpture, called Twisting Torso, and felt it could become a landmark for the city, attracting as much investment as praise.

For such a complicated design, its construction was relatively straightforward. Beginning in February 2001, the SEK 1.6bn project was managed by HSB Malmö and NCC Construction.

Sitting on foundations seven metres deep and 30m wide, the tower is based around a concrete core, shaped like a pipe, in which the main infrastructure is found – including five lifts. The floors cantilever off the core, each rotating 1.6 degrees to give the building its distinct twist.

The floors cantilever off the core, each rotating
1.6 degrees to give the building its distinct twist

The steel frame – or “exoskeleton” – runs up the pointed end of the building, providing additional support. Designed by Spanish firm Emesa, it weighs a staggering 820 tonnes and is attached to the tower by 38 “steel cigars”.

The building may be operating at the limits of conventional engineering – especially in terms of cantilevering – but according to Ingvar Nohlin, HSB’s project director, the only difficulty in the construction was the sheer amount of planning involved. “Because every slab is turning about 40cm from one level to the next we had to move everything – sewage pipes, pipes for the sprinkler system, even the doors. The only thing that goes straight throughout the building are the elevators.”

The two-person team initially tasked with setting out the concrete and pipes was quickly expanded to eight because of this.

In spite of this straightforward construction, the building was not completed until November 2005 – nearly three years behind schedule and at double the original budget. Nohlin shrugs the delays off as the result of “the usual problems” such as mistakes in plans and the difficulties of working in Sweden. High wind speeds alone caused more than 150 days construction to be lost. The one actual problem with the building, according to Nohlin, is it only has 400 sq m of floor space on each level – a “stupidly low” figure for a housing project.

This was an improvement from Calatrava’s original plans, which only had 350 sq m per floor. But in the end, nothing could compromise the building’s design.

“We agreed at the start that we should take all the consequences of Calatrava’s design and not disturb it or change it or destroy it,” Nohlin says. “We knew we could have added in more floor space or built it without the exoskeleton, but then we would have destroyed the whole idea of the sculpture – of the Turning Torso – and nobody would be talking about it today.”

Calatrava himself denies the building is impractical. HSB’s interest in the design was “precisely because it is so functional,” he says. But, ever the architect, he cannot help adding that buildings should be judged on their artistic merits as much as how functional they are.

“I believe it is a mistake to think of artistic form as somehow separate from function,” he says. “It’s very important to me to make clear statements, which can also be poetic. On one level a project must be very rational and clear. But on another, it must stimulate emotion.”

Regardless of the building’s lack of floor space, all 147 apartments are now rented, with tenants paying anywhere from SEK 7,000 to SEK 26,000 a month. The price includes window cleaning and a wine cellar.

The 10 floors of offices are expected to be rented by the end of 2006, while the two meeting rooms on floors 53 and 54, both entirely designed by Calatrava and offering views across to Denmark, are being booked-up.

It is no wonder then that the architectural community expects the building to have a strong influence on apartment buildings worldwide.

Calatrava is doing his part to ensure this – the two towers he has planned are an extension of the design. A 150-storey tower alongside Lake Michigan in Chicago will spiral upwards like a corkscrew. While that for 80th South Street in Manhattan, New York, also features cubes stacked on top of each other, although this time they are offset so the roof of one forms a terrace for that above it.

Both these projects are at the early stage of development. But even if they are not built, Calatrava can be happy: the future of the apartment tower looks increasingly likely to be a sculpture in his studio.