In the center of the main room of Henry Art Gallery's exhibition, Santiago Calatrava: The Architect's Studio, is a model of the City of Arts and Sciences located in Valencia, Spain. The model sits on top of the low, long crate that it arrived in from Calatrava's main office in Zurich, Switzerland. On the side of the crate there is a black imprint of an umbrella and also a wine glass--two objects that have nothing in particular to do with what the crate contained and now displays: the model of a perfect city. Perfect because all of its structures were issued entirely from one mind--that of the Spanish-born architect whose fame has reached global proportions. Consisting of a white bridge, white opera hall, white planetarium, white floating walkway, and white winter garden, the City of Arts and Sciences is the City of God. And any city that is designed by God is always a city that troubles us mere mortals.

Curated by the founder and publisher of arcspace.com, Kirsten Kiser, the exhibition occupies four rooms (two largish, two smallish). It has video footage (shown on TV screens or projected on white walls); models of completed buildings and bridges; rapid watercolors of human, animal, and architectural forms; and wooden and brass sculptures. All together they constitute an excellent introduction to an architect who is presently in the process of conquering the final frontier-- America.

The structures of Calatrava (who is a mathematician, designer, and sculptor) inspire two responses, the first of which is utter amazement at the sight of their soaring and asymmetrical elegance. His buildings and bridges are the distillations of architectural materials into the perfect stuff of art. The second response to his work is a growing uneasiness. Upon a closer and longer look, Calatrava's structures begin to take on a skeletal appearance--they become less like the stuff of art and more like the bleached bones of monsters that once lived and dumbly died in the land before time.

In China Miéville's brilliant fantasy novel Peridido Street Station, the ribs of a "creature [that] had fallen... and died millennia ago, [and are now in the middle of a dense neighborhood called Bonetown]," are described in this way: "Leviathan shards of yellowing ivory thicker than the oldest trees exploded out of the ground, bursting away from each other, sweeping up in a curved ascent until, more than a hundred feet above the earth, looming now over the roofs of the surrounding houses, they curled sharply back towards each other. They climbed high again till the points nearly touched, vast crooked fingers, a god-sized ivory mantrap." If one were to bleach the fossil of this monster, and fuse parts of its spine together, they would have something that looks a lot like Calatrava's proposed design for the new PATH terminal at the World Trade Center site.

The monstrous nature of Calatrava's architecture is a consequence of it being inspired by human and animal bodies. The sketchbooks displayed in The Architect's Studio exhibit are filled with watercolors of walking bodies, flying bodies, bodies confronting bulls, and bodies that harden into buildings. None of these human forms are fat; all are as slender as the Turning Torso building that Calatrava designed and was recently completed in Malmø, Sweden. Because Calatrava's buildings and bridges are basically giant bodies or body parts, and because most of these buildings and bridges are made with pure white concrete, they end up looking like the pristine remains of prelapsarian creatures that plodded about the frozen earth flattening our fur-appareled ancestors with their giant feet.

Another troubling aspect of Calatrava's buildings is they are so singular, so monological. Though the architect can speak seven languages, his structures only know how to say one thing, in one language. Form for the sake of form. His buildings and bridges do not communicate with their natural or built surroundings; they stand alone, deriving their energy and inspiration not from outside sources but entirely from within. Like Hegel's oriental "absolute," Calatrava's most outrageously shaped building (the Tenerife Concert Hall in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain) is a "light which illumines itself. Only it not only illumines itself but also emanates."

The exhibition is certainly edifying, but God's creations are just plain creepy.

Santiago Calatrava is lecturing at Kane Hall, room 130, on Sun Nov 7, 7 pm, free.