ABSTRACT
Calatrava’s notoriety in the media for financial transgressions over multiple projects has rendered him a financier-architect figure, exposing him to criticisms an architect would not normally face. In a mocking sense, he is the Goldman Sachs of the iconic architecture industry: the architect has been implicated in financial crises in Greece, Valencia, Maastricht and even Manhattan, facing accusations of greed, systemic corruption, financial manipulation and creation of moral hazard. In Valencia, for example, Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences financially crashed the city, spawning a new speculation, the “Ghost Towers,” that were never built, while according to The Full Calatrava website, Calatrava profited from the city’s loss. This chapter considers the iconic architect not as a capitalist puppet, as is commonly thought, but as a financier, instrumental in the financialisation mechanism of iconic developments, which deprive the city of its objecthood, its reality, and turn digital dreams into fictitious capital for the capitalist elites of the iconic architecture industry.
