Renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava — the man behind perhaps the most controversial yet-to-be-built building in America — has been commissioned to design the first building on the new Lakeland campus of USF Polytechnic. With Lakeland's Florida Southern College already renowned for its unique collection of Frank Lloyd Wrights, the city stands to burnish its unlikely rep as a trove of internationally significant architecture.
Calatrava can only hope that the USF job doesn't create the headaches he's encountered in realizing a new NY/NJ Port Authority transportation hub at Ground Zero. His vision won admiration at first for its dramatically wingéd roofline, but has since become mired in the politics of rebuilding the World Trade Center. When the architect unveiled his revised design for the structure earlier this spring, NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff characterized it as a "heart-wrenching" failure, "a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else."
USF Poly is hardly as much of a political minefield as post-9/11 New York. But that doesn't mean the design process is going to be clear sailing for Calatrava's firm. Funding for the new campus has already raised questions, and we can never understimate the fuck-up potential for any project involving higher education and the Florida legislature. Let's hope that the end result means architecture fans have yet another reason to make a pilgrimage to Lakeland.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2009.