Built Into Me — Valencia: What Santiago Calatrava and Las Fallas Taught Me About Design
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Structure, ribs, and the courage to exaggerate. Every photo here was taken by yours truly — on my very “new” Galaxy 9 at the time.
A few weeks ago, we were watching Andor. There’s a scene filmed in Valencia.
My husband paused it and said, “Wait… that looks familiar.”
And I just smiled and giggled.
I’ve been there!!
Seven years ago.
It hit me that I’ve never really talked about how much that place impacted me. And the fact that it actually looked like a place built just for this series or any Star Wars context.
So here we are.
The City of Arts and Sciences: Where Architecture Becomes Experience
WHERE THE heck AM I?
I thought I was going to see nice architecture.
Valencia said absolutely not.
The City of Arts and Sciences is not subtle.
It’s aggressively Massive. White. Sharp.
I remember thinking —WHERE THE heck AM I?
Everything felt too precise. Like someone obsessed over every single line curve.
And the water made it look platonic. Like it was an idea of a building, not just a building.
This is Santiago Calatrava’s work.
A Valencian architect known for pushing structure into spectacle.
The Ribs
Calatrava doesn’t hide structure. He exaggerates it.
The skeletal frames stretch upward and outward, basically anatomical. You don’t experience the building as a sealed box, you experience its bones.
The repetition creates rhythm.The negative space between ribs becomes just as important as the material itself.
Light passes through. The Shadows move across the ground throughout the day, and that way, the structure interacts with time.
Exposure.
In design, we work on / with surfaces.
We polish.We layer. We complement.
But what if the structure is the design?
What if the system is visible?
What if instead of hiding the grid, you amplify it?
Context: Why it feels "out of space" but isn't.
The City of Arts and Sciences was built in the old riverbed of the Turia, which was diverted after catastrophic flooding in 1957.
Instead of rebuilding over the river, the city transformed that space into a cultural and scientific complex. And that's such a cool aspect of this place- the water reflects the structure, it amplifies scale, and softens the massive buildings. With it, they feel anchored. It’s wild to be driving through a regular city and suddenly, to your right, you see this.
Imagine that. Something can feel radically futuristic — and still belong.
Las Fallas: The Opposite Kind of Structure
And then there were Las Fallas.
Every March, Valencia builds hundreds of monumental sculptures — called fallas — (pronounced: /fa.ʝas/) across the city.
Teams of artists spend months, sometimes an entire year, constructing them. Some stand several stories tall. They're painted, detailed, satirical, surreal. They fill entire streets.
And then, on the night of March 19th — the Nit del Foc — they burn every single one.
On purpose!!!
The tradition dates back centuries, rooted in the Valencian carpenters' guild who would burn scraps of wood to celebrate the arrival of spring. It evolved into something much bigger — and in 2016, UNESCO declared it an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The entire city gathers to watch them disappear.
That contrast shook me.
Valencia gave me both: structure and surrender. Permanence and ephemerality.
On one side :Calatrava’s white ribs, designed to endure.
On the other: Monuments built to vanish.
Las Fallas made me think about attachment.
About permanence. About how much effort we put into things that won’t last forever.
And yet — that doesn’t make them less meaningful.
If anything, it makes them more intense.
Because everyone knows they will burn.
What Valencia Built Into Me
For years, I didn't consciously connect that trip to my design practice.
But looking back, I can see it everywhere.
I'm less afraid of visible systems
Less afraid of repetition
More aware of how negative space shapes experience
More intentional about how light interacts with a room
And maybe most importantly, I'm not afraid of exaggeration.
Calatrava exaggerates structure. Las Fallas exaggerates ephemerality. Valencia exaggerates contrast.
When things start to feel repetitive, exaggeration feels like relief.
This is the first post in Built Into Me — a series on the architectural experiences that shaped how I see, and how I design. Thank you for reading all the way here.
If something in here resonated — I'd love to know. And if you're curious about what this kind of thinking looks like applied to a space, let's talk.
con amor,
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