According to Santiago Calatrava, there is a Communist conspiracy against him in the Valencia City Council.

The hometown of the world-famous engineer-architect is littered with his structures, which have become tourist calling cards  — here he has designed the City of Arts and Sciences, a multi-building arts complex, along with metro stations and bridges. The conspiracy, if it is one, has emerged because of the huge expense involved in the upkeep of those structures, which a cash-strapped council is no longer able to undertake to the architect’s exacting specifications.

While most “icon” buildings are demonstratively useless  — often galleries and museums whose form is of far greater importance than their functions  — what Calatrava specializes in is infrastructure, or rather, making things that should be entirely functional utterly useless. He is not a particularly original designer. His railway stations are visibly inspired by the faintly kitsch futurism of the high Cold War era, evoking especially the “organic” concrete structure of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal for JFK Airport. Calatrava’s railway stations in Zurich and Lisbon, or the incongruously immense (and frankly, breathtaking) Guillemins Station in the Belgian steel town of Liège, are intended to give the effect of an immense organism into whose concrete ribs you are plunged in order to buy your ticket and get your train.