Leonardo da Vinci: The Latest Architecture and News

The XIV Florence Biennale of Art and Design announced that Santiago Calatrava will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, a "tribute to one of the most influential architects of our times and a recognition of your audacious experimentation, extraordinary talent, and ingenious ability to combine architecture and art in projects imagined and designed in harmony with nature and oriented towards the ideals of beauty.”

The award ceremony is scheduled for 19 October in the theater area of the Spandolini Pavilion of the Fortezza da Basso, where the architect, engineer, and artist will give a speech. From designing and constructing the Ponte della Constitution in Venice, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York, the UAE Pavilion at the 2020 Expo, and the Zubizuri Bridge across the Nervion River in Bilbao, Spain, amongst many other infamous works, Calatrava is one of the most influential architects of the past 50 years, establishing himself as a pioneer in the industry, from architecture, and engineering, to drawing, and sculpting.

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Architecture is not simply building. Over 2,000 years ago, Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio defined two base realities in building: “Firmness” (Safety) and “Commodity” (Use) and then offered what turns building into architecture: “Delight” (Beauty).

“Firmness” has been recoined in this century as “Resilience”. After being unscathed in five hurricanes over thirty years, does this building have “Delight” beyond its “Firmness”? The property of “Commodity” is found in any design’s usefulness and fit: is this archive, in constant use, have “Delight” beyond its “Commodity”?

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A collaboration between the British Library and Microsoft, titled Turning the Pages 2.0, made 570 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's' Codex Arundel available for free online. Now anyone can navigate the writings of one of the most inventive minds of the Renaissance. In the hundreds of digitized pages are ideas for airplanes, helicopters, parachutes, submarines and automobiles, centuries before they were developed and brought to the world.

During his lifetime, part of his ideas and reflections were recorded in his notebooks. Some of these manuscripts have been lost over the centuries, and those that remain have become rare objects accessed only by a select group of collectors and historians - until now.