Valencia sues opera house architect as white elephants rot

Santiago Calatrava is facing legal action from his native city as the dazzling City of Arts and Sciences complex begins to fall apart just eight years after inauguration

He is one of a breed of "starchitects" whose spectacular bridges, airports and museums have brought him fame around the world but now Santiago

Calatrava is facing legal action from his native city of Valencia.

The dazzling City of Arts and Sciences, a sprawling space-age complex that transformed the centre of the city of Valencia when it was inaugurated eight years ago, is already falling apart and regional authorities have said they will sue the architect responsible.

Last week chunks of the mosaic façade of the centerpiece opera house fell off in high winds and authorities were forced cancel scheduled Christmas performances and to close the building to the public until further notice.

Authorities are laying the blame of the rapid deterioration of buildings within the complex at the foot of Mr Calatrava, who was paid close to 100 million euros for a project that came in at four times over budget with a final price tag of over 1 billion euros.

Maximo Buch, the regional government spokesman responsible for Arts and Culture announced on Friday that Valencia would pursue legal action against Mr Calatrava and his architectural firm for the cost of repairs blaming "construction defects"

An emergency technical report on the state of the building is expected to report next week.

The showstopping opera house of the Palau de las Artes, one of seven futuristic buildings within the complex set on reclaimed land in Valencia's former port first began showing signs of aging a year ago.

Wrinkles began to mar the smooth white ceramic skin of the dome made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny mosaic tiles, an effect that was blamed simply on a design fault but nothing was done to repair it and masonry began to fall off when the city was battered by high winds last week.

It is not the first time the architect has faced legal action over faulty design. In the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, Mr Calatrava and his team had to pay 3.3 million euros to settle a dispute over a conference centre he was commissioned to design after it suffered a structural collapse.

In the Avala wine growing region Mr Calatrava is being sued over the persistent leaking roof of the spectacular Ysios bodega he designed 12 years ago for wine producers Domecq. The owners are asking for 2 million euros to hire fresh architects to devise a solution after several botched attempts by Calatrava's team to fix it.

In Bilbao, an iconic footbridge designed by Mr Calatrava has proved a constant headache for authorities since it was inaugurated in 1997 to take pedestrians across the river to the Guggenheim museum.

The glass tile surface that created a spectacular effect when lit from below proved an unstable surface in rain and city authorities were forced to pay out compensation to dozens of pedestrians who injured themselves slipping on it.

Two years ago, the city resorted to covering it in a huge black rubber carpet which dulls the bridges beauty and knocked several people off their feet when it flipped up in a recent storm.

Auditors in Venice are taking Mr. Calatrava and several engineers to court because of cost overruns and what they see as an excessive need for repairs on Mr. Calatrava's Ponte della Costituzione, a footbridge across the Grand Canal that came in at least three times over the original 4 million euro budget.

In Valencia, where Mr Calatrava was born 62 years ago, the architect has also faced criticism after it emerged he was paid 15 million euros by local authorities for a project that will never be built. The project for three skyscrapers and eight residential blocks was shelved when Spain's property bubble burst in 2008.

Regional authorities had hoped that Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences would do for Valencia what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim did for Bilbao but it is widely seen as a white elephant symbol of the vast overspend by regional governments that have left them struggling with huge debts.

Calls made to Mr Calatrava's offices in New York and Zurich were not answered.