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frank van den broeke

Borromini, Santiago Calatrava and myself

This is a weblog about myself.

It’s about what takes my breath away.I like to work with my hands. It gives me the time to reflect. And there are a few architects that inspired me enormously. One of them is Borromini, I like his practical mind, how he is coming up with solutions. And he uses forms that you can find in nature. The same I found when I visited the exhibition in the Vatican of Santiago Calatrava.

Now, in my house in Rome, I had a practical problem: the house itself stood there for a long time, but in the seventies it was shadowed with high new high build developments.

It made that I hardly could enjoy my terrace, always being surrounded and overlooked by my neighbors

. The solution I found in the Gallery of the family Spada by Borromini. I simplified his idea and made loose-standing arches in a triangle with a ramp. This year, my virginia creeper and the bougainvillea will cover all the arches. The greenery and the flowers will cover the view from arch one to arch two and so on. Without having a cover (something the building regulations in Rome would never allow me to do), I can’t see them, and ..... they can’t see me. On top it is fantastic for a party. I don’t need a lot of chairs. My friends can sit in the gallery on the triangular borders.

But still, sitting in the open space in front of it, I was overviewed. The next was discovering the architect Calatrava.

The “Dance” that he created for the Ballet of New York, gave me the inspiration. What you are seeing on the left is not yet the final stage. I tried it with 450 meters of cords. It rises as a flower from the ground.

"I was deeply honored when Peter Martins approached me with this opportunity," said architect, engineer and designer, Santiago Calatrava. "As an architect, I have always studied and sought inspiration from movement and the human body. To me, there is no muse greater than a dancer. It is my sincere hope that my scenic designs truly express the choreographers' visions."

It makes also that my terrace is little by little taking the shape of a ship. And I resolved two other problems. In the near future, I will replace the stretched cords with copper. And the Virginia creeper can start walking over it. On top, I will not need anymore that little foldable laundry unit to dry my cloths!