New York ? At the spring gala of the New York City Ballet, ballet master in chief Peter Martins appeared onstage to lift a glass of aquavit in honor of architect Santiago Calatrava. The Spanish architect renowned for his sleek white forms, which combine masterful engineering and a daring sculptural sensibility, was not only the guest of honor but also the set designer for seven new ballets in the coming weeks. City Ballet has dubbed its spring season, which runs through June 27, “Architecture of Dance: New Choreography and Music Festival.”

Architects working in the theater are not unheard of, but it isn’t common either. Jerome Sirlin, an architect by training, is by now an established stage designer, working primarily in opera. The architectural vision has been essential to the illusionism of stage design, since Andrea Palladio first designed a purpose-built modern theater.

But it is rare for rich and famous architects such as Calatrava, who works in a jet-set world of big budgets and tight schedules, to spend serious time designing for the ephemeral forms of theater, dance or opera.

Which makes it all the more surprising that earlier this season, New Yorkers were to see yet another stage production — of Verdi’s early opera “Attila” — designed by the buzzy architecture team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss visionaries who created the iconic and much-admired “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

The first of Calatrava’s sets, a white, fan-shaped arch form, was unveiled at the April 29 gala. Its tightly stretched cords of rope or metal were reminiscent of Calatrava’s bridges, the structural form that made him famous.

In an interview after the premiere, Calatrava explained that he was asked to design his stage forms long before he had any inkling of what shape the dance would take. In short, the ballets were created around his ideas.

And alas, they looked like it. Millepied’s ballet dealt with a young man’s initiation into some kind of colorful but closed society. Its emotional scope felt thoroughly CW, a tele-trivial world of adolescent desire, teen-age alienation and petty squabbles among loose posses of cool kids. Above it, Calatrava’s arching form soared quietly, calmly, classically, as if in a different universe from the human drama below. The stage set felt a bit like a space-age version of an old temple ruin, or what Keats once called a “foster-child of Silence and slow Time.”

But if Calatrava’s form had the look and feel of something high-tech and even higher design, the concept was perhaps less radical than what Herzog and de Meuron did for the Met’s run of “Attila,” which ended March 27. On the surface, it seems the architects produced something traditional, a realistic stage design that captured in bold strokes the Hun-hastened decay of ancient Rome and the forests of Europe on the brink of the Dark Ages.

If Calatrava created a single, concentrated form for Millepied’s ballet, Herzog and de Meuron used the Met’s vast theatrical resources to produce a textured world defined down to the details. Broken concrete and twisted rebar suggested Rome on the ropes; roots, limbs, ferns and grass were articulated with naturalistic precision.

But Herzog and de Meuron are not the sort of designers who read the score and simply deliver pretty pictures, made to order. In a brilliant stroke, they divorced the naturalistic fantasy of the sets from the human drama of the opera, by placing the singers in thin, horizontal bands of theatrical space separate from the scenography.

And thus they solved a problem that vexes almost every production at the Met, where the proscenium soars more than 100 feet above the stage. Every singer, no matter how big, is dwarfed by the Met. Producing human-scaled spaces for the singers often results in underwhelming sets. Herzog and de Meuron managed to create a grandly scaled wall of scenery, pushed to the front of the stage, beneath which the human drama played out at a more manageable scale.