WTC Transit Hub - by Santiago Calatrava

[JMGarcia]

Spaniard To Design WTC Transit Hub

By Katia Hetter
Staff Writer

July 31, 2003, 12:54 PM EDT

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is expected to be chosen today to design the transit center at the World Trade Center site, according to sources familiar with the selection process.

The action is expected to be approved by the Port Authority board of directors at a meeting this afternoon, the sources said.

Calatrava, who is known for his designs of public buildings and bridges, would work together with architect Daniel Libeskind, who has designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site, the sources said.

According to Calatrava's biography on his Web site, among the big public projects he has worked on in the 1980s and 1990s are the Lyon Airport Station, a cultural complex in Valencia, Spain and the Oriente railway station in Lisbon.

Calatrava also designed the winning proposal in a 1991 design competition to complete the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, a project that has not been realized. Another of his projects in the United States was the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

The engineering firm, DMJM+Harris, is expected to be named to assist in the transportation hub project, the sources said.

Copyright © Newsday, Inc.

[Freedom Tower]

Im just wondering... is Libeskind going to design anything on his own? Every part of his plan is going to be different. The Freedom Tower will be designed with Childs, the memorial will be someone elses, and now the transit center. I wonder how much influence Libeskind is going to have anywhere. It seems like he's really get pushed out of the process.

[JMGarcia]

Here's some pics of Orient Station in Lisbon by Calatrava

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_01.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_02.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_03.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_04.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_05.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_06.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/oriente_station_07.jpg

It is not uncommon for architects to work together on major projects. I would think that Calatrava and Libeskind could be compatible.

[Jasonik]

Calatrava has a gothic approach to structure, in a word- skeletal. *Libeskind seems to think mainly in terms of skin and folded planes to contain volume. *It would be interesting to see the skeleton Calatrava envisions for Libeskind's angularly gestural asymmetrical forms. *

Symmetry is a characteristic Childs will look to integrate as well. Should be interesting.

[dbhstockton]

This is good news.

[JMGarcia]

I think Calatrava's style works well with Libeskind's vision for the transit station which is already somewhat skeletal. It's just combined with his more assymetrical style as mentioned.

Libeskind
http://wtc.e27.com/press/middle/Lower_Manhattan_Station.jpg

Calatrava
http://www.calatrava.com/slides/bce_galleria_04.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/bce_galleria_03.jpg

[billyblancoNYC]

Are there any other pics of things he's done. *This station looks great, but will he create a virtual copy of this?

[billyblancoNYC]

http://www.calatrava.com/

[Jasonik]

Fabulous sun-dappled images JM.

Calatrava seems to employ an organic scale- natural, friendly. *I wonder if he'll go monumental sublime as Libeskind has intimated should be done.


Alameda Station *Valencia Spain 1991-1996
http://www.calatrava.com/slides/alameda_station_04.jpg


http://www.calatrava.com/slides/alameda_station_05.jpg



Interesting sructural language in the City of Arts an Sciences, Valencia Spain 1991-2004 below
http://www.calatrava.com/images_standbilder_cat/1991_science.jpg

[NoyokA]

Understandably the Port Authority like Silverstein requests expierence, Libeskind will be contributing in each-case. *It just goes to show that things never work out as had been planned, the political machine is just too powerful.

[TomAuch]

Choosing Calatrava garuantees that at least the transit hub will be good. I hope he incorporates the Gothic arches into the WTC hub, since it would be a homage to the Twin Towers lobby.

[Evan]

I like Calatrava's open, airy, curvy, and glassy style. *I hope his design for the transit station is as imprssive as the Orient Station is Lisbon.

[Kris]

High-speed rail airport station in Lyon, France:

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_1.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_2.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_3.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_4.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_5.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_6.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/lyon_airport_7.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com

[Chicagoan]

Calatrava
http://www.calatrava.com/slides/bce_galleria_04.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/bce_galleria_03.jpg
[/quote]

These two pictures are not of the train station. They are of the Galleria at BCE Place in Toronto. Both pictures are taken at its portion known as Heritage Square.

It is Calatrava's first project in North America. You never hear about it, but I bet that would be different had it been built in the States. ( No complaint mean there.)

[NoyokA]

I had no idea, BCE Place is among the great public spaces in Toronto.

[TLOZ Link5]

I'm definitely feeling optimistic now.

The Lyonnais terminal is particularly striking. *It totally evokes a bird in flight, especially the head-on views in the fifth and sixth pics. *That would definitely be a form to follow if PATH is ever extended to Newark Liberty Station.

[Chicagoan]

Here are some others of the Galleria.

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce3.JPG

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce2.JPG

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce4.JPG

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce5.JPG

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce6.JPG


The towers forming part of the complex that the Galleria ties together.

http://www.angelfire.com/on3/wyliepoon1/bce1.JPG

[Kris]

August 1, 2003

At Ground Zero, an Architectural Void No Longer

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/08/01/nyregion/01rebu.184.jpg
Santiago Calatrava designed the $100 million addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The site plan represents the destruction of Sept. 11. Now the architecture will provide the creative response. That's the implicit message in the selection of Santiago Calatrava to design a permanent replacement for the PATH station that was destroyed by the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At last, the controversial plan developed by Daniel Libeskind for the site begins to make sense. From it, great things might grow.

Mr. Calatrava, 52, is the world's greatest living poet of transportation architecture. A native of Spain, Mr. Calatrava trained as both an engineer and an architect. He is best known as a designer of bridges, train stations and airports, masterworks of our time. Long before the word "infrastructure" had entered the lexicon of contemporary architecture, Mr. Calatrava had taken this genre of design to the level of genius.

Though his main office is in Zurich, in recent years Mr. Calatrava has been living part time in New York. His first American project, a time capsule designed for The New York Times, is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, his first major public building in this country, opened last year to critical acclaim. Mr. Calatrava is also well known in New York as the architect of a project as yet unrealized: a new transept and spire for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Admirers have long detected a spiritual dimension in Mr. Calatrava's secular work, particularly in Spain. The Communications Tower and City of Science complex, designed for Valencia, has the tripartite arrangement of a Gothic cathedral. The Montjuic Communications Tower in Barcelona gestures skyward like a waving hand, as if to consecrate the air through which electronic messages pass. Inevitably, with its taut cables suspended from a single inclined pylon overhead, the Alamillo Bridge in Seville sparks images of celestial harps.

Some structural engineers have criticized Mr. Calatrava for including expressive forms not strictly required by functional needs. That is like attacking an apple for not being an orange. Twentieth-century functionalism is only one of the cultural strains on which Mr. Calatrava has drawn. His sources also include geometry, human anatomy, animal skeletons and other natural forms. Kinesthetics, the perception of movement, is also central to his work. It harks back to a time when expressive form in architecture stood for exuberance and generosity, not a failure to economize.

The choice of Mr. Calatrava is the clearest sign yet that the rebuilding of ground zero will be an achievement of cosmopolitan dimensions. The city has come far from the time, just more than a year ago, when it had entrusted the design process to a local group of insiders bereft of a vision adequate to the historical challenge before them.

It is doubly amazing that this sign of serious intent should be issued by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency whose architectural standards in recent years have slipped comfortably downhill.

Some New Yorkers who have been following recent developments at ground zero may find themselves secretly hoping that there will be fireworks between Mr. Calatrava and Mr. Libeskind. They may get their wish. In the past several months, Mr. Libeskind seems to have forgotten that he was retained not to design buildings, but to assist the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in preparing a master plan for the 16-acre site.

The corporation appears to have forgotten this, too. It seems that the louder Mr. Libeskind has voiced his demands, the more control he has been awarded over the design of buildings planned for the site. And the state agency has yet to produce an actual master plan.

In his presentation to the agency last December, Mr. Libeskind called for "great architects" to help realize his vision. A client would not, in any case, hire a designer of Mr. Calatrava's stature simply to execute the ideas of an architect who has given some New Yorkers cause to fear that he may have difficulty distinguishing sunlight from shade.

With architects of the quality of Mr. Calatrava, many New Yorkers will find it easier to appreciate the value of Mr. Libeskind's original inclusive approach. A stylized re-creation of the shock waves felt around the world on 9/11, the Libeskind plan has aroused opposition on the grounds that it would inflict a perpetually open wound on Lower Manhattan. The wound would serve a constructive purpose, however, if it were surrounded by unmistakable signs of the city's resilience.

Memory Foundations: that is the name of the proposal Mr. Libeskind submitted last year, and it is a good one. There is much to be remembered on this site, much life along with death. And we must learn to see this project literally as a re-membering, a putting together of pieces that have been violently torn apart.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

(Edited by Christian Wieland at 2:51 am on Aug. 1, 2003)

[NoyokA]

The wintergraden at BCE Place has French exhibits and tours and notably a French restuarant, Marche. If Im not mistaken the Hockey Hall of Fame is either adjacent or part of the complex, that alone would never fly here. But Im hoping for an American, freedomized version, and I realize it sounds tacky. Downtown Toronto has more life than NYC though, and people magnatize there, we can learn something.

(Edited by Stern at 10:34 pm on July 31, 2003)

[Chicagoan]

The Hockey Hall of fame is in one of the older buildings, the old Bank of Montreal Building, saved from demolition, that was incorporated into the new complex.

But Heritage Square, what you call the winter garden, has rotating exhibits, free concerts, etc. The complex is also tied to the Underground from which one can connect to most of the buildings in Downtown Toronto- from Union Station to City Hall.

[NoyokA]

Now that its official I withdraw my comments on the architect of Santialgo Caltrava, the station should be brilliant and act as a great doorway to the New World Trade Center. And besides I wont be nearly as much of a hypocrit in my criticisms, as Mr. Muschamp:


Memory Foundations: that is the name of the proposal Mr. Libeskind submitted last year, and it is a good one

How quickly our opinions change. Ive already forgotten.


(Edited by Stern at 10:55 pm on July 31, 2003)

[Kris]

In a sense, Libeskind and Calatrava are like night and day and my reservations about their collaboration are the same I had when the possibility of a partnership with Foster was evoked for the Freedom Tower. Their architectures are rationalist, as opposed to Libeskind's freer expressivity (not restricted by structural logic). They are more classical in their belief in order, harmony, and derive their clear structures from natural forms - especially Calatrava. Libeskind has a more contemporary and subjective symbolist approach which I doubt is compatible with theirs. Respective roles should be well defined. Beyond the skeletal appearance of the station's sketches, I see few commonalities.

I hope the MTA is using standards as high in the selection of an architect for the neighboring transit center.

[JMGarcia]

I don't think Calatrava is nearly as "rational" an architect as Foster and can be given over to a more expressionistic approach.

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/montjuic_tower_06.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/turning_torso_04.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/milwaukee_museum_05.jpg

I think both Libeskind and Calatrava work with a sort of openness and also with more complex forms than many of their peers. Hopefully their collaboration can build on that.

I also think, given the lack of controversy leading up to the announcement, that Libeskind and Calatrava are quite willing to collaborate. Its quite possible that Calatrava is there at Libeskind's suggestion. There's no hint that Calatrava is being forced into the project like Silverstein did with Childs.

[billyblancoNYC]

Maybe with this, Fulton St. and the new "Penn" NY will actually have some beautiful places to catch mass transit again. *Nice to see.

[TonyO]

Quote: from billyblancoNYC on 10:56 am on Aug. 1, 2003
Maybe with this, Fulton St. and the new "Penn" NY will actually have some beautiful places to catch mass transit again. *Nice to see.

True. *This will only happen downtown if they actually connect commuter trains to the station. *Otherwise it is just another subway transfer station. *LIRR, NJT and JFK need connection here. *I doubt that they would go to all the trouble of building a "downtown grand central" and not make it grand.

[BrooklynRider]

Quote: from tonyo on 11:35 am on Aug. 1, 2003
[quote]True. *This will only happen downtown if they actually connect commuter trains to the station. *Otherwise it is just another subway transfer station. *LIRR, NJT and JFK need connection here. *I doubt that they would go to all the trouble of building a "downtown grand central" and not make it grand.

I have to agree. *I would bemore impressed with a transportation hub that can get me anywhere, than a beautiful structure that can only get me on a subway or PATH line. *LIRR and NJT would be great - but the key is one stop monorail service to JFK - Newark & LaGuardia. Now, THAT would be a hub. *This of course has little to do with the design of the facility.

This architect selection is very pleasing to me.

[STT757]

The PATH extension to the Newark Airport Rail link station is almost a given, the next step would be to build the new East River tunnel to allow LIRR trains from Jamaica and JFK Airtrains to operate over the Atlantic Ave branch to the new Fulton Street station.

Incorporating the Corbin building into the Fulton street station and extending the LIRR Atlantic Ave branch to the new transit terminal would be a great tribute to *Austin Corbin who formed the LIRR.

[STT757]

Im really excited about the news of Mr. Calatrava being brought in to design the new World Trade Center transit complex, I've seen his work in a great book called "station to station" which depicts great train stations.

With his experience and Libeskind's vision this is going to become a NY land mark of grandness that *has not been built in a long time.

Building the PATH EWR extension and the LIRR extension will solidify this new station's status for Centuries to come.

[TLOZ Link5]

What's EWR an acronym for?

[TAFisher123]

EWR = newark international airport, the path already goes down to newark

[JMGarcia]

EWR is the code for Newark Airport.

[STT757]

"the path already goes down to newark"

The line goes South of Newark Penn for about 1/2 a mile, it's about another mile or mile and a half to the Newark Airport rail link station.

It's the easiest plan to implement, the original plan dates back to the Early 1970s when the Port Authority was planning to extend the PATH to Plainfield NJ and the "new" Central Terminal area at EWR via a "ITTS" Intra Terminal train system.

It would have been a rail link station and a monorail connection, the plan was finally realized in the late 1990s.

[Chicagoan]

Quote: from TLOZ Link5 on 5:32 pm on Aug. 1, 2003
What's EWR an acronym for?


nEWaRk.

Just try not to figure how Chicago (ORD) got its code.

I am trying to find pictures of the very first project that Calatrava did that gained some measurable press. It was in Germany, I think.

It does have similarities to his later work. But just as Calatrava is an engineer and architect, he is also an urbanist. I wonder if he will insist on some "magnatising" amenities on this project.

[Kris]

Quote: from JMGarcia on 7:23 am on Aug. 1, 2003
I don't think Calatrava is nearly as "rational" an architect as Foster and can be given over to a more expressionistic approach.

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/montjuic_tower_06.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/turning_torso_04.jpg

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/milwaukee_museum_05.jpg

I think both Libeskind and Calatrava work with a sort of openness and also with more complex forms than many of their peers. Hopefully their collaboration can build on that.

I also think, given the lack of controversy leading up to the announcement, that Libeskind and Calatrava are quite willing to collaborate. Its quite possible that Calatrava is there at Libeskind's suggestion. There's no hint that Calatrava is being forced into the project like Silverstein did with Childs.

I don't mean that Calatrava lacks expressivity or flamboyance. He is rationalist in the sense that nature is his primary source of inspiration: his fanciful structures are regular, logical, controlled natural forms. Libeskind's structures adapt to his free conflictual planes, an altogether different language. I don't think they cannot collaborate, but Libeskind should probably only take care of the station's relation to the rest of the site.

[thirduncle]

The good news is that Calatrava is not a hack and he's not Silverstein's toady. The good news is it won't be shoved underground below an office tower. Reconciling the styles of artists is easier than reconciling the peculiar notions of an overreaching leaseholder.

* We will not enter New York City like rats, which was the famous remark after the new Penn station was opened.

[TLOZ Link5]

Thanks for answering, Garcia, Chicagoan and Fisher.

As for Herbie's complete 180 regarding his opinion of Memory Foundations...do you think it's possible that he actually took Mrs. Libeskind's death threats seriously? ;)

[Kris]

There's no U-turn, just an optimistic reinterpretation of the site plan.

"The wound would serve a constructive purpose, however, if it were surrounded by unmistakable signs of the city's resilience."

I suppose he considers Libeskind's original building designs flawed in that respect. If he denies that the scheme features any attempt to heal and claims it only focuses on the wound, then he is dishonest and hypocritical by admitting the opposite only now that a different architect is to work within the same frame.

"In his presentation to the agency last December, Mr. Libeskind called for "great architects" to help realize his vision. A client would not, in any case, hire a designer of Mr. Calatrava's stature simply to execute the ideas of an architect who has given some New Yorkers cause to fear that he may have difficulty distinguishing sunlight from shade."

I think this is an obvious confirmation that his view remains unchanged.

[JMGarcia]

Risky Business
Will Santiago Calatrava's high-design style work at Ground Zero?
By Christopher Hawthorne - Slate
Posted Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 10:31 AM PT

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087178/

Santiago Calatrava, the 52-year-old Spaniard picked earlier this month to design a big new train and subway station at the World Trade Center site, is a singular figure in the design world: a remarkably inventive architect who's also a civil engineer and a sculptor. But is he a good fit for Ground Zero?

I'm not sure there's an easy answer to that question. Over the last three years, I've gone to see a handful of Calatrava's buildings and other projects, including his extension to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which opened two years ago on the edge of Lake Michigan; his huge and still unfinished City of Arts and Sciences complex in his hometown of Valencia, which includes a planetarium, an IMAX theater, a science museum, and an opera house; and his canted pedestrian bridge across the Nervion River in Bilbao.

Considering that Calatrava has more than 50 bridges and public buildings to his credit—a huge number for an architect his age—the ones I've seen make up just a sliver of his total output. But they do span the range of his commissions, from infrastructure to high culture. And having walked through (or over) them, it seems to me that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in selecting Calatrava, has made a choice that is both obvious and more than a little risky.

Why obvious? Because no architect in the world can match Calatrava's talent for investing complex transportation projects, which are often pretty bland architecturally, with the kind of eye-catching, high-design appeal the public is expecting at Ground Zero. Part of this has simply to do with experience: He got his first train station commission, from the city of Zurich, when he was just 32, and has gone on to design stations for Lisbon, Lyon, and the Belgian city of Liège. But more than any other designer of his generation, Calatrava has consistently made infrastructure beautiful. His buildings are rigorously conceived and meticulously executed but also playful, airy, and imaginative—a perfect combination of right and left brain.

Why risky? Because Calatrava's work has a personality—a pristine, sometimes aloof perfectionism—that seems an odd fit for the constricted and politically charged Ground Zero site, where compromise and rolling with the punches are among the chief job requirements. While the list of artists who have influenced Calatrava's work is a long one—it includes everyone from architects Eero Saarinen and Antonio Gaudi to filmmaker Luis Buñuel—his projects are consistently disdainful, in true modernist style, of architectural context. In other words, they borrow from a whole range of creative work but not from the buildings around them.

Indeed, you could even say that Calatrava's skeletal designs, which are often pure white and involve gigantic moving parts, manufacture their own context. Most pictures of his finished work—even the museum extension in Milwaukee, which attaches not only to a 1957 design by Saarinen, but also to a 1975 addition by Wisconsin firm Kahler Slater—push surrounding buildings to the extreme edge of the frame (if the buildings can be seen at all). Renderings of another U.S. project, a cathedral in Oakland that now seems sadly to be on hold, show the same desire for solitude and room to stretch and breathe.

Though Calatrava earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, he carries himself like an artist or an urbane professor of architectural history. He speaks seven languages and has been awarded a dozen honorary doctorates. He produces his fluid, elegant designs by hand and still works out of his Zurich villa, in what Rowan Moore, writing in Metropolis, called, "an atmosphere of deep serenity." Another critic calls him "monkish." All in all, he's hardly the kind of architect who seems well-suited for the horse-trading and bare-knuckle power plays that have so far been a central part of the downtown rebuilding process.

But nobody ever said that bringing unusually talented architects into the WTC mix was going to be simple. It's certainly true that the huge job—the budget for the station has been pegged at $2 billion, and some are already calling it a Grand Central for Ground Zero—will be a tough test for Calatrava, who will join forces with two large engineering firms to complete it. He'll have to adjust his work to a tight, contested urban context and practice a kind of deference that he's not used to—deference to Daniel Libeskind and other architects, to politicians, to a complex site plan, to the families of the 9/11 victims.

But the reverse may also be true: Calatrava's participation could very well provide a useful measure of architectural integrity downtown. In the last couple of weeks, we've heard a lot of suspiciously optimistic reports from the New York Times and elsewhere that a new cooperative spirit has emerged among Libeskind, Larry Silverstein (the WTC leaseholder), the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and the Port Authority. According to these stories—the New York Times put its version on Page One with the headline, "Trade Center Arguments Fade, And a Single Vision Is Emerging"—Libeskind's master plan remains basically uncorrupted.

That news seems to be built more of spin than substance. But maybe the arrival of Calatrava will provide a fresh method of keeping the various players honest. His architecture seems likely to show the effects of misguided tampering a lot more clearly than that of Libeskind or Skidmore Owings & Merrill's David Childs, the master designer of sleek corporate towers who has also joined the WTC rebuilding team.

By this I don't mean that Calatrava's work is fragile. I mean that it's almost always stripped down to its basics, with its precise structural and architectural logic on full display. In other words, if Calatrava's first New York building is compromised by some inane political deal cooked up in Silverstein's office, or George Pataki's, it'll be the architecture itself that lets us know.




(Edited by JMGarcia at 3:08 pm on Aug. 22, 2003)

[chris]

Oh, I just came to the thread with the Slate article copied to my clip-board...

[Kris]

October 22, 2003

An Architect's Grand Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/22/nyregion/22CALA.3xl.jpg
The TGV-Bahnhof von Santolas, a train station and airport in Lyon, might suggest designs to be adopted downtown for the new PATH transit hub.

In hiring Santiago Calatrava to design the new transit hub at the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey thought large. And in his first public words about the project, Mr. Calatrava made it clear that he, too, would think large — on the scale of Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station. Old Pennsylvania Station.

"Those places are gates to the city," he said in an interview on Monday, 10 days after signing a contract to design the $2 billion transit center, in partnership with the STV Group and DMJM & Harris. "New York City has a tradition of great stations. There are cities in the world that don't have that. New York has it."

While short on specifics, Mr. Calatrava described a structure that would have "the most universal character" of any at the site, something above and beyond a PATH terminal, though that function will be at its core. He envisions a civic gathering place that would be open 24 hours a day, pulsing with life and movement, sending people out into the city, greeting travelers from the airport, discharging commuters to nearby ferries and even sheltering visitors from the rain.

"Of all the buildings, this is more devoted to the everyday person," said Mr. Calatrava, 52, a Spanish citizen who lives part-time in Manhattan and sometimes walks through Grand Central just for the pleasure of it.

He deflected speculation about what the PATH terminal might look like, an inevitable question since his designs are renowned for sinuous curves, abstract monumentality and sometimes anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms. Because his buildings also tend to resemble freestanding sculptures, it would be perilous to guess how successfully Mr. Calatrava can cope with constriction.

"This station will be different than anything else I've done," he said. "I don't remember having had to work in such a dense, dense core of a city."

Asked whether his fluid and flowing style might be incongruent with the more crystalline forms of the master plan for the trade center site by Studio Daniel Libeskind, Mr. Calatrava said: "We will certainly work within the master plan. But you see, if you look at the city, it's always done from incongruence. Particularly New York illustrates that, more than any other city." For his part, Mr. Libeskind welcomed Mr. Calatrava. "I think he will bring in a very good dimension," he said yesterday. "There is plenty of capacity for expression in this station."

No matter how the design turns out, the terminal will be the architectural face that the new trade center presents to most New Yorkers, since it will be on Church Street, closer to the spine of Broadway and landmarks like the New York Stock Exchange. Freedom Tower and the memorial, by contrast, will be on the west side of the 16-acre site. And the office towers planned on Church Street may be many years distant.

Construction on the terminal could begin late next year or early in 2005, according to a draft document that is part of the environmental review, at the same spot where the temporary station stands now. Underground levels would be finished by the end of 2006, with the main terminal building and pedestrian network completed between 2007 and 2009.

The temporary station, designed by Robert I. Davidson of the Port Authority, is to open next month.

At the moment, the design team is studying transportation demands that may exist in 25 years to ensure that the terminal is flexible enough, said Dominick M. Servedio, the chairman and chief executive of STV Group. His firm, Mr. Calatrava and DMJM & Harris are allied as the Downtown Design Partnership, which has a $19.2 million contract from the authority. The project is being financed by the Federal Transit Administration and from insurance proceeds.

Mr. Servedio said the Downtown Design Partnership, the Port Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had been in a "dialogue" about the relation of the PATH terminal to the Fulton Street Transit Center, being designed by Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners and Ove Arup & Partners.

What is known about the trade center project is that it will include four passenger platforms for 10-car trains (the same length as those that existed before the attack), a vast mezzanine, lower and upper concourses and a street-level building, presumably under glass, with retail space.

There will be pedestrian passageways to the 1 and 9 subway station, the World Financial Center, the Fulton Street Transit Center, Liberty Plaza and other buildings on the trade center site.

"We have a goal to fulfill," Mr. Calatrava said, "creating interior spaces of high quality, welcoming people, having them get immediately in touch with the light, giving them from the moment in which they are on the platform the feeling they are in ground zero, they are arriving in the city."

"The sequence of spaces will be one of the most interesting things to explore," he said. Although the mezzanine is underground, Mr. Calatrava said he hoped a way might be found to bring daylight and views into the space.

Madelyn Wils, the chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan, applauded Mr. Calatrava's ambitious vision — to a point.

"It's certainly wonderful that he wants to create the best possible indoor space," she said yesterday. "Obviously, we want to be as creative and visionary as possible. But we also want street life. We don't want to internalize the civic audience too much. We want them to be on the streets, shopping, visiting other parts of the area."

Though none of Mr. Calatrava's other stations are precisely analogous to the PATH terminal, he said his designs for the Lyon Airport Station and the Orient Station in Lisbon embodied the kind of monumentality that might be appropriate. The Stadelhofen Station in Zurich exemplifies integration into an existing context, he said, and the Liège-Guillemins TGV Station in Liège, Belgium, shows how stations can play a role in economic regeneration.

The only New York City project that Mr. Calatrava has yet completed is the five-foot, stainless-steel New York Times Capsule, installed outside the American Museum of Natural History in 2001 and not to be opened until 3000.

Five years ago, he was part of a team with Beyer Blinder Belle that bid unsuccessfully on a new concourse and ticketing area for Pennsylvania Station within the landmark General Post Office on Eighth Avenue.

"He really is the modern descendant in the great tradition of architect-engineers like Robert Maillart, Pier Luigi Nervi and Isambard Kingdom Brunel," said John Belle, when asked yesterday how he had come to choose Mr. Calatrava.

Nervi, who designed the George Washington Bridge Bus Station of 1963 for the Port Authority, is a hero of Mr. Calatrava's. So is Eero Saarinen, whose Trans World Airlines Flight Center of 1962 at Kennedy Airport may be revived as part of a new terminal being planned by JetBlue Airways and the Port Authority.

"It puts us in a tradition of the Port Authority as a client of grand buildings," Mr. Calatrava said.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/22/nyregion/22CALA.top.jpg
Train platforms at the Orient Station in Lisbon. The architect, Santiago Calatrava, said their sort of monumentality might be appropriate at the PATH station.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/10/22/nyregion/22CALA.mug.jpg

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

October 26, 2003

A Clue to What's to Come at Ground Zero

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Slide Show: Santiago Calatrava's Sculptural Buildings (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2003/10/23/arts/20031026_BERN_slideshow_1.html)

Walking around Santiago Calatrava's Park Avenue town house is like helicoptering over some of the world's most striking buildings. On one pedestal is a bronze sculpture that resembles the architect's birdlike addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. In another room, an assemblage of steel cables and ebony cubes echoes his twisting apartment tower in Malmo, Sweden. And upstairs is a bronze sculpture in the form of a long, curved wing. "This one," he says, "is Tenerife."

Mr. Calatrava is just back from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the largest city on the largest of the seven Canary Islands. There, off the northwest coast of Africa, he has produced an astonishingly photogenic opera house. Above its main space — a 1,600-seat auditorium in the shape of a tilted cone — a winglike canopy rises almost 200 feet before swooping back to earth. The building can look like a turtle, a crescent moon, an eyelid, a cresting wave, a helmet, a palm frond or an erotic Georgia O'Keeffe flower.

That representational quality — everyone who sees the opera house wants to compare it to something — helps explain Mr. Calatrava's success. (At 52, he has completed 60 buildings, including train stations and airports throughout Europe, and has dozens more in the works.) "People need symbols, and Calatrava's buildings provide them," says David Marks, the London architect who with his wife designed the Eye — that city's sleek, popular Ferris wheel.

And now Mr. Calatrava has a chance to create a symbol for New York. Last summer, he was commissioned to design a $2 billion transportation hub at the World Trade Center site. In The New York Times, Herbert Muschamp called that commission "the clearest sign yet that the rebuilding of ground zero will be an achievement of cosmopolitan dimensions."

For the moment, Mr. Calatrava is speaking about the project only in general terms, under the watchful eye of his client, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. But clearly he has grand ambitions for the station. "It has to feel as important as Grand Central, or the old Penn Station," he says. It is also likely to have echoes of two other important New York structures: Eero Saarinen's T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy Airport and Pier Luigi Nervi's bus terminal at the George Washington Bridge (which Mr. Calatrava says he has investigated from every angle). Both make startling use of poured concrete, the material Mr. Calatrava has formed into buildings and bridges as if it were Silly Putty.

Like Nervi, Mr. Calatrava is an engineer by training, and that makes it possible for him to construct the ambitious buildings he calls "penetrable sculptures." When his addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum was in trouble a couple of years ago — no one could figure out how to build the movable "sunshades" that Mr. Calatrava insisted on — he became a licensed engineer in Wisconsin, then arranged to have the pieces made in Spain and flown over on a Soviet transport plane.

Mr. Calatrava's current projects include bridges in Jerusalem, Dallas and Venice; a new hall for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; an 86-acre cultural center in Spain; and a series of projects for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. As a result, he is away more than he's home, often sleeping on airplanes. His Swedish-Italian wife, Robertina, runs the firm's three offices (in Valencia, Mr. Calatrava's hometown in Spain, Paris and Zurich) from their Manhattan residence, while keeping tabs on the couple's four children.

On a rare morning in New York, just before leaving for a meeting with the Port Authority, Mr. Calatrava bounds up and down the stairs of his town house like an eager graduate student. His conversations — conducted in seven languages, sometimes three or four per sentence — are laden with references to poetry, philosophy and music. When he says Mendelssohn, does he mean the composer, Felix, or the architect Erich Mendelsohn? No matter — he has ideas about both. Equally fluent with a pencil, he sketches constantly, more often to illustrate points than to record ideas (of which he appears to have a surplus).

A new book by Franklin Toker about Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater suggests that the anti-Semitism of Pittsburgh society is what motivated Wright's patron, Edgar Kaufmann, to build what he hoped would be one of the world's great houses. In that case, just imagine what Mr. Calatrava's background might produce: in 1691, Raphael Valls, a prominent rabbi, was burned at the stake in Palma de Majorca, Spain. Mr. Calatrava's mother (still living in Valencia) believes she is descended from the rabbi; Santiago grew up knowing that his family had been chuetas, from the Spanish word for pig: Jews who "proved" they weren't Jews by eating pork in public. (While many Spanish Jews became Catholics during the Inquisition, Mr. Calatrava says his family "never really" converted.)

On the other side of the family, Mr. Calatrava's father, grandfather and uncles, who were in the export business, were imprisoned by Francisco Franco in the 1930's. "The war marked them in a tragic way," Mr. Calatrava says. Wanting to escape the stifling atmosphere in his home country, Mr. Calatrava moved to Zurich to study engineering; he was particularly interested in the streamlined concrete bridges of the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart. He would have gone on to Princeton — to study with the Maillart devotee David Billington — had he not met Robertina, then a law student in Zurich.

While living in a Zurich dormitory, he helped a veterinary student with drawings for his dissertation. In exchange, the veterinarian gave him the skeleton of a dog, which the Calatravas' oldest son, Rafael, now 23, named Fifi. Mr. Calatrava hung the skeleton in his Zurich office.

It proved a fitting gift. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1980, he quickly won a commission to design a train station in Zurich. That building introduced the skeletonlike forms that became his trademark. Studying spinal columns, birds in flight and even fluttering eyelids, Mr. Calatrava had found a way to create buildings that suggested movement — perfect for airports, train stations and bridges. (Mr. Muschamp has since called Mr. Calatrava "the world's leading poet of transportation architecture.") Then, in the 1980's, he began working on the $350 million City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (where the last structure, an opera house, will be completed in 2005).

In the 1990's, Mr. Calatrava arrived in New York with a plan for completing the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a show at the Museum of Modern Art and a millennial time capsule — a project for The New York Times Magazine and now on view outside the American Museum of Natural History.

Gambling that the city would embrace him, Mr. Calatrava reportedly spent $7 million for the town house, its interior now stripped down as a backdrop for his sculptures and watercolors. (He also bought the house next door, reportedly for another $7 million.) Then came 9/11, the date on which he said New York joined Jerusalem, Rome and Athens on his list of "heroic cities." By beginning the ground zero project just as the cultural center in his hometown wraps up, Mr. Calatrava is literally moving from the old world to the new. And that's where Tenerife comes in, because — as Mr. Calatrava said in a series of conversations during a weekend of inaugural festivities — the Canary Islands have been a bridge between civilizations: the place Columbus stopped to provision his ships on his way west.

Mr. Calatrava had that history, and the island's dramatic topography, in mind when he designed the $80 million opera house. Without the wing, he said, the building would have been "too small a gesture" for its site: the base of the volcano Teide, the tallest mountain in Spanish territory. And so the concert hall, largely completed in 2000, wasn't opened until the 3,500-ton wing could be constructed — which added three years and millions of dollars to the cost. As in Milwaukee, he stuck it out.

Even now, the wing isn't perfect, with what looks like a white pipe connecting it to the roof of the concert hall below. The pipe was a compromise, Mr. Calatrava says later over coffee in Manhattan. Immediately he begins sketching a more elegant version of the connector, which he says he will take up with the Tenerife contractors.

The imperfection may be the inevitable result of his extravagant ambitions. Until now, Mr. Calatrava's curves were mostly the curves of individual structural elements, which, one could choose to believe, were the product of an engineer's calculations, looking the way they did because they had to. But in Tenerife, the spectacular arc is the end, not the means. Mr. Calatrava has defied the key precept of modernist architecture, that form must follow function. Instead he is following his own aesthetic predilections. For that he owes one debt to Antonio Gaudí, the Catalan master of undulating forms, and — with his turtle-helmet-eyelid dominating the Tenerife coast — another to Salvador Dalí.

OF course there are detractors. The British architecture writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams said, "architects sneer that Calatrava is an engineer, while engineers dismiss him as a sculptor." David Cohn, an American architecture critic living in Madrid, says of the Tenerife auditorium: "What is this large tongue or tentacle looming over the whole work? Is it an orchid? A sea monster? Calatrava doesn't take artistic control of the subliminal suggestions these works provoke." He adds that giving the wing a purpose would have improved it. "Function," he says, "disciplines expression."

Peter Reed, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, disagrees. "If you're going to criticize Calatrava," he said, "you need to criticize a lot of other people, including Frank Gehry, on the same grounds." Mr. Calatrava's buildings "make you aware you're someplace special," he added, and praised Mr. Calatrava for bringing inspiring architecture to the civic realm. "It's refreshing that his buildings aren't Prada boutiques, but places for the public," he said.

And if the public loves them, Mr. Calatrava always sees something he could have done better. "Buildings," he says, joking, "never look as good as Fifi."

But his buildings may come closer than anyone's; they are the stars of "Zoomorphic," a current exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum that focuses on a supposed "new wave" of animal-inspired buildings. In the show's catalog, Mr. Aldersey-Williams compares the Milwaukee museum to a "shark's gill basket" and Mr. Calatrava's Lyon station to an anteater's snout.

Asked about the comparisons, Mr. Calatrava steers the conversation to Picasso. "Even at his most abstract he was a figurative painter," he says. "But the objects he painted were a means to an end. The paintings were really about his feelings. I'm doing the same with architecture — making it an abstract figurative art."

Picasso has particular meaning for him. "The artists of my parents' generation" — he cites Picasso, Miró and the poet Antonio Machado — "had to build a Spain outside Spain. My generation is making up for lost time." He says the exuberance of the opera house, then, is a direct response to the repression of the Franco era. Not to mention the the Inquisition.

But Mr. Calatrava is also working outside Spain — on a global scale. Even Saarinen didn't have the success that Mr. Calatrava is having, and Nervi (whom Mr. Calatrava calls "the father of us all") is hardly known to the public. Over lunch at the restaurant La Cazuela in Santa Cruz, Mr. Calatrava begins naming great architects who died ignominiously (Gaudi, hit by a streetcar and taken, unrecognized, to a hospital for indigents; Louis Kahn, who collapsed in Pennsylvania Station in New York).

What does it mean that he has achieved so much recognition in his lifetime, when many of his idols struggled?

"It's a bad sign," says Mr. Calatrava, while signing autographs for the restaurant's owner. He adds, eyes twinkling: "It makes you grateful for your detractors."

Fred A. Bernstein contributes to Oculus, Blueprint and Metropolitan Home.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[NoyokA]

and Pier Luigi Nervi's bus terminal at the George Washington Bridge (which Mr. Calatrava says he has investigated from every angle). Both make startling use of poured concrete, the material Mr. Calatrava has formed into buildings and bridges as if it were Silly Putty.

I didnt think anyone else liked this building. Its great!

[Kris]

http://www.columbia.edu/~nad7/images/gwb-terminal2.gif

http://www.columbia.edu/~nad7/neighborhood/170-180.html#terminal

http://www.panynj.gov/tbt/gwbbsmiddle.jpg

http://www.panynj.gov/tbt/gwbframe.HTM

[ZippyTheChimp]

From NY1 news www.ny1.com

Airy Design For WTC Transit Hub To Be Unveiled

JANUARY 21ST, 2004

The design for the transit hub at the World Trade Center site will be unveiled Thursday.

The $2 billion project, which will connect several subway lines and the PATH train, is envisioned as a grand entry point to Lower Manhattan, similar to Grand Central Terminal.

The architect, Santiago Calatrava, a 53-year-old native of Spain, is known for his modern, airy buildings and bridges made of steel and glass. Among his more than 50 projects are an extension to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Oriente train station in Lisbon, Portugal.

In an interview with NY1, Calatrava said his latest work has a lot of light, a lot of open space and even translucent pavement allowing sunlight to reach all the way down to the train platforms some 60 feet below ground.

"The lightness that you will experience in the building, the idea of rising up off the ground, the idea of the fly and the lightness and transparency bringing the light down below to the tracks, is a response of our culture to the tragedy,” said Calatrava. “It is a response of hope."

The World Trade Center transit hub will replace the temporary PATH station that opened about two months ago, and it will include an underground concourse that connects a dozen subway lines. The concourse will also extend to the west, connecting to the World Financial Center and ferry terminals.

Construction on the terminal could begin late this year or early next year, to be completed between 2007 and 2009.

Note: Tonight at 8:00 EST on NY1 "New York Tonight," there will be an interview with Santiago Calatrava. Larry Silverstein will also be on the program.


I'm going to try to get to the Wintergarden tomorrow.

[BigMac]

Thanks for that info, Zippy...looking forward to it.

[RedFerrari360f1]

The second picture JMGarcia posted of that tower looks awesome.

[ZippyTheChimp]

NY Newsday

Open-air Design For WTC Transit Hub

By The Associated Press

January 21, 2004, 5:46 PM EST

The design for a transit hub that would link ferries, commuter trains and 14 subway lines to the World Trade Center site will shine natural light 60 feet underground, move people on mechanical walkways and make some connection to the 2001 terrorist attacks, officials familiar with the design said.

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was to present final drawings Thursday for the $2 billion transit station that New York and New Jersey officials say will be comparable to city landmarks like Grand Central Terminal.

Calatrava, who has designed buildings around the world including the stadium for the Athens Olympics this summer, is adding his design to several visions introduced in recent weeks for the 16-acre site.

Architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind last month presented models of the Freedom Tower that would replace the trade center, and designers Michael Arad and Peter Walker last week offered drawings of a ground zero memorial.

Calatrava has had to receive Libeskind's approval for a design that would mesh with the architect's master plan for the site, and is working with New York's STV Group and DMJM & Harris to design a new station to replace the one destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001.

According to preliminary documents filed with the Federal Transit Administration, the station would still be called the World Trade Center Transportation hub.

A temporary terminal opened in November, and is now taking more than 24,000 daily riders between New Jersey and downtown and midtown Manhattan, said Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman Greg Trevor.

The station had served 67,000 daily passengers before the attacks; the agency said the permanent hub should begin operating in 2006 and could handle more than 80,000 passengers by 2020.

Calatrava's design will feature a huge, glass-and-steel entrance and will let daylight shine down 60 feet below ground to its four train platforms, according to the Port Authority, which is in charge of the rebuilding.

It will have a huge open plaza, several shops and restaurants and mechanical walkways that connect passengers to ferry service at the World Financial Center and other walkways that link the terminal to 14 downtown subway lines.

The design will also restore a mass transit network in lower Manhattan "in a manner that recognizes the horror and heroism of Sept. 11, 2001," said Trevor. He did not elaborate, but said besides improving downtown mass transit, "the World Trade Center transportation hub must be an architectural icon that will inspire generations to come."

Construction could begin on the new hub by the end of the year, and it should be finished in 2009, the same year the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower is scheduled for completion.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[RedFerrari360f1]

Open air?? Couldnt that pose a problem come the chilly months?? Other than that Im extremely excited to see this plan.

[Kris]

January 22, 2004

Design for Trade Center PATH Terminal to Be Unveiled

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Two counterpoised glass wings - bent as if to offer shelter, soaring as if to offer hope, as long as a city block and capable of movement on their own - will crown the permanent World Trade Center PATH terminal designed by Santiago Calatrava.

The design of the terminal, which will sit astride a network of passageways linking commuter trains, ferry boats, 14 subway lines and perhaps even an AirTrain station, is to be unveiled this morning by Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which will build the $2 billion project.

Though the PATH terminal is the third key element of the trade center redevelopment project - in many ways, quite literally its heart - the design will almost burst on the civic consciousness, since work has proceeded quietly, with none of the discordant prelude that accompanied Freedom Tower and the memorial, "Reflecting Absence."

And quiet was still the order of the day yesterday, when the Port Authority permitted only a brief interview with the architect, one that could not touch on specifics.

"On the scale of the next 30, 40 years, generosity of planning is essential," said Mr. Calatrava, who is widely regarded as the world's leading designer of lyrical transportation structures. His partners in the PATH project are the STV Group and DMJM & Harris.

To hear the terminal described by those who have seen it, the Port Authority embraced the idea of creating a generous space. Indeed, the project may be criticized for extravagance, since there is a functioning $323 million temporary PATH station.

In the permanent station, which might begin serving passengers in 2006 and be completed by 2009, the most striking element above ground would be curving, winglike canopies. They would run the length of the oblong glass-and-steel shell that is to serve as an enormous skylight over the terminal concourse. They would also extend over the plazas created to the northeast and southwest of the terminal building.

At the apogee of their arcs, the wings would rise more than 100 feet into the air. Given the size of the block - bounded by Church Street and the re-established Fulton, Greenwich and Dey Streets - they would apparently be more than 350 feet long.

Even more striking, said those who have been shown the proposal, the wings could pivot aside to create an opening to the sky along the main axis of the terminal. This would allow the concourse to be ventilated naturally; a pleasant amenity on a spring day, a necessity in case of fire.

This slow-motion but kinetic architectural gesture unmistakably bears the Calatrava signature. A canopy at his Valencia Science Center in Spain, for example, opens and closes like an eyelid. The roof of the Kuwait Pavilion for the 1992 World's Fair in Seville was composed of fingerlike segments that could be opened to expose it to the sky.

The bold, sweeping curves of the PATH terminal canopies bring to mind several of Mr. Calatrava's recent projects, like the Milwaukee Art Museum expansion and the opera house at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But they might also remind some viewers of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House or Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport or the glass wall planned by David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as part of the proposed expansion of Pennsylvania Station.

Mr. Calatrava has made it plain since last fall that he views the terminal as far more than a commuter rail station. "It is like the heart to the body," he said yesterday, "pulsing people in and out."

And some hint of the airy design to be unveiled today could be gleaned from Mr. Calatrava's statement that "we are building with light."

Certainly, there is a premium to be paid for architecture of this quality, which the Port Authority acknowledged without ascribing a specific cost.

"I just don't think you can say because we've hired Calatrava, it's going to cost 15 to 20 percent more," said Joseph J. Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority. "We want to create for downtown a grand point of entry, a place that's not only a transportation hub but also a great piece of architecture, because that also defines an area."

"Great cities really demand great public spaces," Mr. Seymour said.

The above-ground PATH terminal structure would occupy part of the area set aside for the Wedge of Light plaza in the master plan for the site by Studio Daniel Libeskind. The lines of the wedge, Mr. Libeskind has explained, are defined by the angle of the sun at 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m. on Sept. 11: the beginning of the 2001 attack and the collapse of the second tower.

These angles have apparently been preserved and incorporated into Mr. Calatrava's design, which sits obliquely on the block. Mr. Calatrava said yesterday that he found the Wedge of Light a "beautiful idea" and one of the strongest symbolic features of the plan.

"I am working fully with the master plan," Mr. Calatrava said, "and using it as inspiration."

For his part, Mr. Libeskind, who has fought on several other fronts to protect his overall concept, said yesterday that Mr. Calatrava had embraced and improved the plan.

"I was very moved when he showed me the direction for the station," Mr. Libeskind said, "which not only is reinforcing the Wedge of Light but creating something wonderful as a civic building."

"He understood the musical quality of the whole plan," Mr. Libeskind said.

Mr. Calatrava, too, used musical terms to describe the place of the terminal within an ascending spiral of office skyscrapers that reaches its peak at Freedom Tower. The terminal will sit between a 62-story building and a 65-story building.

Rather than compete with a crescendo, Mr. Calatrava said, he envisioned the terminal as a pause. "Part of the music that is very important is the silent moment," he said. "El silencio es también música."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Gulcrapek]

My stomach is shaking. I can't wait to get to the school library tomorrow...

[LuPeRcALiO]

those wings sound a little like the Liège TGV Station in Belgium
http://www.calatrava.com/slides/liege_guillemins_02.jpg

[fioco]

I'll sleep with fingers crossed tonight. Calatrava's transit center may prove to be the evocative sculptural centerpiece that people had hoped the memorial to be -- and Calatrava is certainly capable of evoking such powerful metaphors.

The "silence is also music" metaphor borrows a motif from Reflecting Absence. The types of silences in music are just as varied as the musical notes. This "pause" hopes to soar and dance with the light. Its location adjacent to the memorial will bring poetry above ground level and bring a fuller statement to the memorial site.

In my wildest dreams I hope that these developments will have a resultant effect upon the design of the Freedom Tower. It has great aspirations but it hasn't found the poetry yet to attain them.

[Lemonsoda]

In my wildest dreams I hope that these developments will have a resultant effect upon the design of the Freedom Tower. It has great aspirations but it hasn't found the poetry yet to attain them.

That particular dreamscape includes me.

And I wish Santiago Calatrava could design the toothpick on top of the Freedom Tower. In my opinion, that might frame such a setting of sorrow and hope appropriately.

[NYguy]

Sounds very exciting...



Though the PATH terminal is the third key element of the trade center redevelopment project, the design will almost burst on the civic consciousness, since work has proceeded quietly, with none of the discordant prelude that accompanied Freedom Tower and the memorial, "Reflecting Absence."

"On the scale of the next 30, 40 years, generosity of planning is essential," said Mr. Calatrava, who is widely regarded as the world's leading designer of lyrical transportation structures. His partners in the PATH project are the STV Group and DMJM & Harris.

To hear the terminal described by those who have seen it, the Port Authority embraced the idea of creating a generous space..........

the most striking element above ground would be curving, winglike canopies. They would run the length of the oblong glass-and-steel shell that is to serve as an enormous skylight over the terminal concourse. They would also extend over the plazas created to the northeast and southwest of the terminal building.

At the apogee of their arcs, the wings would rise more than 100 feet into the air. Given the size of the block - bounded by Church Street and the re-established Fulton, Greenwich and Dey Streets - they would apparently be more than 350 feet long.

Even more striking, said those who have been shown the proposal, the wings could pivot aside to create an opening to the sky along the main axis of the terminal. This would allow the concourse to be ventilated naturally; a pleasant amenity on a spring day, a necessity in case of fire.

[NYguy]

Not the best rendering, but an early scan from the Star Ledger...


http://www.pbase.com/image/25361693/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/image/25361696/original.jpg

[TonyO]

wow.

[Jasonik]

In the Belly of the Beast, or a Venus Flytrap. :wink:

Dramatic :!:

[STT757]

Open air?? Couldnt that pose a problem come the chilly months??

From what I've read it will be able to be opened and closed, a retractable roof similar to modern baseball stadiums.

It would serve several purposes..

First it could vent smoke and gases quickly in the event of a fire or other such events.

It would be a way to cool the lower platforms in the Summer without the need for air conditioning, if you have ever stood for five minutes on a Subway platform when it's 90 degrees out you will appreciate having a breeze.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Some photos from Newsday

NY Newsday (http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/wtc/nyc-transitpix,0,1519372.photogallery?coll=nyc-topheadlines-span)

[BrooklynRider]

Stunning! Finally, an artist unleashd!

[JMGarcia]

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099602.jpg

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099715.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099960.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099940.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099938.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099937.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099857.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099850.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099843.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099847.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11099800.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

Hopefully, the video showing approaches from Church, Fulton and Dey will be available to download. Even the IRT 1/9 station is open to the mezzanine.

[JMGarcia]

Here's a link to the Power Point presentation.

http://www.panynj.gov/images_2004/wtc_hub_present.ppt

[Kris]

http://www.panynj.gov/images_2004/hub_rendering.jpg

A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE IN LOWER MANHATTAN: RENOWNED ARCHITECT SANTIAGO CALATRAVA UNVEILS DESIGN CONCEPTS FOR PORT AUTHORITY’S WORLD TRADE CENTER TRANSPORTATION HUB

Date: January 22, 2004
Press Release Number: 7-2004

Freestanding Glass-and-Steel Mass-Transit Hub Will Connect
PATH to Ferries and Subway Service across Lower Manhattan

The world caught its first glimpse today of the Port Authority’s enduring monument to the heroism of September 11, 2001, when world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava unveiled soaring, spectacular design concepts for the bistate agency’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which will significantly improve mass-transit connections across Lower Manhattan.

The glass roof above the hub’s freestanding grand pavilion, featuring ribbed arches that evoke a cathedral, will open each year on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Glass-and-steel wings will rise up to 150 feet. Natural light will reach rail platforms 60 feet below street level.

“This is the Port Authority’s gift to New York City,” Mr. Calatrava said. “It will be a lamp of hope in the middle of Lower Manhattan, creating an unbroken line of natural light from the platforms to the sky.”

Flanked by New York Governor George E. Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. Calatrava also said the $2 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub will include:
A permanent Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) terminal that eventually will serve more than 80,000 daily PATH riders, including tens of thousands of commuters and millions of annual visitors to the World Trade Center Memorial.

Pedestrian connections that will significantly improve access to PATH, ferries and subway lines across Lower Manhattan. By 2020, these connections are expected to accommodate 250,000 daily commuters and visitors.

Greater open space in the Wedge of Light Plaza and additional access from Church Street to the Memorial District.

State-of-the-art safety, security and environmental enhancements.
Mr. Calatrava said the Transportation Hub will serve as a source of inspiration for the heroes, survivors and families of September 11, as well as those who live in, work in and visit Lower Manhattan.

Last summer, the Port Authority selected the Downtown Design Partnership, in association with Mr. Calatrava, to design the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. The partnership is led by the joint venture of DMJM + Harris and STV Group, Inc. – two of the world’s most successful and respected architectural/engineering firms.

Governor Pataki said, “The soaring design for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub completes the promise of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the site, skillfully complementing the designs for the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and the Memorial. Santiago Calatrava’s masterpiece will one day take its rightful place among New York City’s most inspiring architectural icons. Millions of commuters and visitors will pass through this spectacular new transit hub when they come to Lower Manhattan.”

New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey said, “The World Trade Center Transportation Hub will make a statement to the world: The people of this region are undaunted in the face of the forces of evil. The design for this spectacular structure clearly shows that we are fully committed to rebuilding our infrastructure and restoring normalcy to our lives.”

Mayor Bloomberg said, “Today we unveil the design of downtown’s new PATH station and we imagine that future generations will look at this building as a true record of our lives today as we rebuild our city. What will they see in Santiago Calatrava’s thrilling work? They’ll see creativity in design, and strength in construction. They’ll see confidence in our investment in a stunning gateway to what will always be the ‘Financial Capital of the World.’ They’ll see a seamless connection to the PATH train, city subways, and ultimately, to our regional airports. And they’ll see optimism – a building appearing to take flight – just like the neighborhood it serves.”

Port Authority Chairman Anthony R. Coscia said, “Our most important priority at the World Trade Center site is the creation of a Memorial that will pay tribute to the heroes of September 11, including the 84 members of the Port Authority family who sacrificed their lives on that terrible day. Our next priority is to create a 21st century mass-transit network that will serve commuters and visitors to Lower Manhattan. Santiago Calatrava’s Transportation Hub – a work of unsurpassed beauty – will meet the region’s needs while inspiring the world for generations to come.”

Port Authority Vice Chairman Charles A. Gargano said, “The World Trade Center Transportation Hub will enable a quarter-million daily travelers to reach their destinations across Lower Manhattan faster and more conveniently. Much as the rehabilitation of Grand Central Terminal has sparked the revitalization of midtown, the restoration and enhancement of Lower Manhattan’s transportation system will accelerate the economic recovery of the nation’s third-largest business district.”

Port Authority Executive Director Joseph J. Seymour said, “The significance of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub is nothing short of historic. We will finally untangle Lower Manhattan’s knotted network of confusing mass-transit connections, which have hindered this part of the city for a century.”

The permanent World Trade Center Transportation Hub will feature seamless pedestrian connections to the World Financial Center and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed Fulton Street Transit Center. Lower Manhattan residents, commuters and visitors will enjoy far faster access to ferry service along the Hudson River, and to 14 Lower Manhattan subway lines – the 1/9, 2/3, 4/5, N/R, A/C/E and J/M/Z. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub also is being designed to accommodate potential rail service to John F. Kennedy International Airport or other destinations.

The Permanent PATH Terminal is expected to begin serving passengers by the end of 2006. All elements of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub are scheduled for completion by 2009.

The Port Authority is in the middle of the environmental review process for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which is being developed in cooperation with the Federal Transit Administration.

A temporary PATH station opened at the World Trade Center site on November 23, 2003. The temporary station – the final piece of the Port Authority’s $566 million program to restore PATH service as quickly as possible between New Jersey and Lower Manhattan – was the first public space to open within the World Trade Center site since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Ridership at the temporary World Trade Center PATH station already is exceeding initial projections.

The temporary station is an open-air facility that provides a basic level of passenger service. It does not include many of the customer amenities that existed in the World Trade Center PATH station prior to September 11, 2001, such as heating, air conditioning and rest rooms. Those customer amenities will be restored in the permanent World Trade Center Transportation Hub.

The Port Authority began service in 1962 on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson system, more commonly known as PATH, after taking over the system from the bankrupt Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. The system was originally built in 1908, and the tunnels linking New York and New Jersey were the first passenger rail connections between the two states.

Before September 11, 2001, the PATH rapid-transit rail system of 13 stations carried approximately 260,000 daily passengers between New York and New Jersey. Today, PATH carries approximately 180,000 daily passengers. Prior to September 11, 2001, approximately 67,000 daily passengers boarded PATH at the World Trade Center.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey operates many of the busiest and most important transportation links in the region. They include John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty International, LaGuardia and Teterboro airports; AirTrain JFK and AirTrain Newark; the George Washington Bridge; the Lincoln and Holland tunnels; the three bridges between Staten Island and New Jersey; the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) rapid-transit rail system; the Downtown Manhattan Heliport; Port Newark; the Elizabeth-Port Authority Marine Terminal; the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island; the Brooklyn Piers/Red Hook Container Terminal; and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. The agency also owns the 16-acre World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The Port Authority is financially self-supporting and receives no tax revenue from either state.

WTC Transportation Hub PowerPoint Presentation (http://www.panynj.gov/images_2004/wtc_hub_present.ppt)

[LuPeRcALiO]

it looks like a winged armadillo but for some nutty reason it works

[dbhstockton]

What a relief! No less than what I expected from Calatrava, which is great. Flanked by world-class skyscrapers (Foster, Nouvel, et al), this is going to be awesome. I like how it's a free-standing structure, ameliorating the increasingly cluttered and crowded streetscape we were seeing in sucessive renderings.

It works very well with the wedge of light concept, too. Everyone was taking it much more literally than it should have been, though it's hard to figure what Libeskind's original intentions were. The allignment of the whole building along that axis is arguably more meaningful than just a wall, as Libeskind intended. I don't know about the opening up every September 11th business; It's a little silly to open up to let the shadow of the Millenium Hilton in.

[dbhstockton]

Oh, and I love the transluscent floors. They're the one thing about the design that must be preserved no matter what revisions are made. The concourse of the old Penn Station had glass tile floors; it was something I would have liked to see. They're still there, under the terazzo. You can see the underside from some places on the lower level.

[BigMac]

Very nice design. On a side note, I wonder if it would be economical one day to construct an underground tunnel (with shuttles and/or moving walkways) to travel to Liberty and Ellis islands, and connecting to the transit hub or Battery Park.

[RedFerrari360f1]

Am I the only one who is a little disapointed? The size and scope of this project is minimal compared to other projects he has done. It looks a bit liek a upturend hairclip. Im not totaly disapointed as this is much better than the FT but I was expecting great things from Signor Calatrava. Can someone explain to me this concept of glassy trans-lucent tiles. From the description they sound slippery.

[Kris]

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/22/nyregion/22cnd-path.650.jpg

[BigMac]

I like how the wings form a matrix of shadows and reflection on the floors.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Am I the only one who is a little disapointed? The size and scope of this project is minimal compared to other projects he has done.
At the presentation, it was stated that the structure is 350 ft long.

[dbhstockton]

Is there anything good in the Powerpoint presentation? I can't look at it on my Mac.

[Eugenius]

Are the two wings of different sizes? Depending on which rendering you look at, they either look the same or different. I think the asymmetry would add a lot to the project, and would work well with any futuristic towers that go up around it.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Is there anything good in the Powerpoint presentation? I can't look at it on my Mac.
You can download a free Powerpoint viewer for Mac here (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/office98/powerpoint98viewer.xml&secid=20&ssid=7).

[NoyokA]

Looks like an airport terminal. Its alright....

[fioco]

Calatrava's design puts a lot of pressure on Libeskind's cultural buildings which will adjoin the memorial and be its "bridge" to the transit center. Crystalline shards may be compatible with this free-standing transit center as they too will be free-standing buildings on the opposite side of the street, but Libeskind's challenge will be creating something original that is yet organic and cohesive.

May David Childs be equally challenged and inspired. I keep my fingers crossed in hope.

A bit off subject: In the WTC development thread, David Dunlop's article states that the bases of all of the skyscrapers, primarily retail, would be completed by 2009. Are Foster, Nouvel, and Maki already working behind the scenes on their designs or are these bases merely expectant of future buildings? Stern, if the transit center eventually serves as a primary portal to the regional airports, perhaps the airline terminal analogy may not be far off base. I'm happy with this kinetic form. And after what we've seen before, we finally have a chicken from which to count our eggs.

[dbhstockton]

Is there anything good in the Powerpoint presentation? I can't look at it on my Mac.
You can download a free Powerpoint viewer for Mac here (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/office98/powerpoint98viewer.xml&secid=20&ssid=7).

Thank you, Zippy. It works very well.

[DougGold]

This is absolutely beautiful. Very distinct, graceful and should be a joy to be in. It's the first WTC-site design that I not only have nothing to complain about, but I think it's freakin' cool. Only wish the tower was designed with someone capable of such creative expression.

[Kris]

January 22, 2004

Winglike Design Unveiled for W.T.C. Transit Hub

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Where there was darkness on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the architect Santiago Calatrava would bring a flood of light in the form of a winged railway station, draped in glass, suffused with natural illumination and, on occasion, open to the clear skies above.

Mr. Calatrava's design for the permanent World Trade Center PATH terminal — a soaring sculptural steel-and-glass shell covering a cathedral-like concourse and a network of passageways that would knit commuter trains, ferry boats, 14 subway lines and an entire swath of Lower Manhattan — was unveiled today to quick acclaim.

"When you see the model, `Wow' is the first word that's got to come to your mind," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who joined in the unveiling with Gov. George E. Pataki and officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which will build the terminal. It may cost up to $2 billion and take five years to complete.

In its aesthetic and logistical ambitions, the PATH terminal might rise to the ranks of the old Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal, which Mr. Calatrava claimed as the "deepest inspirational object" in his new design.

Like the original Pennsylvania Station, it will bathe travelers in daylight, which would reach all the way to the train platforms 60 feet below ground through the use of glass-block floors above. And like Grand Central, it would serve as the hub of an underground network linking numerous subway stations and skyscrapers.

But it would also do something neither of these buildings did: move.

Two counterpoised canopies over the main concourse, rising some 150 feet like skeletal birds' wings, could be opened hydraulically in about two minutes to create a tapered opening almost 50 feet wide at its center. This could be used to ventilate smoke out of the building in case of fire and to provide natural air-conditioning.

"On a beautiful summer day," Mr. Calatrava said, "the building can work not as a greenhouse but as an open space." He also envisioned the symbolic power of opening the roof every year on the morning of Sept. 11, "giving us the sense of unprotection."

"The building itself expresses the memory of Sept. 11," said Mr. Calatrava, 52, a Spanish architect, engineer and artist, who is widely admired for the lyrical quality of his bridges and train stations. Though he has a home on the Upper East Side, the PATH terminal would be Mr. Calatrava's first structure in New York City. (His partners in the design and engineering team are DMJM & Harris and the STV Group.)

The main axis of the 360-foot-long concourse would align with the angle of the sun at 10:28 on the morning of Sept. 11, when the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsed into itself. The angle of the canopies' outer edges would mark the line of the sun at 8:46 that morning, when the first jetliner hit the towers.

"I have to say that Santiago Calatrava's interpretation of the Wedge of Light is a brilliant one," Daniel Libeskind, the master planner working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said today. "It's an inspiring one because it takes the master plan and contributes even a greater significance to the spaces that an architect of his caliber can do."

Although the PATH terminal is the third major element of the trade center redevelopment project — in many ways, quite literally its heart — the design almost burst on the civic consciousness, since work has proceeded quietly, with none of the discordant prelude that accompanied Freedom Tower and the memorial, "Reflecting Absence."

"This is the Port Authority's gift to New York City," Mr. Calatrava said today. "It will be a lamp of hope in the middle of Lower Manhattan, creating an unbroken line of natural light from the platforms to the sky."

The Port Authority embraced the idea of creating a generous space. Indeed, the project may be criticized for extravagance, since there is a functioning $323 million temporary PATH station.

The bold, sweeping curves of the PATH terminal canopies bring to mind several of Mr. Calatrava's recent projects, like the Milwaukee Art Museum expansion and the opera house at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But they might also remind some viewers of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House or Eero Saarinen's T.W.A. Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport or the glass wall planned by David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill as part of the proposed expansion of Pennsylvania Station.

Mr. Calatrava has made it plain since last fall that he views the terminal as far more than a commuter rail station. "It is like the heart to the body," he said in an interview on Wednesday, "pulsing people in and out."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[TLOZ Link5]

It's gorgeous. The renderings are still a bit computery, but I'm betting that it will be a great terminal.

[NYguy]

This is absolutely beautiful. Very distinct, graceful and should be a joy to be in. It's the first WTC-site design that I not only have nothing to complain about, but I think it's freakin' cool. Only wish the tower was designed with someone capable of such creative expression.

I agree...

[RedFerrari360f1]

Going back to someones comment about what Libeskinds cultural buildings will look like. I wouldnt get your hopes to high. His buildings are the worst kind of deconstructionism Ive seen. One such building hes done in London is nasty looking. In addition his many Haulocaust museums are at the very best weird. He should surrender control of these cultural buildings to Calatrava or someone else.

[Kris]

January 23, 2004

From Underground, the PATH Station Becomes a Procession of Flight

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

An exorcism was held yesterday at the World Financial Center Winter Garden at Battery Park City. The spirit of diminished expectations that produced the Winter Garden and buildings like it was severed from the soul of New York. In place of suburban shopping-mall atrium design, there emerged civic architecture of the highest order.

Santiago Calatrava's design for the World Trade Center PATH station should satisfy those who believe that buildings planned for ground zero must aspire to a spiritual dimension. Over the years, many people have discerned a metaphysical element in Mr. Calatrava's work. I hope New Yorkers will detect its presence, too. With deep appreciation, I congratulate the Port Authority for commissioning Mr. Calatrava, the great Spanish architect and engineer, to design a building with the power to shape the future of New York. It is a pleasure to report, for once, that public officials are not overstating the case when they describe a design as breathtaking.

Mr. Calatrava has the creative magnetism that the Spanish know as duende. The envious call this quality star power. I call it soul. Derived from duen de casa (lord of the house), duende descends on great poets, musicians, and dancers at peak moments of inspiration. It has alighted on Mr. Calatrava once again. The PATH station will be more than a building. It will cast out the defeatist attitude that has clogged New York's architectural arteries since the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station.

The PATH station has been designed in collaboration with the Downtown Design Partnership, a joint venture between two local firms, DMJM & Harris and the STV Group. It is aligned on an east-west axis, occupying a portion of the site designated as the Wedge of Light in Daniel Libeskind's ground zero plan. In place of a wedge (in reality, an inglorious traffic intersection), there will arise what Mr. Calatrava envisions as a bird, most likely a dove, released from the hands of a child. No more second-hand Statues of Liberty here, in other words. Rather, a prayer for peace.

The outspread wings of this elusive bird are the design's most dramatic feature. Composed of steel and glass, the wings form two gigantic canopies that will shelter an open plaza surrounding the station. Some may see the shadow of an angel in this architectural image: a descendant of those great winged sculptures that descended on the skylines of great European cities in the mid-19th century. Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is their worthy American cousin. Mr. Calatrava has revived the genre in the form of an entire building.

The bird's torso reminds this viewer of Eero Saarinen's magnificent ice hockey rink at Yale. Like other Saarinen projects, such as the former T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy Airport, the rink was criticized for making a showy display of structure that lacked structural justification. This criticism has been aimed at Mr. Calatrava, also. Though trained in engineering as well as architecture, Mr. Calatrava is a highly expressive, not to say an expressionistic, architect. Yet he differs from Saarinen in one crucial respect. His expressive gestures do not rely on concealed structural support; they have the integrity of their own physical being.

Mr. Calatrava needs no hints from the solar system to make architecture out of light. He has been doing it for years. The genius of his design unfolds underground, where light from the roof cascades down three levels from the street to the train platforms. The intermediary levels mezzanine and concourse are sleek, dynamic spaces, open to the sky. At night, lighting from within the building will illuminate the plaza and the office towers surrounding it.

It is easy to mistake Mr. Calatrava as an architect of sweetness and light. Risk and mortality are seldom absent from his designs. In the time capsule he designed four years ago for The New York Times Magazine, for example, a steel thorn appears to project forward from a pair of full-bodied lips. Like Henry Moore, Mr. Calatrava is often inspired by the skeletal remains of living forms. This formal source acquires greater depth of meaning at ground zero. The spreading canopies portend the afterlife.

"The duende will not approach if he does not see the possibility of death," wrote García Lorca, the poet who introduced the creative imp to many non-Hispanic readers. Mr. Calatrava's reading of the concept is lighter. He once compared it to whiff of orange blossoms on the hills around Valencia. But in both cases the image derives from the land.

This is the gentle paradox of Mr. Calatrava's transportation designs. They bring a sense of rootedness to the experience of movement. This quality may derive from Mr. Calatrava's affinity for Gothic religious architecture. The great cathedrals, too, are epic processionals, walks through lightness of structure, enclosure, and space.

It helps to visualize the station's design in conjunction with "Reflecting Absence," the memorial designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. Both projects emphasize procession into the ground. The memorial procession will be darker. In the station, circulation will be radiant. The penetration of depth will be common to both.

Mr. Calatrava is a poet of movement. Bridges and rail stations are among his finest lyrics. They connect the traveler not only to points in space, but also to the cosmopolitan idea. It has been a long time since New York has forged this strong a link to the rest of the world. It is poetry in the ancient sense of connective tissue: the beliefs and aspirations that hold a society together.

In Europe, the winged statue was a totem of an earlier cosmopolitan age, an era when the continent was linked by trains. Infrastructure gave us modern cosmopolitanism, that is to say. May the art of making connections help bring peace.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Updated:

January 23, 2004

A PATH Station That Honors 9/11, and Opens Wide, Too

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Where there was darkness on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the architect Santiago Calatrava would bring a flood of light in the form of a winged railway station, draped in glass, suffused with natural illumination and, on occasion, open to the clear skies above.

Mr. Calatrava's design for the permanent World Trade Center PATH terminal, which was unveiled yesterday, is a soaring, sculptural, steel-and-glass shell covering a cathedral-like concourse. Through a network of passageways, the terminal would connect the Port Authority Trans-Hudson underground rail line from New Jersey and 14 subway lines.

" 'Wow' is the first word that's just got to come to your mind," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He joined in the unveiling with Gov. George E. Pataki and officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which will build the terminal. It may cost up to $2 billion. Construction is expected to begin early next year and take four years to complete.

Rather than rely on words alone, Mr. Calatrava took pastels to paper in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center at Battery Park City. He sketched a child releasing a bird into the air, then superimposed the bird on the outline of the terminal.

About 67,000 commuters boarded PATH trains at the trade center before the attack. Today, a temporary open-air station is used daily by about 30,000 travelers.

In aesthetics and logistics, Mr. Calatrava's design aspires to be far more than a commuter rail station, vital as that is to Lower Manhattan. Its admirers are already mentioning it in the same breath as the old Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in the early 1960's, and Grand Central Terminal, which Mr. Calatrava claimed as his "deepest inspirational object."

Like the original Penn Station, the PATH terminal would bathe travelers in daylight, which would reach all the way to the train platforms 60 feet below ground through the use of glass-block floors above. And like Grand Central, it would be a hub of an underground network linking numerous skyscrapers and subway stations.It would also do something neither of the earlier stations did: move.

Two counterpoised canopies over the main concourse, rising some 150 feet like skeletal birds' wings, could be retracted hydraulically in about two minutes to create a tapered opening almost 50 feet wide at its center. This would ventilate smoke from the building in case of fire and provide natural air-conditioning.

"On a beautiful summer day," Mr. Calatrava said, "the building can work not as a greenhouse but as an open space." He also envisioned the symbolic power of opening the roof every year on the morning of Sept. 11, "giving us the sense of unprotection."

"The building itself expresses the memory of Sept. 11," said Mr. Calatrava, 52, a Spanish architect, engineer and artist who is widely admired for the lyrical quality of his bridges and train stations. Though he has a home on the Upper East Side, the PATH terminal would be Mr. Calatrava's first structure in New York City. (His partners in the design and engineering are DMJM & Harris and the STV Group.)

The angle of the canopies' outer edges would mark the line of the sun at 8:46 on the morning of Sept. 11, when the first plane struck the trade center. The main axis of the 360-foot-long concourse would be aligned with the angle of the sun at 10:28 that morning, when the second tower collapsed.

An architectural expression of these angles was called for in the master site plan by Studio Daniel Libeskind. They formed the Wedge of Light plaza on either side of Fulton Street. In the Libeskind plan, the PATH terminal was to be south of the plaza, in the approximate location of Dey Street, adjoining one of the planned office buildings.

Mr. Calatrava pulled the terminal northward, making it a free-standing structure surrounded by plazas, thereby reopening Dey Street. Because the terminal integrally expresses the Wedge of Light, its design won a warm endorsement from Mr. Libeskind, who has otherwise been struggling to preserve key elements of his year-old site plan.

It was also embraced by Nikki Stern, whose husband, James E. Potorti, died in the north tower. After calling up the images of the design to the screen of her computer, she said her first reaction was - indeed - "Wow."

"My second reaction was how beautifully it complements Daniel's plan," Ms. Stern said, "and how pleased I am that the Port Authority allowed Calatrava to create something that is respectful, yet so hopeful and functional."

That is not to say that the difficult issues are all resolved. Among them is the extent to which the platforms and tracks of the new terminal will encroach on the footprints of the north and south towers.

The amount of retail space in the 200,000-square-foot terminal will not only affect its character but could potentially drain life from the surrounding streets.

Construction will also have to be coordinated with that of the memorial, the Fulton Street Transit Center being designed by Nicholas Grimshaw and with the office buildings planned by Silverstein Properties, including 62- and 65-story towers on either side of the terminal.

Only two months ago, the $323 million temporary PATH station opened. A month later, the design of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower was announced. And last week, the design of the memorial, "Reflecting Absence," was made public.

The permanent PATH terminal and its surrounding network of passageways carries the largest price tag of any of these projects: up to $2 billion, financed with $1.7 billion from the Federal Transit Administration and $300 million in insurance proceeds.

Governor Pataki seemed to anticipate criticism of the project as an extravagance when he summoned the memory of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "He would lament the fact that we don't build grand things any more," Mr. Pataki said. The governor said he vowed that on the trade center site, "the buildings themselves would be a lasting tribute to those we lost and to the courage that showed on Sept. 11."

After the unveiling, Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission, asked, "Should we pre-emptively landmark this?"

The terminal will not in fact be eligible until it turns 30 years old. But glancing at the shimmering models nearby, Mr. Tierney said, "This will still be flying at that age."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

http://www.gothamgazette.com/rebuilding_nyc/PATH.shtml

[BigMac]

How would the Wedge of Light or the WTC hub axis work consistently with the sunlight each Sept. 11 considering leap year and such (or am I just missing something)?

[BrooklynRider]

Am I the only one who is a little disapointed? The size and scope of this project is minimal compared to other projects he has done. It looks a bit liek a upturend hairclip. Im not totaly disapointed as this is much better than the FT but I was expecting great things from Signor Calatrava. Can someone explain to me this concept of glassy trans-lucent tiles. From the description they sound slippery.

I'm not disappointed at all. I think we are seeing a brilliant piece of architecture develop that will challenge and free forthcoming designers at the WTC to step up and be creative. I think the relative "small" footprint of the building reflects the fact that the tracks are not laid out parallel to one another as in a trainshed, but are instead stacked in layers below grade. Either way, and anybody can correct me if I am interpreting it wrong, it does seem that this is a huge station perhaps a block in length.

[BigMac]

Either way, and anybody can correct me if I am interpreting it wrong, it does seem that this is a huge station perhaps a block in length.

For some reason it struck me at first as looking rather small, but yes, it looks to be about that size.

[NYguy]

NY POST...

WTC HUB: A WINNER

By STEVE CUOZZO


January 23, 2004 -- SAY this for Santiago Calatrava's design for the new World Trade Center Transporta tion Hub unveiled yesterday: It does nothing to clear up my confusion over what the "Wedge of Light" is supposed to be.

The closest I can come to making sense of Daniel Libeskind's bone-headed brainstorm is this line from the Port Authority's description of the Calatrava scheme: "Greater open space in the Wedge of Light Plaza."

Which seems to translate as: a smaller Wedge of Light Plaza."

It's hard to say for sure, for — astonishingly — neither the PA nor the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has an up-to-date map incorporating all the new Ground Zero elements.

The PA graphic shown yesterday still displays the memorial quadrant as Libeskind drew it, with a building cantilevered over the north tower footprint — a building eliminated in the "Reflecting Absence" scheme announced a week ago.

But if, as it appears, Calatrava's plan effectively reduces the amount of space wasted on the plaza, it's a good thing — just as every successive incremental erosion of Libeskind's master plan for Ground Zero is a good thing.

The Calatrava design is full of good things, even though he was forced to orient it along the path of sunlight that's supposed to fall every Sept. 11 at 10:28 a.m. — a token accommodation to Gov. Pataki's infatuation with Libeskind's vision. (Besides the embarrassing disclosure that nearby buildings will block the sunlight Libeskind claimed would fall on every 9/11 anniversary, has it ever occurred to anyone that there's no guarantee of sunshine on any day?)

But more than merely nibbling away at Libeskind's straitjacket, Calatrava's design succeeds on its own terms.

Running more or less east-west between Church Street and an extended Greenwich Street, it looks nothing like anything in New York, but it sure looks a lot like his train stations in Liege, Belgium; Valencia, Spain; and Zurich, Switzerland. Calatrava, known for his glass-and-steel structures that seem to swoop and soar, has not switched tracks for Manhattan.

It's just what we may have expected of him, tailored to the needs, conditions and emotional resonance of the site.

Architectural purists will quibble over its "formal" elements and the extent to which it echoes his earlier work. But 150-foot-high "wings," meant to evoke a bird released into the air by a child, embody the same optimistic and resilient esthetic as David Childs' Freedom Tower behind the station.

On paper at least, the design reveals a lyrical buoyancy rare in so functional a structure.

Its key features — a vaulted grand pavillion with cathedral-like ribbed arches, and a transparent roof that will bring natural light to underground train platforms and occasionally open to the sky — seem too good to be true in a city that still hasn't been able to get the forever-promised "new" Penn Station off the ground.

Indeed, it is the original Penn Station, demolished in the early 1960s, that all of Calatrava's work recalls — even though it bears it no literal resemblance. Penn Station's concourse, with its cathedral-like, vaulted and ribbed glass ceiling, remains the greatest room ever for many of us lucky enough to remember it.

As a work of architecture, the Hub will draw legions of tourists and visitors Downtown — an antidote to the "Reflecting Absence" memorial's obsessive morbidity. And if a plan is realized for the new station to link up underground with subway lines on the east side of Broadway, it will be good news for everyone.

Give the PA credit: The agency that often seems accountable to no one, which gave us the bad old World Trade Center and an airport train few want to use, this time did the right thing.


*****************************

DAILY NEWS...

Beautiful monument, waste of money

The Pharaoh Cheops, builder of the great Great Pyramid of Giza, would stand in awe of the cathedral-like train station that the Port Authority plans to construct as an anchor of the World Trade Center redevelopment.

The station - a "transportation hub," in hyped development-speak - would be stunning. Designed by world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, it would take up a city block and soar to a winged glass roof resembling a vaulted cathedral. It's lovely, and almost as useless as the burial monument Cheops planted for himself in the desert.

This is architecture for architecture's sake, and a wasteful use of the money the federal government sent to New York after 9/11. A pleasant, serviceable depot connecting PATH trains and downtown's subway spaghetti would do just fine, and cost a lot less.

The Port Authority has an edifice complex. It's programmed to build monuments, whether or not they make economic sense. In this case, thanks mostly to the feds, the agency has $2 billion burning a hole in its pocket and is determined to spend as lavishly as possible.

Project supporters include Gov. Pataki, a man for whom rebuilding at the Trade Center has become a mission and a path to a legacy. They say the station, with its five underground layers and glass roof that opens, will return New York to building grandly. They also say a transit hub is economically the best use of the federal dollars.

As evidence, supporters cite a consultant's study. It asserts that having a hub would produce more economic development than, say, using the money to extend the Long Island Rail Road from Brooklyn to Manhattan. While the numbers thrown about in such studies are inherently squishy, let's grant that they're accurate. They only strengthen the argument against the project.

Mass transit's sole function is to get people where they want to go as quickly and conveniently as possible. That's what generates economic development, not architecture that aspires to be the Eighth Wonder of the World. A less expensive station would get the job done with money left over to invest in transportation projects that generate even more for the economy.

[NYatKNIGHT]

How would the Wedge of Light or the WTC hub axis work consistently with the sunlight each Sept. 11 considering leap year and such (or am I just missing something)?
It's negligible, and with other buildings casting shadows into it the Wedge of Light it will never be precise.


I have to say that Santiago Calatrava's interpretation of the Wedge of Light is a brilliant one," Daniel Libeskind, the master planner working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said today. "It's an inspiring one because it takes the master plan and contributes even a greater significance to the spaces that an architect of his caliber can do."

And from David Dunlop's article above:

An architectural expression of these angles was called for in the master site plan by Studio Daniel Libeskind. They formed the Wedge of Light plaza on either side of Fulton Street. In the Libeskind plan, the PATH terminal was to be south of the plaza, in the approximate location of Dey Street, adjoining one of the planned office buildings.

Mr. Calatrava pulled the terminal northward, making it a free-standing structure surrounded by plazas, thereby reopening Dey Street. Because the terminal integrally expresses the Wedge of Light, its design won a warm endorsement from Mr. Libeskind.
So now Dey Street becomes part of the new street grid. The Times had the new layout, but it's not online - I'll keep looking.....

[ZippyTheChimp]

The Daily News article is ridiculous. Someone at the presentation said, "We don't build grand anymore."

In my opinion, this station is the first exceptional design to emerge from the rebuilding saga.



Is there anything good in the Powerpoint presentation? I can't look at it on my Mac.
You can download a free Powerpoint viewer for Mac here (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/office98/powerpoint98viewer.xml&secid=20&ssid=7).

Thank you, Zippy. It works very well.
Whew, that's a relief. I was worried - you Mac people are a little too counterculture for my conservative tastes.

[krulltime]

:shock: Am I still dreaming or is this for real?

This is a perfect design for a World Trade Center Transportation Hub. It will attract thousands of people, especially tourists....count me in.

Why couldn't the memorial be a little more creative.... :(

[Kris]

About the Times Capsule:

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/timescapsule

http://www.nytco.com/company-capsule.html

Calatrava's other work in NYC, the Shadow Machine:

http://www.calatrava.com/slides/shadow_machine_01.jpg
http://www.calatrava.com/slides/shadow_machine_02.jpg

[Kris]

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_close_lg.jpg http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_model_clos.jpg http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_insite_sm.jpg

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/news/calatrava_s_wtc_transportation_29863.asp

[DougGold]

This is architecture for architecture's sake.

If it was one thing all of the WTC site plans needed more of, it was architecture going wild just expressing itself. Since this is the only large project that does so, I wouldn't be surprised if, years and decades down the road, it becomes the symbol of the area over the tower and the park. (Is it okay to call the memorial a park? I'm calling it a park.)

[RedFerrari360f1]

The model makes it look much better.

[dbhstockton]

RealVideo from Newsday:

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/wtc/nyc-calatravavideo,0,1878061.realvideo?coll=nyc-topheadlines-span

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/wtc/nyc-wbwtc0123,0,2704495.realvideo?coll=nyc-topheadlines-span

[BrooklynRider]

The model makes it look much better.

I agree. I get so lost on where things are going in this plan. I like it even more now, although building this before those towers are built might create a group opposed to buildings obstructing sunlight penetration into the station.

[BigMac]

Thanks for those links dbhstockton; that was the first time I had seen Calatrava. Someone said that imaginative artists/poets are exactly what Ground Zero needs, and I would agree. They provide hope and inspiration to a place that needs it most.

[STT757]

It's as I hoped it would be, a timeless gateway to NYC as the "Late Great" Pennsylvania Station once was and as Grand Central Terminal still is to the Upper East Side.

[dbhstockton]

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_model_clos.jpg

Calatrava mentioned in the video that he took into consideration the way the station will appear to those looking down from the surrounding skyscrapers. I like the impression from that perspective of perforations, aperatures, or orifices (I can hear Beavis & Butthead laughing) in the street level of Manhattan. Muschamp touched on this, too. It's perfect for NYC, where so much goes on underground, unacknowledged. Mostly one descends via a narrow subway entrance, an abrupt transition. There aren't too many places where you can appreciate, from street-level, the wonderful human ant farm underneath the streets of Manhattan (I'd love to see a real-life cross-section of the Times Square subway station). The relationship between street-level and underground is disjointed, and something like this will shed some light on that relationship, literally.

[JMGarcia]

It really is a beautiful station. If there is any negative I could comment on is that it may seem a little sterile in places. I also wonder how well used it will be if they put a secondary entrance at Church and Liberty as is planned. Most of the traffic comes from south east of the site and I imagine most people would take the first entrance they hit which is at Church and Liberty. This may be mitagated if there turns out to be high traffic through the connection to the Fulton St. transit center.

IMO, the brilliance of the transit center shows just how out of his league Childs is in working on this site. Like almost all of Childs' designs it is a good building but is flawed in enough ways so that it is not a great building. His conservative, corporate instincts always seem to force his designs to stop just short of being great. For instance, the twist, as is, is good but in a effort to eek as much floor space out as low as possible he didn't twist all the sides of the tower. Twisting all the sides would have been preferable IMO. Furthermore the lattice and concrete cores are, I fear, not going to be as appealing as in the renderings. It seems they all know this as the concrete cores are rendered as virtually and unrealistically see-through. While cables around a core work well in a design like CentrePointe in Syndey, I am not sure how good it will look with dual cores and the cables much farther removed from the cores.

http://www.ira.cnr.it/~mgitti/immagini/sydney/tower_3.jpg

http://www.bbraun.cz/cesty/cestopisy/1998cks/obrazky/australie/aus_sydney_sydneytower.jpg

The building is going to look at lot more like the building with 2 huge smokestacks sticking out of it like the rendering of Childs' original design in the NY Observer than anything we've seen since.

Calatrava and Libeskind are quite good friends supposedly. Perhaps between the two of them they can convince Childs and Silverstein that the cabled area and spire can be better than Childs has shown so far.

[dbhstockton]

I think the latest version of the Freedom Tower is an obvious rush job. I'm optimistic that we'll see some refinements in the future.

[BigMac]

NY Newsday

Newsday's Justin Davidson Finds A Soaring Icon

By Justin Davidson

January 23, 2004

When the great glass bird that Santiago Calatrava has designed for the World Trade Center train station alights in lower Manhattan, it will deliver to New York City a phantasmagoric piece of urban theater. Commuters have always dozed in transit; now, they will emerge from beneath the Hudson River into sunlit caverns and arise to an architectural daydream.

In Calatrava's design, light filters through layers of glass and burrows down to the PATH train platforms below ground. A few steps up the escalator, and the city's towers appear through a curving transparent shed. Outside, a public plaza wraps itself around the station and beneath the building's soaring canopies, merging the lobby with the street. Here, at the edge of the Sept. 11 memorial's sober acres, is a place for crowds to mingle: a full block of exuberant urban chaos capped by the stunning, luminescent structure.

The design, which was made public yesterday, represents the arrival of a new, baroque architecture of waves and drama in a stodgily rectilinear city. It preens, it arcs, it spreads its wings — which, the architect assures us, will even flap a little when the spine of the movable roof slides open to the sky. The building sits aslant New York's omnipresent grid, its axis aligned with the sun's position on the morning of every Sept. 11, so during the hours of remembrance a direct ray will theoretically shine through a gap in the building to fill the great domed terminal.

Of all the buildings that are being fitted into what was once called Ground Zero, this will be the most spectacularly alien. Anyone familiar with Calatrava's work — especially the Airport Station in Lyon, France and the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum — will recognize the avian skeleton, the sense of an enormous structure skimming the ground, landing on an open clearing. Here, we have shoehorned our train stations into tight spaces and buried them beneath office blocks. Calatrava's airy, freestanding sculpture is hardly a New York type.

Yet somehow it seems perfect in its place, beautifully conceived in relation to every direction, including up and down. The station will be a stage set for the ceaseless human flow; a portal to soaring Manhattan and to its subterranean precincts. Calatrava has given it what he calls a "fifth facade," by which he means the glittering undulating expanse of glass that it presents to the upper floors of surrounding office buildings. To approach the building broadside, across the plaza, is to see its full span and grandeur. But it will also crouch breathtakingly at the end of certain blocks and spring up before unsuspecting drivers proceeding down Greenwich Street, announcing that New York City is once again prepared for architectural adventure.

The station — surely it deserves a name more elegant than World Trade Center Transportation Hub — will also relate to the city as a secular cathedral. Inside, Calatrava has carved out vast spaces beneath a long, tapered vault, and created a course for the constant ceremony of transit. Above, he has conceived a monument to movement, an optimistic emblem of flight as an answer to an airborne disaster.

The design will mature and resolve before construction begins next year, but Calatrava, who is an engineer as well as an artist, has a record of getting his fantasies actually built, and he has imagined a structure of unforgettable panache. His is the first of the Ground Zero buildings to elicit an instant aha! The Freedom Tower will insert itself into the composite picture of New York that is the skyline and the memorial will depend on memory for its meaning. But Calatrava's station is destined to become a freestanding icon, a New York symbol as instantly recognizable as the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[BPC]

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_model_clos.jpg

Am I missing something? Isn't this model missing the museum/cultural building(s) that Libeskind will be designing for the Noetheast corner of the memorial site? And, if so, won't that block most of the perspectives shown in the Calatrava presentation, as the terminal will be surrounded on all four sides by other buildings? Someone help me out here.

[BigMac]

[img]http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_model_clos.jpg[img]

Am I missing something? Isn't this model missing the museum/cultural building(s) that Libeskind will be designing for the Noetheast corner of the memorial site? And, if so, won't that block most of the perspectives shown in the Calatrava presentation, as the terminal will be surrounded on all four sides by other buildings? Someone help me out here.

Good point; maybe the entire museum will now be underground, or the building will be moved to the other side?

[TLOZ Link5]

Good call, BPC.

[Kris]

The animation shows the approaches from Fulton and Dey Streets. No obstructions there. I presume the cultural buildings were omitted in the model for convenience.

http://www.theslatinreport.com/story.jsp?Topic=Top%20Story&theStory=0123path.txt

[Kris]

January 24, 2004

Santiago Calatrava's Contribution

By now, New Yorkers should be used to seeing themselves portrayed in architectural renderings. Over the past year or so, in image after image, we have seen ourselves shown gazing at the wonders that will someday be built in Lower Manhattan. On Thursday, we got yet another glimpse of the future, when Santiago Calatrava's design for the new transportation hub at ground zero was revealed. If anything, the New Yorkers pictured in the computer renderings of this design appear too complacent. They should be pictured with looks of surprise and gratitude on their faces.

For the past two years, many of us have been waiting for a building that embodies grace and simplicity to fill the aching space tragically created on 9/11. Mr. Calatrava's station may well be that building. He explains its soaring twin-winged glass and steel arc with the image of a child releasing a dove, which is the kind of anticipatory architectural symbolism that has become familiar over the past few months. He quotes Matisse on the character of New York's extraordinary light — something we don't often pause to notice — and suggests that this station is itself a sculpture made out of that light.

But this permanent PATH station, which will replace the temporary one now in service, is likely to become the kind of creation that is iconic in its own right, that needs no explanatory buttressing. Its functional virtues will be as obvious as its aesthetic ones — only appropriate in a station. As construction winds down in several years on this building and on the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station, New York will probably find itself in the extravagant position of possessing three of the greatest stations ever built.

It's worth noting that Mr. Calatrava's design came about in an old-fashioned way: a client hired an architect. No public process, none of the constant oversight that has helped shape other designs in Lower Manhattan. In this case, the client is the Port Authority. A few years ago, the thought that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey could have grasped the eloquence of Mr. Calatrava's idiom would have seemed almost absurd. But as Mr. Calatrava points out, he discovered, in working with the men and women of the Port Authority, a "hidden emotion": the echo, of course, of what they lost on Sept. 11. We do not usually suspect such institutions of having emotions, hidden or otherwise. It is the extraordinary achievement of this building that it catches that emotion and translates it for us to share.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11101158.jpg
http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11101498.jpg
http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11101157.jpg
http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-01/11101197.jpg

[NYguy]

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/73t_gt_calatrava_model_clos.jpg

Am I missing something? Isn't this model missing the museum/cultural building(s) that Libeskind will be designing for the Noetheast corner of the memorial site? And, if so, won't that block most of the perspectives shown in the Calatrava presentation, as the terminal will be surrounded on all four sides by other buildings? Someone help me out here.

I think it just hasn't been done. But most of the renderings of the station were from the street anyway. The museum will sit back a bit...

[NYguy]

Calatrava and Libeskind are quite good friends supposedly. Perhaps between the two of them they can convince Childs and Silverstein that the cabled area and spire can be better than Childs has shown so far.

Maybe that's how Libeskind got Nina to shut up about the changes Calatrava made to his design. Maybe he can convince Libeskind that the spire doesn't really work, and to expand his limits...

[ZippyTheChimp]

Regardless of whether Libeskind or Childs (or both) is at fault, the result will be a nice building at best. Neither the Childs version nor the agreed-upon design match the inspiration of the PATH terminal. Hopefully, the architects for the other towers will equal Calatrava.

Funny, with all the political posturing, it's the PA that quietly comes up with a winner.

[JMGarcia]

Calatrava and Libeskind are quite good friends supposedly. Perhaps between the two of them they can convince Childs and Silverstein that the cabled area and spire can be better than Childs has shown so far.

Maybe that's how Libeskind got Nina to shut up about the changes Calatrava made to his design. Maybe he can convince Libeskind that the spire doesn't really work, and to expand his limits...

Calatrava's design changed but respected the wedge of light with the angle of the opening sping of the terminal. That's the first difference. The second is that Calatrava's building is stunning. Childs' original design is not even close. At best its nice like Zippy says. Just like Time Warner is nice or World Wide Plaza is nice. So close to being great and Childs just can't seem to do it.

[LuPeRcALiO]

Funny, with all the political posturing, it's the PA that quietly comes up with a winner.
Calatrava's transit hub is polling 93% favorable on NY1, which is something that Governor Pataki can appreciate, though I still don't think he's figured out that building design is not a branch of politics.

[DominicanoNYC]

LOL. I really like the design. It really does look like it's flying.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Calatrava's transit hub is polling 93% favorable on NY1, which is something that Governor Pataki can appreciate, though I still don't think he's figured out that building design is not a branch of politics.
I hope he takes care of himself. I don't think I'd be able to live near the George Pataki Memorial Station.

[TonyO]

I don't think I'd be able to live near the George Pataki Memorial Station.

What do you all think it will/should be called? Pataki Station aside of course. I read somewhere that they are initially referring to it as "The World Trade Center Transit Hub" - which I hope is temporary.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Well, the name on the temporary station is: World Trade Center PATH Station.

I suppose the PATH will be dropped when it becomes multimodal. At the Wintergarden, when the model was unveiled, it was referred to as the World Trade Center Station.

That's fine with me, mainly because I'm afraid they would come up with something like Freedom Tower.

[BigMac]

I'm afraid they would come up with something like Freedom Tower.

I can see it now: Emancipation Station.

[JMGarcia]

Did any of you guys see Calatrava's speech? I thought the bit about the station top opening along the line of the Wedge of Light every 9/11 was pushing it a just a little bit but when he went on to suggest that maybe children could release doves to fly out the opening all I could hear was Muschamp screaming "It's kitsch, such kitsch". ;)

[TLOZ Link5]

I still can't get over how wonderful this station looks. Calatrava is great.

So long as we're on this subject, are the plans for the Fulton Street hub final; and ofr that matter, will there be a need for a railyard if the LIRR is extended to Downtown?

[JMGarcia]

I still can't get over how wonderful this station looks. Calatrava is great.

So long as we're on this subject, are the plans for the Fulton Street hub final; and ofr that matter, will there be a need for a railyard if the LIRR is extended to Downtown?

The last I heard on Fulton St. was that the designs would be released in the spring.

[STT757]

So long as we're on this subject, are the plans for the Fulton Street hub final; and ofr that matter, will there be a need for a railyard if the LIRR is extended to Downtown?

As mentioned the plans should be released in the next couple of months, also the details on which plan for connecting Lower Manhattan and JFK will be choosen will also be announced soon.

The choices are either the "Super-Subway" or the JFK/Long Island "Express" plans which includes building a new tunnel under the East river and extending LIRR service from the Atlantic Ave branch directly to Lower Manhattan, the LIRR plan is by far the most complicated and most expensive, but it's also the most expansive in it's effect on Lower Manhattan.

There's no place to build a yard under or below ground in Lower Manhattan, they have two options which are similar to current PATH operations.

First..

The can build a "loop" similar to the PATH World Trade Center Setup, one track comes into Lower Manhattan, branches into 4 tracks serving 2 platforms and then one track exits the station and returns under the East River to Brooklyn.

Or the Second option would be to build a 4 track stub end terminal similar to PATH operations at Hoboken and 33rd Street, train enters on one track and drops off passengers, then picks up passengers on the same platform and reverses direction and crosses over to out bound track.

[Kris]

http://downtownexpress.com/de_37/cover.jpg

http://downtownexpress.com/de_37/wtctrainstation.html

[BigMac]

New York Daily News

January 25, 2004

Give the city a transit hub it deserves

By JOSEPH SEYMOUR

Since 9/11, several transportation projects have been proposed that could help spark lower Manhattan's rebirth. But New York leaders clearly believe that the creation of a world-class World Trade Center transportation hub would provide the biggest boost.

In a recent survey, members of the New York City Partnership said they think the transportation hub would provide the most benefits, returning more than five times its capital cost in economic development. Another survey by the Alliance for Downtown New York rated the hub as the most important transportation project — even ahead of Long Island Rail Road access to lower Manhattan.

One-third of the people who work in lower Manhattan come from New Jersey. Millions of square feet of office space are up for renewal in the coming years. The jobs could go anywhere; they must stay in lower Manhattan.

Many have misconstrued the transportation hub — which is being designed by world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava — as nothing more than a $2 billion train station. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The hub will include a permanent World Trade Center PATH terminal with many of the standard amenities of major transportation facilities. It is expected to serve 250,000 commuters, office workers and 9/11 memorial visitors by 2020, far exceeding the temporary PATH station's projected 50,000 daily riders. The permanent facility will be fully enclosed and have heating, air conditioning and rest rooms — all services that are needed to attract people to public transportation.

More important, the hub will include critical east-west connections to different subway lines and ferries. This will link the World Financial Center and the Wall Street area, untangle downtown's knotted mass-transit network and provide New York and New Jersey workers with quick, convenient access to their jobs.

Furthermore, the hub will include a grand pavilion — a point of arrival worthy of the World Trade Center site. This grand entryway will be similar to Grand Central Terminal in helping attract businesses and visitors to lower Manhattan.

As Gov. Pataki noted during the unveiling of Calatrava's design, the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan "would lament the fact we don't build grand things anymore."

The governor vowed that "the buildings themselves would be a lasting tribute to those we lost and to the courage that we showed on Sept. 11."

Since 9/11, many worthwhile projects have surfaced that could fit in with the Port Authority's mission of developing the New York-New Jersey region. Extending the LIRR to lower Manhattan is one, along with a one-seat ride to Kennedy Airport. We believe these projects deserve further consideration. That is why the PA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Lower Manhattan Development Corp. are studying options to provide direct access to JFK and Long Island and why the hub is being designed to handle future rail service.

It is abundantly clear that the hub will provide the greatest benefit for a section of the city clearly in need of this major boost now.

Seymour is executive director of the Port Authority.

Copyright 2004 Daily News, L.P.

[BigMac]

Newsday

January 25, 2004

PATH Station, of All Things, Will Enrich WTC Site

Until last week, the reputation of the Port Authority was pretty much cast in concrete: It did fine as a regional toll collector. It knew how to build charmless structures like the bus station near Times Square or the hulking Twin Towers. But when it came to the twin arts of public vision and civic grace, the agency was totally without a clue.

Then on Thursday, it unveiled its design for the third key element on the World Trade Center site, a new PATH-train transit hub.

An astonishing thing happened.

When architect Santiago Calatrava ended his presentation, he won a standing ovation.

And no wonder. Calatrava has designed far more than a station for the underground rail link between New York and New Jersey. He has designed a structure that will use air and light to create a feeling of transcendent hope on a place where 2,749 people lost their lives.

Given his reputation for innovation, many expected Calatrava to do something special. But no one quite expected the Port Authority to sponsor a train station that might someday rival Grand Central Terminal in elegance and beauty. No one expected a structure that could leaven so effortlessly the heavy symbolism found elsewhere on the site - especially in the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower and in the 9/11 memorial called Reflecting Absence.

Because he was only designing the PATH station, Calatrava was allowed to work in an environment relatively free from the pressure of impassioned survivors, insistent developers and nervous politicians.

He created a magnificent structure.

And yet, although the applause hasn't quite died out yet, the Port Authority already has taken a few nasty shots from critics who are upset at the station's $2-billion pricetag.

There's no doubt that this is a lot of money for a PATH station - even if it will offer access to the new Fulton Street transit center and even if it will beckon millions of tourists into the region's transportation maw. About $1.7 billion of the money will come from the Federal Transit Administration while perhaps $300 million will come from insurance payouts.

Whatever. The station is worth the price.

To those who worry that New York doesn't build grand things anymore, this creation will be very grand. As Gov. George Pataki said, the station will show that New York is "confident and full of belief in a brighter world."

Several issues remain. The Port Authority might want to call the station something a bit more lyrical than the "World Trade Center Transportation Hub." The authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. still must find the right mix of street-level retail trade and office space on the 16-acre site.

But for now, it's enough to say that the Port Authority has breathed new life into the WTC project. The Calatrava station is a tribute not only to the victims of 9/11 but to the spirit that made this region great in the first place.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

February 1, 2004

Ground Zero Finally Grows Up

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/02/01/arts/KIMM.450.jpg
The World Trade Center PATH terminal, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

This is more like it. The World Trade Center PATH Terminal by Santiago Calatrava, the renowned Spanish architect and engineer, is what we should have at ground zero. Not modified suburban malls with water fountains, but a major cultural contribution to our city.

Here is how it happened: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, acting on its own, invited qualified professionals to apply for the job and selected Mr. Calatrava, the presiding master builder of bridges, airports and rail stations. No jury. No pandering to populism. No public performances. Alternate proposals were not displayed and debated. The result was presented, and the reaction has been appropriately ecstatic.

Too bad the memorial hasn't turned out so well. But then, the process was different. An open competition, ballyhooed as a democratic, grass-roots enterprise, elicited 5,201 entries from around the world, which the jury, stuck with those choices, dutifully whittled down to eight mediocre finalists, and later to three. Notwithstanding all the noble rhetoric about the openness of the competition, jurors then did what was necessary: they demanded changes and help from outside experts. The design by Michael Arad, a young architect with the New York City Housing Authority, won only after he brought on Peter Walker, a well-known veteran landscape architect from Berkeley, Calif., as a full partner. Mr. Walker had an idea about how to make Mr. Arad's concept more winning; he turned the rough and barren plaza, centered on two voids where the towers used to be, into an orchestrated grove of sycamore, locust and linden trees.

But perhaps more important, Mr. Walker had a 45-year track record. During that time he has headed his own firm — working on Millennium Park for the Sydney Olympics, on a large fountain at Harvard, on the Toyota Museum and on Disney City in Orlando, Fla. — and served as chairman of the departments of landscape architecture at Harvard and at the University of California at Berkeley. His inclusion enhanced public confidence and satisfied jurors.

Call this tactic elitism, if you want. I did, writing in Arts & Leisure in December that jurors should scrap the populist palaver and seek out better ideas from the most talented people they could find. Elitism is an incendiary word. When the article appeared, the jury bristled. "Smug cultural superiority" was reportedly how one juror reacted. With art, however, elitism is a blunt term for expertise. And clearly the jury wanted that quality: as Vartan Gregorian, its chairman, put it after the winning design was announced: "Without Walker there would be no Arad."

Then public attention moved on. We're a distracted and impatient society. It was similar with the evolution of ground zero's signature tower. Daniel Libeskind, who has never built a skyscraper, proposed a design with big problems. The developer felt nervous and insisted on involving his own expert on high-rise architecture, David M. Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who has built many skyscrapers. Mr. Libeskind was ordered to work with Mr. Childs. Their joint design turned out to look better than expected.

So, two nominally public processes, altered by the authoritative imposition of outside expertise, produced plans that have come as a relief to many people who feared the worst. Relief. Not, on the whole, as with Mr. Calatrava's work, ecstasy.

Ironing out the details of the memorial will now require experts besides Mr. Walker to join in: engineers, horticulturists, electricians, plumbers. According to the plan, water is supposed to drop from the plaza into reflecting pools matching the tower footprints, then again into smaller rectangular shafts even deeper down. Visitors will be able to descend below ground to see a museum of artifacts. Mr. Arad has said he doesn't want any glass between the water and the public in those spaces.

But as Eric Lipton reported in The New York Times last weekend, cold, wind and ice are among various predictable problems that the design faces. Many public fountains don't function. They are pathetic. This memorial should be inspiring and haunting. The plan has already been significantly altered from its original scheme with the changes by Mr. Walker and now requires further practical modifications. It's not clear how much its eventual form will resemble the design we've been shown.

Rhetoric versus reality: advertising the competition as a model of democracy and ending up with a dose of constructive elitism is not the only example of what seems like political dissembling at ground zero. Officials insist that having the best memorial is the site's top priority. But if that were true, they would have waited until enough time had passed to grasp the proper historic meaning of the event being remembered. Instead, there has been a rush. Partly to console the grieving. But also driven by the need to show big corporate employers downtown that their workers will not be walking indefinitely past what looks like a war zone.

That's understandable. Maybe there was no alternative to haste. Jobs and the economy are critical, after all; they're about survival, too. More square footage at ground zero will go to retail shopping than to the memorial. But everybody should at least be frank about the agenda behind the timetable.

Speed itself isn't even the issue. It's possible to work well quickly, if the goal of the project is clear. Mr. Calatrava has proved that. At this point his design, with its soaring wings and cathedral-like space, opening to the sky, may be the best memorial we have. It certainly brings people together.

Some people find spirituality and rebirth in the voids and flowing water of Mr. Arad's and Mr. Walker's design. Others see a polar bear grotto and spider holes. Kinship with a monumental work by the artist Michael Heizer at the Dia:Beacon museum in Beacon, N.Y., has also been noted.

Mr. Heizer's "North, East, South, West," a variation of a sculpture he did in the 1960's, consists of four big vertigo-inducing steel-lined holes cut into a concrete floor, up to 20 feet deep, in the shapes of a wedge, a cone, part of an upturned cone and a double-stepped square, very similar to the voids Mr. Arad has for his waterfall fountains. Those voids exploit what Mr. Heizer has called "negative sculpture" to preserve the footprints of the towers, the most profound act of memorialization in the design.

The power of Mr. Heizer's minimalist work derives from its necessary scale and abstract simplicity. Whether the addition of water and trees at the memorial elevates the concept or dilutes it remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Mr. Calatrava's rapturous plan for the terminal, conceived in collaboration with the Downtown Design Partnership of DMJM & Harris and the STV Group, has its own historical precedents in the work of engineering-minded artists and builders like Robert Maillart, Felix Candela, Anton Pevsner, El Lissitzky, Eero Saarinen and Robert Ricolais. The allusion to a bird might be hokey, but here strong form born from creative engineering saves it from kitsch. The central metaphor also rescues flight from the violent image of the planes crashing into the towers and raises it poetically to the level of something beautiful and romantic.

We can thank an enlightened patron. The Port Authority might have hired Hack & Hack. The terminal might have been awful. But the authority acted civically. Everybody should be grateful. Building a PATH station is, of course, less emotionally, politically and morally vexing than designing a memorial. Even so, the public hungers for models of uncompromising excellence, and to repeat the truism that no memorial could please everyone is to settle on an easy excuse for compromise.

The lesson is not that commissions without oversight are better than open competitions. It is that substance trumps rhetoric and quality is what people value in the end. Maya Lin's black granite wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not prized because it won an open competition. It is prized for its eloquence.

The quality of Mr. Calatrava's design speaks to the most serious aspirations of the nation. Inventive and transcendent, it establishes a metaphor and benchmark for the evolution of downtown as a place of cultural significance and symbolic weight. The standard for development has been raised. The stakes could not be much higher. Now we should demand that everything at ground zero rise to this challenge.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Ninjahedge]

Nice fantasy building there.

It LOOKS really cool, and it is an interesting concept, except for some pesky little problems like wind, dirt and that ever present nuisance, gravity.

I really do not want anothe 1970's glass and aluminum box for this place, or the concrete and steel "motif" that buildings such as Port Authority and the GWB Bus terminal have represented, but still....

[TallGuy]

I LIKE it. Unlike the towers, which must live up to (AND DON'T) the original WTC, the PATH station I believe is something we can allow something radically different than what came before without resenting the fact that it doesn't live up to it. This is one area where I am willing to allow the redevelopment process free reign, and let it take us where it will.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Nice fantasy building there.
Calatrava has an excellent record in getting his designs translated into real structures. I suppose it's his training in engineering.

[Kris]

http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/calatrava.html

[Kris]

Animation (http://www.calatrava.com/_openwin2.html?pic=world_trade_center_02) (QuickTime)

[DougGold]

That video is really amazing, especially how it gives a feel for how downtown will look with all the new buildings. But, it does make me wonder something. Those huge wings are going to hold up a LOT of snow during snowstorms. In light of that ceiling collapse at the Moscow water park, I wonder how the wings will be built to hold up so much weight. They look very slender.

[TLOZ Link5]

Good point. Maybe there will be heating conduits within the wings to melt the snow? Then it would just employ the same apparatus it would use to channel or recycle rainwater.

[dbhstockton]

Shouldn't the steep slope of the roof take care of all that?

[TLOZ Link5]

Shouldn't the steep slope of the roof take care of all that?

Take care of the snow or the rain?

[MrShakespeare]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Copyright 2004, Chicago Tribune. All Rights Reserved.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Calatrava's ground zero design flies to new heights
By Blair Kamin, Tribune architecture critic.

While Frank Lloyd Wright drew inspiration from the forms of nature, designing
skyscrapers that suggested the tree-and-branch structure of a tree, Santiago
Calatrava often finds his artistic sources in the bodies of living creatures.
His buildings, it's been said, are "zoo-omorphic," variously evoking the wings
of a bird, the belly of a whale, or the skeleton of a cat. Visitors who have
toured Calatrava's stunning addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which flaunts
a sunshade that opens and closes like the wings of a giant bird, intuitively
understand this idea. And now they are likely to realize something else: The
Milwaukee project, which was Calatrava's first American building and which
opened one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was a kind of
off-Broadway tryout. Now Calatrava plans another moving, winglike structure --
a $2 billion commuter railway station at the World Trade Center.

That design, unveiled last month and expected to be finished in 2009, seems
destined to become the finest piece of architecture at ground zero, head and
shoulders above the awkward "Freedom Tower" that resulted from the stormy
collaboration between architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind. The transit
station will simultaneously provide a grandly scaled civic gateway to lower
Manhattan and the kind of light-washed, cathedral-like public space that
Chicagoans and other visitors rave about in Milwaukee.

More with less

In key respects, however, the station is an architectural refinement of the
Milwaukee addition. It's simpler, doing more with less. That is all to the good
because Calatrava can be his own worst enemy, designing outlandish, over-the-
top stuff, like his new opera house in the Canary Islands. There, a huge
curving element swoops menacingly over concrete shells. It's sheer spectacle
and showmanship.

Happily, there will be none of this excess in lower Manhattan, where Calatrava,
in association with DMJM + Harris and the STV Group, proposes a railway station
with several underground levels that will serve PATH commuter railroad trains
between New York and New Jersey, plus city subway trains.

Yet like any Calatrava transportation project -- the 52-year-old Spanish- born,
Zurich-based architect and engineer is internationally renowned for bridges as
well as airports and railroad stations -- this transit station is much more
than an anonymous building that moves people from Point A to Point B.

A better plan

Calatrava's design improves on Libeskind's ground zero master plan, which
attached the transit station to a skyscraper and placed it in the middle of a
block. By making the station free-standing and by shifting it northward,
Calatrava puts it squarely at the crossroads of the new Trade Center -- kitty-
corner from the Freedom Tower site and directly across the street from the
planned "Reflecting Absence" memorial by Michael Arad and Peter Walker.

Beyond the obvious logic of putting the station where the people are, the move
will allow a small east-west street to be rebuilt, making it easier for cars
and pedestrians to get around. It also makes a virtue of one of the more
controversial parts of Libeskind's master plan -- the so-called "Wedge of
Light," a proposed outdoor plaza that the architect claimed would be bathed in
sunlight every Sept. 11 from 8:46 a.m. (marking the moment when the first plane
hit the trade center) to 10:28 a.m. (when the second tower collapsed).

That idea did not withstand the scrutiny of critics, who charged that nearby
towers would block the sun for much of the time. Yet Calatrava has astutely
honored it, aligning the main axis of the transit station with the southern
edge of Libeskind's Wedge of Light. The move lends his diagonally oriented
building, which might have dismissed as a free-standing sculptural object, a
convenient historical rationale.

"It gives you a testimony of time in the ground," Calatrava said Thursday in a
telephone interview from Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he was on a ski vacation.
Libeskind has warmly endorsed the plan, in contrast to his tussles with Childs
over the Freedom Tower.

At street level, Calatrava's transit station will resemble a great bird that
alighted on a landscaped plaza, breaking up the dense cluster of skyscrapers at
the new Trade Center. But its true merits are architectural.

In contrast to the Milwaukee museum addition, which is part-bird and part-ship
due to the prowlike extensions of its main reception hall, the station is a
pure oval, its forms uncluttered and uncompromised.

The station's steel ribs would extend upward to form a pair of canopies that
suggest wings, but the canopies would not open and close completely, as the
sunshade does in Milwaukee. Instead -- on warm days in the spring and summer,
and on each Sept. 11 -- the canopies could be retracted hydraulically to form a
45-foot-wide opening. That would open the station to the sky, a poetic gesture
that would subtly memorialize those who died in the terrorist attacks.

The canopies also may have a practical value, or so Calatrava claims. With each
canopy cantilevering 140 feet, he said, the overhangs will protect pedestrians
from the wind and the rain. Yet they seem so dramatically raked that it's hard
to imagine them providing shelter from the weather. Opening the concourse's
roof, on the other hand, should save on energy costs and prevent the building
from becoming an overheated greenhouse.

To Calatrava's credit, the birdlike pavilion is simply the most visible part of
a design that has greater depth, both literally and figuratively, than the
Milwaukee museum addition.

Lighting the depths

In Milwaukee, the grand gesture of the reception hall and its winglike sunshade
provide the museum an iconic image. At ground zero, such imagery is more
closely integrated with the rest of the building: Not only will the new
pavilion shelter a clear-span, cathedral-like concourse. It will bring light
down to three lower levels of concourses, mezzanines and platforms.

Based on Calatrava's computer simulations of the station, these interlocking,
subterranean spaces promise to be astonishing. Topped by concrete ceilings with
arching ribs, they appear expansive and inviting, brilliant demonstrations of
structural art. Glass block floors and light wells will bring natural light
into them. And Calatrava plans to endow them with additional drama.

As he did in Milwaukee, where the lyrical concrete columns of the museum's
underground parking garage give way to the even more dazzling steel-and-glass
tent of the reception hall, Calatrava will shift from concrete to steel as the
visitor ascends within the transit station.

On days when the pavilion roof opens, the building will dematerialize into the
sky. Throughout the year, the station should suggest, with great subtlety, a
phoenix bird rising from the ashes.

Calatrava's design is at once a return to the tradition of grand New York
transit hubs, such as the restored Grand Central Terminal and the demolished
Pennsylvania Station, and a new kind of transit architecture that relies not
classical facades, but a dazzling integration of structure and form. It is not
spectacle, but art.

[Archit_K]

If anyone one is interested in a video rendering of the WTCTransportation Hub with the preliminary 1776 Freedom Fower and five office tower go to Calatrava’s firm site.http://www.calatrava.com

1. click WTC Transportation Hub
2. bottom you should see: Video
3. enjoy

[professionalx]

I have lately returned from Milwaukee, where I was working on the installation of an exhibition in the new Calatrava-designed wing. I was very impressed with more that the look of the building. I was delighted with how well it worked and how well its form was married to its function. Of particular interest to me was the ease of traffic flow both for visitors and for workers such as myself, especially when I compared it to the equally new Geary building I was in the following week, which suddenly seemed all about the shiny bauble of the roof yet with cramped and mundane interiors.

The Milwaukee Art Museum reaffirmed my belief in the positive transformative effect of great architecture. I look forward to passing through Calatrava's PATH station in my future trips to Newark.

[Derek2k3]

When the design for the transit station came out I knew I had seen something similar to it before. I think I found the proposal about 3 years ago on the Roosevelt Island web site.
http://galleries.soaringtowers.org/albums/Derek2k3/Memorial_Park_and_restaurant_pavilion.gif
Roosevelt Island Memorial Park and Restaurant Pavillion

[Gulcrapek]

Did Calatrava do that?

[Kris]

Yes. I remember it now. It couldn't be financed.

[TLOZ Link5]

Seems like a rough sketch. Very similar to the PATH terminal, but it cannot be denied that all of his works have a common theme. The similiarities may have been the result of past inspiration, or merely coincidence.

[maxinmilan]

simply, a masterpiece

[MrShakespeare]

Note that two models of the PATH station are on display at MoMA Queens...

...There was an image available with this article that I could not access. It may be a new rendering - can someone check it out?


CITY ARTS

A glimpse of the future WTC transit pavilion

BY STEVE DOLLAR

May 9, 2004

That once and future site of the World Trade Center is gradually bounding back. Take a nighttime PATH train to the transportation hub adjacent to the spot and, for now, you'll get an eerie glimpse of Ground Zero under reconstruction.

It's a spooky inside view that would have been inaccessible to the public eye before rail service resumed. But, as grand and grandiose plans for a new WTC - and a Sept. 11, 2001, memorial - are unfurled, debated and rethought, there is a reviving air of promise below Canal Street.

Much of that is embodied in Spanish artist Santiago Calatrava's designs for the concourse and street-level entrance to the site's transit center. This commission from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey transcends what is usually thought of as civic architecture. The glass-and-steel pavilion will boast an exterior composed of two interlocking canopies - wings that rise 168 feet high, and can be hydraulically retracted. Symbolically, according to the architect, this represents an image of hope: a bird flying free from a child's open hands.

Two scale models of Calatrava's design are on display at the Museum of Modern Art Queens through Sept. 27, providing a sneak preview of New York's future. "He has the incredible ability to take the infrastructure of daily life and turn it into something spectacular," says Terence Riley, the MoMA chief curator of architecture and design who organized the exhibit as part of an ongoing display of significant works of civic architecture. "This isn't just a baby step. This will restore a great amount of dignity and civic pride to downtown."

The project is a part of the Downtown Design Partnership, a joint venture of the firms DMJM+Harris and STV Group, along with Calatrava's company. Though construction won't be complete until 2009, the models can give viewers a sense of things to come. Of course, that doesn't happen without the architect's having to tangle with the past. As Riley notes, those four major subway lines running into TriBeCa and the Financial District were originally operated by competing companies, which had scarce concern if their services overlapped and resisted any standard form of operation. But the beauty of the designs is how they tie all of this together and make it seem somehow logical.

But even more significantly, Calatrava has managed to sway bureaucratic tastes, not necessarily known for their artistic acumen. "He has the advantage of being an extraordinarily courtly gentleman and of being from out of town," Riley says. "And like [noted California architect] Frank Gehry, he has an innate instinct for the kind of architecture that really inspires public authorities. He gets people to loosen up the purse strings."

MoMA QNS is located at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard, Long Island City. Admission is $12. Hours are Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays 10 a.m.- 5 p.m., Fridays 10 a.m.-7:45 p.m.; call 212-708-9400 or visit www.moma.org .

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[billyblancoNYC]

simply, a masterpiece

Hello innovative design excellence and awe-inspiring public and mass transit spaces. We've missed you...

[TLOZ Link5]

Indeed, Billy.

[dbhstockton]

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that we're not worthy, but I quickly snap out of it...

[MrShakespeare]

Real Estate Weekly

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

WTC hub architect aims to inspire a generation.

Nelson, Barbara

Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, hopes his design of the Port Authority's
new World Trade Center Transportation Hub will inspire many generations to
come. Giving an impassioned presentation at the New York Building Congress
breakfast last week on his vision of the new hub that he was commissioned to
design last year, Calatrava explained that, in addition to designing a transit
station that would fit into and connect the landscapes of the region, he based
his design on the image of a child, hands outstretched, setting free a bird.

"The young people, it is given to them," he said to the nearly 300 attendees.
"It's a civic center. It is given to everybody."

The glass roof above the hub's freestanding grand pavilion, featuring ribbed
arches that evoke a cathedral, will open daily during summer months for
ventilation. The glass-and-steel wings will rise up to 150 feet.

Calatrava's symbolic design, to be finalized by spring of next year,
memorializes the event and commemorates the moments before the world changed,
with even the natural light that will reach rail platforms 60 feet below street
level having significant meaning.

"September 11 was a very bright day," he said. "Maybe it (the design of the
hub) was a better way than having a memorial."

Although the avant-garde design is quite different than any other terminal hub
now in New York, it will function much like Grand Central Terminal in Midtown,
he said.

Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, said, "Santiago understands that great cities demand great spaces ... a
place that is not only a transportation hub but a great piece of architecture.

Seymour estimated the project would stay within the $2 billion budget. The
temporary PATH station, just opened in November of last year, cost $540 million
to build with a design-build delivery system.

The permanent World Trade Center Transportation Hub is scheduled for completion
in 2006 and will include underground pedestrian connections to New York City
subway stations on the 1/9, N/R and E lines, as well as connections to the 2,
3, 4, 5, J, M, Z, A and C lines at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's
proposed Fulton Street Transit Center.

Seymour said the hub will be built in two or three construction stages with all
construction being completed by 2007/2008.

Calatrava has designed several transportation projects throughout Europe,
including Sondica Airport in Bilbao, Spain; Railway Station in Liege, Belgium;
Airport Station in Lyon, France; Alameda Metro Stationin Valencia, Spain; and
Stadelhofen Station in Zurich, Germany.

The WTC project is being designed by the Downtown Design Partnership, which
includes Calatrava, and is led by the joint venture of DMJM + Harris and STV
Group, Inc.--two architectural-engineering firms.

Copyright 2004 Gale Group Inc.

[TLOZ Link5]

The Daily News seems to be alone in its criticism of the station: not for its design but for its "extravagance." It's true that the new PATH won't connect that many people to begin with, but it's going to connect to two commuter rail lines and practically every subway line that passes through the Financial District. This is the centerpiece of Downtown's mass transit network. It deserves to be extravagant. It deserves to be grand.

[BPC]

For those interested in how the roof to the Calatrava WTC Transit Hub might be put into place, attached is a time-lapsed video of the roof to the Calatrava Olympic Stadium being slid into place just a few days ago:

http://www.athens2004.com/Videos/NewVideos/Video_static/OAKA_ROOF_01_H.wmv

[krulltime]

Cool video! Thanks... :P

[Kris]

Buildings that breathe

Santiago Calatrava, the architect chosen for lower Manhattan's transit hub, engineers landmarks for life

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

June 22, 2004

In the sunny showroom of Santiago Calatrava's Park Avenue town house, all museum-white walls and bleached wood floors, geometric sculptures seem frozen in mid-pirouette. Towers of black cubes separated by tiny steel cones, tethered by slender wires, stand in breathless equilibrium, as if the momentum of an instant ago were still trying to hurl them into the air.

The man who made these things - who has peppered the Western Hemisphere with buildings that appear to have slipped through loopholes in the laws of gravity - enters the room, looking surprisingly earthbound. An architect and engineer by trade, a sculptor and painter by avocation, the 52-year-old Calatrava has bestowed on the Spanish island of Tenerife a concert hall surmounted by a cresting wave. He has designed a bird-like transportation hub with movable wings for the World Trade Center site, and slung swooping bridges across rivers in Europe and California.

But as he pads into his home gallery dressed in a sober suit, he has the demeanor not of a showman or a visionary or a poet - all words that have been used to describe him - but of an affluent Mediterranean intellectual.

Speaking erudite Castilian Spanish that occasionally swerves into English, French, Italian and the odd Latin phrase, he extemporizes elaborate paragraphs filled with references to august historical precedents. Lacking the pad and marking pen that usually accompany his conversations, he illustrates his points by molding the air with his fingers. Once or twice, his Swedish wife, Tina, pops in and they have a brief exchange in German.

Architecture and engineering

"Until the 18th century, the figure of the architect and the figure of the engineer are completely mixed together," he says. "Look at Michelangelo, for example, who planned the fortifications of Florence and also designed the staircase for the Laurentian Library in Florence. Or Leonardo, the same. The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It's a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape."

In Calatrava's case, those objects assert themselves over the landscape with a kind of surrealistic confidence. Passengers headed for the airport in Lyon, France, board a bus in a terminal that resembles an aerodynamic cockroach. The Alamillo Bridge in Seville, and a similar new one across the Sacramento River in Redding, Calif., consists of a single tilted mast, supporting the span by cables.

His structures tend to resolve into metaphors, often several at once. The bridge is a man, leaning away from his load and tugging on a rope. Or it is a harp, its cables singing in the breeze. Or it represents speed itself, a mast blown back like the world experienced at high velocity.

Calatrava's buildings often evoke movement. They are best described in verbs: They soar, they lunge, crane, twist and arc. Rather than wading into metaphysical explanations of why this is true, Calatrava offers an engineer's rationale for designing dynamic structures.

"We're used to thinking of force as a stable phenomenon, but it has a cinematic variable, which is acceleration. In force, you have the crystallization of movement. If I lean on this table, the moment in which the support disappears, my elbow will make a downward movement." Calatrava's buildings express the ineluctable fact that a structure will always want to collapse.

This might in theory have made him an odd choice to design a train station at the World Trade Center, a site defined by the literal collapse of two towers. What made Calatrava perfect for that task is the sacramental quality of even his most pragmatic projects. His stations and bridges look less like utilitarian public works than like pantheistic temples. Even BCE Place, an enclosed shopping street in Toronto, has the high, rhythmic vaults of a Gothic cathedral. The memorial aura of his winged design for the World Trade Center Transit Hub was instantly obvious.

Throughout his career, he has been hired by bureaucrats and elected officials because he ennobles infrastructure and supplies a sublime, humanistic rhetoric to go with every project. He can make a compelling connection between a subway platform and ancient Greece.

It seems somehow apt that on Sept. 11, 2001, he happened to be in Athens, working on the Olympic Stadium, which is now struggling toward completion in time for this summer's games. The next day, he went for a walk in the Plaka, the neighborhood at the foot of the Acropolis, and meditated on temples.

"From there, you can see columns embedded in the wall that supports the Acropolis," he says. "That's the old Parthenon, which was destroyed. But the city was reconstructed and a new Parthenon was built, bequeathing to us our great classical legacy. The attitude of that time is the same as ours: We believe in our own culture and in what those buildings meant. So reconstructing in a more brilliant way, and if possible in a more human way, in a way that is more usable, more transparent, more full of light - this is what we have to do."

He was born outside Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and the upbringing he describes is one of studious privilege: art school, long summer travels and a university life that continued until he was 30. He considered himself a painter until the day, at age 17, when he picked up a book on the French architect Le Corbusier, and the graceful masses of the master's buildings, the counterpoint of sumptuous curves and implacable angles, seduced him on the spot.

Yet he never abandoned his early crafts. Even today he develops ideas by filling artists' pads with figurative line drawings and watercolors and by working out the balance of forces in intricate arrangements of simple shapes. When he was invited to lecture at MIT, he began by showing slides of sculptures he had made out of children's blocks, a stone and lengths of string. In some cases, the link to the figurative idea remains clear, as in "Turning Torso," a high-rise in Malm", Sweden, that evolved from an anatomical study into a tower that twists around its central spine.

When Calatrava traces his aesthetic heritage back through the 20th century, he mentions artists and sculptors most: Picasso, Rodin, Calder, Henry Moore. Just as he sees no solid line between architecture and engineering, so he believes deeply in the continuity of the plastic arts: An idea worked out on a tabletop in clay, or in two dimensions, eventually can be adapted to the intricacies of an urban site: Architecture is useful sculpture, and a building that has lost its function can revert to sculpture, too.

"Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins," he says. "All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful. The Parthenon is now a great sculpture."

Stoking his clients

While he is involved in the long and laborious process of designing a building, Calatrava keeps his clients stoked with keepsakes of the process. His design for a new concert hall for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has yet to be made public, but he shows up in Atlanta monthly, bearing stacks of watercolors, bound into volumes.

"I asked him how to approach these sketches," says Alison Vogelmore, the orchestra's executive director. "He said, 'They're in the order of my thinking, and you have to look at them page after page.' Sometimes you see the engineer in him - a very detailed line sketch focusing on how a mechanical joint would work. Then you'll turn the page, and you'll see the running of the bulls, or an inscription, or a Madonna and child. I asked him about those, and he said, 'This is where my mind took a pause.'"

Calatrava belongs to that rarefied company of architects whose minds and aesthetic personalities are precisely what a client buys. In his case, the result is almost invariably a building that has more in common with other Calatravas around the world than with anything nearby.

Architectural symbolism

His metaphors turn out to be adaptable to vastly different jobs. Atlanta's concert hall and lower Manhattan's station will both, it seems, have wings as symbols of regeneration and local history. In Atlanta, they represent the city as thrice-burned phoenix, in New York, the healing from recent trauma. This kind of promiscuous symbolism can irritate even admiring critics.

"I wouldn't put too much weight on that kind of analysis," says Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. "But the architecture always validates the argument. If it produces great architecture, then it's hard to say it's the wrong metaphor."

What rescues Calatrava from the accusation of stick- on interpretations is his sensitivity to the specifics of each site and the client's aspirations. His first major commission, won by competition at 32, a year and a half after finishing his dissertation, was the Stadelhofen train station in Zurich, Switzerland, a fiercely difficult project. The tracks cut into a steep hill, changed level and curved, and the platform roof had to support the houses that already stood on the slope above.

'Listen to the site'

"You have to listen to the site," says Calatrava, who now has his principal office in Zurich. "There are situations in which the landscape exerts an enormous amount of control. In Zurich, it's the horizontal that controls everything. All the disparate elements are unified by the through-motion of the train. And when you're limited by the landscape, you can concentrate on the details."

So Calatrava used the Stadelhofen station to develop signature flourishes of graceful engineering: angled steel pillars, curving concrete surfaces, boomerang-shaped struts and weightless glass canopies. The conditions were complex, but the station he produced was the physical embodiment of a platitude: Have a pleasant journey.

Calatrava's great strength is his ability to negotiate between a tangled set of specifics and his own broad philosophies.

"Underlying his humanist predisposition is a kind of universalist concept," Riley says. "He employs the same language globally but employs it to the best advantage of local and specific conditions. A lot of architects will fly into town, rush around and hunt for a metaphor and then back they go to wherever they came from and then six weeks later they come up with something local.

"Calatrava drops the pretense of globetrotter culture and sticks to his own guns. He understands the programmatic needs, and those become the local conditions - not that he went down to Atlanta and came up with something that reminds him of 'Gone With the Wind' or grits."

Trusting his audacity

Experience has taught Calatrava to trust his own audacity, and he is a gently persuasive advocate for his ideas. The New York-based builder Frank Sciame describes his first meeting with Calatrava several years ago as a triumph of unexpected charm. When the architect called one summer afternoon and asked if they could meet for coffee at the Four Seasons Hotel, Sciame naturally assumed that he was shopping for contractors for the Atlanta Symphony Hall.

"Instead, he wanted me to finish his town house - not even build it, but finish it!" Sciame recalls. "I was a little taken aback. But in 15 minutes of listening to him talk, I was assuring him that he would move in by September."

80 South St.

Within a few years, it was Sciame who was hiring Calatrava and offering a tight parcel of land near the South Street Seaport for one of the architect's most startling experiments: an 835-foot tower of cubes reminiscent of the sculptures in his living room. The condominium at 80 South St. will be an alternating stack of four-story town houses clinging to a central core and fastened by spindles on either side. In direct violation of the Manhattan developer's first commandment - Thou Shalt Use Every Inch - much of the tower consists of empty space.

If it ever gets built, 80 South St. will engrave itself onto the Manhattan skyline and become an instant landmark. It must be an awesome thing to see one's ideas dominate a landscape in perpetuity that way, but the architect demurs.

"This is a profession you have to approach with a lot of humility," he says. "These works mostly bring honor to those who commissioned them and to those who built them with their hands. I see these works with a certain distance, because they're not mine anymore, they belong to the people who use them.

"The best is to go into a train station that I've built and buy a ticket. The guy in the ticket booth might recognize me, which is a marvelous feeling, but it might be that he doesn't and I go in like any other passenger, except that I enter with a critical eye, looking to see how it's held up. When I use the train station in Zurich, I look at it with the perspective of 20 years since we began.

"I can say that it's aging with dignity."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.


80 South Street (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=2542)

[BigMac]

New York Times
August 27, 2004

Ground Zero Items Added to Plans for Transit Hub

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

A 66-foot-long, travertine-paved remnant of the original World Trade Center concourse - still used every day by hundreds of commuters walking between the Eighth Avenue subway platforms and the PATH station - will be permanently preserved as part of the new trade center transportation hub, the Port Authority said yesterday.

The authority also said it would salvage a fluorescent orange memorial marking from the stairwell of the underground garage, uncover the remaining steel stubs of the twin towers' perimeter columns and mark the edge of the north tower outline on a PATH platform that will one day cover one corner of the tower's footprint.

In announcing these and other preservation measures, the Port Authority hoped to defuse the almost simultaneous announcement by the Coalition of 9/11 Families that it was suing the authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in federal court to stop construction at ground zero until the agencies "adhere to their legally binding commitments to satisfy historic preservation requirements."

Although ground zero appears at first glance to have been swept clean of trade center remnants, there are, in fact, many architectural features and structural outcroppings - some small and quite subtle - that speak to the site's history.

Saving these remnants will add to the cost and complexity of an already challenging reconstruction project, so there has long been tension between redevelopment officials and preservationists over how much to keep or salvage. They have also battled over the extent to which state agencies are adhering to requirements of federal preservation law.

"We have to be constantly, diligently, aggressively on their case about all the historic preservation issues," said Anthony Gardner of the Coalition of 9/11 Families. "Otherwise, the historic integrity of the World Trade Center would be destroyed."

The authority and the corporation said in a statement that they had "worked closely with the coalition and other stakeholders" to preserve the historical significance and dignity of the site and were "deeply disappointed" that the coalition filed suit.

Originally, the Port Authority planned to demolish the remaining segment of the trade center concourse to accommodate the permanent terminal, in part because there will be a 14-foot difference in floor levels. But Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the authority, said yesterday that as a result of suggestions during a federally required historical review, the entire segment would be preserved and joined to the new building by stairs or escalators. It will still serve as a conduit between the PATH station and the subway.

A new PATH platform in the permanent hub will cover about 1,600 square feet of the north tower footprint. The tower outline will be indicated on the platform, perhaps with colored tiles, Mr. Coleman said.

In the garage, which is being demolished to make way for the Freedom Tower, the authority had earlier committed to saving two smoke- and heat-damaged columns and a section of wall labeled "Yellow Parking B2." It has now expanded the salvage list to include a staircase handrail and a fluorescent orange heart and cross, evidently an impromptu memorial to electrical workers who died in the attack. It may also save a ceiling beam stenciled "Ponya," for the Port of New York Authority, as the agency was called when the trade center was under construction.

Mr. Coleman said the authority would dig as many tower column stubs as possible out from under layers of dirt and gravel, probably in October. This will permit relatives of the attack victims to visit the site and trace much more exactly where the towers stood. The column remnants will also be documented.

Mr. Gardner was unappeased. "In terms of documentation of the remains of the footprints," he said yesterday, "this should have been done months ago and could have been done months ago."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYguy]

Originally, the Port Authority planned to demolish the remaining segment of the trade center concourse to accommodate the permanent terminal, in part because there will be a 14-foot difference in floor levels. But Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the authority, said yesterday that as a result of suggestions during a federally required historical review, the entire segment would be preserved and joined to the new building by stairs or escalators. It will still serve as a conduit between the PATH station and the subway.

A new PATH platform in the permanent hub will cover about 1,600 square feet of the north tower footprint. The tower outline will be indicated on the platform, perhaps with colored tiles, Mr. Coleman said.

That's very interesting about the tower outline.....

[NoyokA]

I thought the tower footprints were preserved by the memorial????

[Jasonik]

I thought the tower footprints were preserved by the memorial????

Not all the way to bedrock.

[NYatKNIGHT]

So the memorial fountain will be right above that part of the train station. Hmmm.

[James Kovata]

So the memorial fountain will be right above that part of the train station. Hmmm.

Are you talking about the pools/waterfall that will occupy the footprints? Or is this some other memorial fountain?

[NYguy]

So the memorial fountain will be right above that part of the train station. Hmmm.

The trains themselves run at the bottom of the pit (even crossing a footprint at about 70 ft below) while the memorial "footprints" will be about 30 ft below. There will be access to one of the footprints at bedrock.

[Bob]

Am pleased to learn the original WTC base columns will be preserved, in some fashion. Years from now, people will want to have the physical evidence to show that, indeed, there was a WTC and that - yes - the place really was that big.

As for the new transit hub, terrific! Tie in the LIRR link, and it's the best catalyst for downtown renewal.

[TonyO]

NY1

Transit Hub To Preserve Remnants Of Twin Towers

MARCH 23RD, 2005

In an effort to preserve history, remnants of the base of the twin towers and a subway stop will be incorporated into the transit hub being built at the World Trade Center site.

In a deal with the state Historic Preservation Office, the Port Authority, which owns the site, has agreed to build around more than 120 columns that were not destroyed and make them visible to commuters through a glass wall.

The authority has also promised to do all it can to preserve the old subway entrance for the E line at the site.

The authority also plans to temporarily relocate the steel beams that stood at the site in the form of a cross, until a permanent location is chosen.

Victims’ relatives and other advocates say it is important to save as many remnants as possible, because no remains have been identified for over 40 percent of the victims.

[Jake]

$2 billion budget, nice,

Does anyone know what the floors and walls of the station are gonna be made out of? In the photos and animations the station looks really white as if the floor was marble or granite.

Colored tiles seem kinda insulting, so it's just gonna be like a body outline in a homicide? But I don't know, I don't have a better idea. I was at the PATH yesterday and the Newark platform is pretty much right in the middle of the WTC site where the plaza used to be.

[americasroof]

Now it's officially in the crosshairs:
http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/07/11/port_authority_clips_calatravas_wings.php

[phillymatt]

Now it's officially in the crosshairs:
http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/07/11/port_authority_clips_calatravas_wings.php
A blog is far from offical.

[lofter1]

Official or not, the smell of downsizing is in the air...

I love Calatrava's design, but what part of WTC2 hasn't been altered since it was first presented? Also notice on the renderings how close the edge of the Calatrava canopy comes to Broadway. Wouldn''t be surprised if NYPD raises a security issue there. And those beautiful sloping walls that come down to the sidewalk -- imagine all the youngsters climing up the sides. And the wings are glorious, but by the end I bet they will be shortened and immobile.

Caltrava might just pull the whole thing and walk away from it.
Time is out of joint -- and it seems we no longer have the capacity to realize dreams such as this...

[czsz]

It's hard to dream when all anyone has are nightmares.

[Johnnyboy]

time to cross our fingers and hope this desighn won't be tampered with and get really, really ugly

[americasroof]

It's hard to dream when all anyone has are nightmares.
That's the most eloquent summary of the Ground Zero situation I've ever heard.

[Jake]

My hope is they will stop once the station is built and I don't have to see Ground Zero every time I come back on the PATH train form meetings at Goldman.

[Jasonik]

It's hard to dream when all anyone has are nightmares.

That's the most eloquent summary of the Ground Zero situation I've ever heard.

HEAR, HEAR!

[sfenn1117]

off-topic here, but I live in Bay Ridge too Jake.....what area are you in? I'm near Owls Head Park.

[NoyokA]

I just heard on the news that some of the money Congress earmarked for lower Manhattan will be used to build Calatrava's Transit Hub. There should be no scaling back.

[Jonathan_Hakala]

The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) press release that was just issued makes it clear that only an additional "$221 million" was "awarded for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) terminal." The Port Authority also "received $478 million to construct a security center for the southern World Trade Center site". The New York State Department of Transportation received a "$200 million grant to rebuild the World Trade Center segment of Route 9A/West Street from West Thames Street to Chambers Street."

The amount of additional PATH money would seem to leave open the possibility of Calatrava's vision being severely compromised.

[BrooklynRider]

... The Port Authority also "received $478 million to construct a security center for the southern World Trade Center site".

What does THAT mean? Are we all going to be x-rayed, puffed and frisked to enter this site too?

There is nothing at the southern end of the WTC site besides the memorial and another way-off tower. Is there something obvious I'm missing or will we now have a security funnel to pass through? Stuff like this kills people's desire to work and live there.

[czsz]

Next at Ground Zero, Frank Gehry's security tunnel and sniper alley:

http://www.studiolo.org/pix/thumbs006/2003-11-29-17-30-01_a-pix_small.jpg

[BPC]

What does THAT mean? Are we all going to be x-rayed, puffed and frisked to enter this site too?

There is nothing at the southern end of the WTC site besides the memorial and another way-off tower. Is there something obvious I'm missing or will we now have a security funnel to pass through? Stuff like this kills people's desire to work and live there.

Unlike the pre-9/11 set-up, which was far more sensible because it was designed by low-paid PA bureaucrats instead of the genius Mr. Libeskind, in the new WTC site plan there will be only one inbound truck ramp for the entire 16 acre site, which contains an enormous underground complex. It will be on Liberty street. ALL deliveries for every single building on the site, as well as tour bus drop offs and such, will have to go through that ramp. This is the #1 security risk, because large-scale trucks will have access to areas adjacent to the foundations of the buildings (see 1993). Accordingly, there needs to be a security screening area for all inbound trucks. It can't be in the street, as there is no room for hundreds of trucks to park. They plan to put it undergrond by the Liberty Street ramp. I didn't realize it was going to cost that much. Now I see where the West St. tunnel money went.

[JMGarcia]

I was under the impression it was the community that forced limits on the number of truck ramps.

[BPC]

I was under the impression it was the community that forced limits on the number of truck ramps.

On many issues, including this one, the "Community" is not a monolith. It is true that certain more influential members of the part of the Downtown residential community that lies directly to the north of the site (ie Tribeca), managed to get all of the truck traffic pushed on to their poorer cousins to the South. (Pre 9/11, there was a ramp around Barclay Street north of the site which worked pretty well.) It is also true, however, that other parts of the community (less BPC residents than the residents in the Cedar Street blocks directly south of the site) fought the tunnel tooth-and-nail, without success.

I suspect that the PA believes modern-day security concerns (i.e., truck bombs) are more easily addressed from one entry point than from two, and probably prefers it this way in any event. But from an urban planning point of view, it probably is not going to be the best configuration.

[JMGarcia]

On many issues, including this one, the "Community" is not a monolith. It is true that certain more influential members of the part of the Downtown residential community that lies directly to the north of the site (ie Tribeca), managed to get all of the truck traffic pushed on to their poorer cousins to the South. (Pre 9/11, there was a ramp around Barclay Street north of the site which worked pretty well.) It is also true, however, that other parts of the community (less BPC residents than the residents in the Cedar Street blocks directly south of the site) fought the tunnel tooth-and-nail, without success.

I suspect that the PA believes modern-day security concerns (i.e., truck bombs) are more easily addressed from one entry point than from two, and probably prefers it this way in any event. But from an urban planning point of view, it probably is not going to be the best configuration.

My only point was that it was not Libeskind who made this design decision but rather a PA bureaucrat who heeded the calls of at least part of the "community". Of course those poorer cousins to the south would have like to push the entry on the richer cousins in the north so I guess there really isn't that much to differentiate them on that issue.

[STT757]

"FEDERAL TRANSIT ADMINISTRATION APPROVES $699 MILLION IN GRANTS FOR WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE WORK
Date: July 12, 2005
Press Release Number: 82-2005


Agency Also Approves Environmental Review of WTC Transportation Hub; Groundbreaking Scheduled This Summer


The Federal Transit Administration today awarded $699 million in grants to the Port Authority to implement key World Trade Center site infrastructure projects.

The federal agency also has completed an environmental review for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub project – a major milestone that will allow construction of the $2 billion facility to begin on time in late summer.

New York Governor George E. Pataki said, “These funds will help fulfill our unwavering commitment to the people of New York State and the region with respect to the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. I’m extremely grateful for the help we continue to receive from our federal partners, and look forward to working with them as the redevelopment proceeds.”

Acting New Jersey Governor Richard J. Codey said, “It is vitally important to the tens of thousands of our citizens who work in, live in or visit Lower Manhattan that we continue to move aggressively forward to upgrade the transportation infrastructure on the site. These grants, coupled with the FTA’s approval of the environmental review for the transportation hub project, will ensure that these projects remain on track.”

Port Authority Chairman Anthony R. Coscia said, “While most of the attention at the World Trade Center site has focused on the Memorial, the Freedom Tower and the restoration of transportation services at the site, few people realize the fundamental importance of the below-ground infrastructure. These grants will provide the necessary resources for us to provide a portion of the infrastructure to permit vehicle access to the site through a security center and for the support of the site’s transportation hub.”

Port Authority Vice Chairman Charles A. Gargano said, “The rebuilding and revitalization of Lower Manhattan is our top economic development priority. These grants will allow us to move quickly to rebuild and improve the basic infrastructure at the World Trade Center site. The rebuilding of the site, including these projects, will generate $15 billion in total economic output in New York City and an average of 8,000 jobs each year for 13 years.”

Port Authority Executive Director Kenneth J. Ringler Jr. said, “One of our key priorities at the World Trade Center site is to ensure the safety and security of those who will visit the Memorial, work in the office buildings and patronize the retail shops. We are extremely pleased that the FTA has agreed to pay for a critical vehicle security center, which will permit underground access, and to provide other subgrade infrastructure for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub.”

The $699 million – requested by Governor Pataki on June 3 – will pay for the following projects:



A $478 million World Trade Center Security Center. The project involves the construction of a south “bathtub” between Liberty, West, Cedar and Greenwich streets that will contain a vehicle screening center as well as potential parking spaces for tour buses. The bathtub structure is to prevent underground water from coming in.


A $174 million project to build a bathtub on the eastern portion of the site bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Greenwich and Church streets. The project involves construction of slurry walls and site excavation to support the Transit Hall and north-south pedestrian concourses.


A $17 million project to install slurry wall liners in several locations to permanently reinforce existing walls that are now supported by tiebacks.


A $30 million project to install a hardened concrete-and-steel slab to protect pedestrians traveling along a portion of the future east-west corridor of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. The corridor will be located under the future extension of Fulton Street through the site.


In addition to the grants, the federal agency formally issued a Record of Decision to complete the Environmental Impact Statement process for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub. The environmental review also incorporated an evaluation of historic resources at the World Trade Center site. The federal agency’s Record of Decision, noting that the project has satisfied the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, can be accessed at www.panynj.gov/pathrestoration.

The transportation hub project will seamlessly link a permanent World Trade Center PATH Terminal with New York City subways and Battery Park City ferries, as well as other destinations on and adjacent to the World Trade Center site.

The transportation hub, which will be operational in 2009, will include the PATH Terminal with a track and platform level, a mezzanine level, two concourse levels and access to streets surrounding the World Trade Center site. It also includes underground pedestrian connections to New York City subway stations on the 1, W, R and E lines, and the 2, 3, 4, 5, J, M, Z, A and C routes at the Fulton Street Transit Center. World-famous architect Santiago Calatrava developed the transportation hub design."

[lofter1]

All those new "bathtubs" and slurry walls will make for long excavation / foundation construction. So, other than WTC7 and possibly the F***dom Tower, it will clearly be a long while before the hole starts to get built up.

[BPC]

My only point was that it was not Libeskind who made this design decision but rather a PA bureaucrat who heeded the calls of at least part of the "community". Of course those poorer cousins to the south would have like to push the entry on the richer cousins in the north so I guess there really isn't that much to differentiate them on that issue.

No doubt. Nobody wants a truck ramp in their neighborhood. My real point (putting aside the cheap shot at Libeskind) was that the decision to limit the new WTC site plan to only one ramp seems unwise.

[NewYorkYankee]

This connecting to the Fulton Street Center, thats a heck of a station if you ask me.

[Law & Order]

I dont know where this should be, there are so many World Trade Center threads, and transit ones... so Ill make a new one.

Images first:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/24/nyregion/tubes.slide.5.jpg
At left, on the east side of the World Trade Center site, the openings of the Manhattan-bound tunnels of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, the predecessor to PATH.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/24/nyregion/tubes.slide.2.jpg
The Port Authority says the cruciform steel column found at 6 World Trade Center will be relocated when the new transportation hub is built.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/24/nyregion/tubes.slide.3.jpg
Cast-iron rings brace a Hudson & Manhattan Railroad tunnel that linked Manhattan and New Jersey. Some tunnels were used as truck ramps for the trade center.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/24/nyregion/tubes.slide.4.jpg
A sign in the old Hudson Terminal, which was used for trucks before 9/11.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/24/nyregion/tubes.slide.1.jpg
A view looking west toward the World Financial Center across the steel structure of the World Trade Center concourse.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/07/25/nyregion/20050725.tubes.graphic.gif
Work will begin in September on a transit hub at the trade center site.

July 25, 2005
Below Ground Zero, Stirrings of Past and Future

By DAVID W. DUNLAP (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=DAVID%20W.%20DUNLAP&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=DAVID%20W.%20DUNLAP&inline=nyt-per)
Having endured the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center above, the 96-year-old Hudson Terminal - now a colossal underground ruin at ground zero - will soon give way to a new transportation hub.

The ground that is to be broken in September for a new trade center terminal on the eastern side of the site includes some astonishing infrastructure: the two-block-long passenger platform level of the Hudson Terminal, later used as loading docks; cast-iron railroad tubes that were turned into truck ramps; a vault where tons of gold and silver were stored; and structural hints - geometrically patterned flooring here, chocolate-colored brickwork there - of the once bustling trade center shopping concourse.

In their place will be the lower levels of the PATH terminal and transportation hub designed by Santiago Calatrava, new pedestrian passageways, shops, parking spaces, loading docks and the basement of the third office tower planned for the site.

For now, there is nowhere else at ground zero where time is more palpably suspended than in the tubes and tunnels and truck bays that once served the World Trade Center and, before that, the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, predecessor to PATH.

Almost four years after the attack, signs still command truck drivers who have long since vanished: "No Idling." "Not for Service Vehicles." "30 Minute Parking Only for Deliveries. Offenders Will Be Autoclamped and Fined."

Within the cavernous gloom of the deeply ribbed 15-foot-3-inch-diameter tubes, the quiet is broken every few minutes by the disembodied rumble of a PATH train passing nearby.

"It makes you think we should get out of the way, that a light will come down from the end of the tunnel," said Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as he stood last week at the mouth of the tubes.

Mr. Ringler said elements of this subterranean realm - perhaps some cast-iron tube rings, certainly some ornamental flooring - would be salvaged.

The authority is committed to preserving the travertine-clad hallway leading to the E train terminus at Chambers Street. It plans to relocate the cruciform steel column that was found at 6 World Trade Center. What the authority does not save, it will document in written descriptions, drawings and large-format photographs.

"It's important that we attempt to preserve some of this for history," Mr. Ringler said. "This is part of the story. It is not necessarily integral to 9/11, but there is history here."

Tangible history on the eastern third of the trade center site may date to the second half of the 18th century, since the blocks between Greenwich and Church Streets were always on dry land, unlike the western part of the site, which was landfill.

Excavation of areas along Vesey and Liberty Streets could conceivably uncover privies, cisterns, wells or cesspools from the 1750's through the 1850's, according to the environmental impact statement for World Trade Center redevelopment project.

In any case, the milestone year of 1909 is abundantly recalled. That was when William G. McAdoo, founder of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company, opened the Hudson Terminal, an underground complex that stretched from Fulton Street to Cortlandt Street, ushering in three-minute rail service between Jersey City and Lower Manhattan. Above the terminal were two 22-story towers, nearly twins.

Trains approached the Hudson Terminal through the southern tube, which branched into five tracks that looped among six passenger platforms, studded every 20 feet or so with white-tiled columns. They headed back under the river through the northern tube.

In 1962, the bistate Port Authority took over the bankrupt Hudson & Manhattan line - renaming it Port Authority Trans-Hudson - in return for the support of New Jersey officials for a huge trade center in New York. The authority had planned to build the center on the East River, but moved it to align with the Hudson Terminal.

During construction of the center, the U-shaped track array was shifted about 450 feet westward to a new PATH terminal, which opened in 1971. The vestigial Hudson Terminal platform area was turned into loading bays for the two low-rise trade center buildings on Church Street, served by Ramp L (the south tube) and Ramp J (the north tube).

These loading bays look today much as they must have on Sept. 10, 2001. There are still rubber bumpers along the edges of the four-foot-high truck docks. Columns and ramp walls are still color coded: green for 4 World Trade Center, purple for 5 World Trade Center. But Ramp L bears deep scars from Sept. 11, 2001. Steel reinforcing bars embedded in the concrete walls have been twisted into Medusa-like tangles. Steel column flanges are bent like wilting leaves. The tunnel ceiling is bowed and braced.

Nearby, a door with a shattered window leads to the vestibule of the Bank of Nova Scotia vault. Inside the vestibule is a massive steel door with six-inch-thick hinges. Behind that door, the bank was storing about $200 million in gold and silver when the World Trade Center came under attack.

"The vault was intact and all the silver and bullion was taken out," said Peter L. Rinaldi, general manager of the trade center site in the Port Authority's priority capital programs unit. He witnessed the recovery operation, a month and a half after the attack, and remembers more than 100 armored trucks making their way out of Ramp J.

Directly above the loading bays was the long north-south corridor of the trade center shopping concourse. The most distinctive remnant of the mall is the banded flooring pattern from the crossroads once occupied by a Warner Brothers Studio Store, a Tourneau watch store and Casual Corner and Strawberry clothing stores.

Very little remains of the rest of the concourse except for a small field of 8-by-8-inch floor tiles just south of the crossroads, directly under the steel cruciform.

This was where Benjamin Books once did business, succeeded by Innovation Luggage. Because Innovation's target customer is a 35- to 50-year-old business traveler, the trade center store was in "the center of our demographic," said David R. Petroski, the company's regional director. "Volume-wise, it was headed toward being one of the top two stores."

Briefcases and attaché cases were big sellers. The store featured a large metal globe and five television monitors tuned to business channels.

Mr. Petroski, 39, who was then district manager for New York City, happened to be in the trade center store that Tuesday morning to catch up on work before the staff arrived to open up. Because he left the door unlocked, a customer had already come in to check out a bug-eye-green Timberland knapsack.

The concourse started to shake. Mr. Petroski figured it was the subway. But then came a roar. And then, visible through the plate-glass storefront, a stampede. "Businessmen were running for their lives in huge packs," he said. "My first thought was that there must be a shooter in the hall. I couldn't comprehend why hundreds of people were running."

The customer dropped the knapsack. Without saying a word to each other, the two men joined the flight. After finding sanctuary in the park at 1 Liberty Plaza, Mr. Petroski heard a rumor that the explosion had been caused by a faulty boiler.

"The store's a bank vault - a quarter million dollars of inventory," he said. "Responsible district manager that I am, I went back into the World Trade Center. Security is saying, 'Get out!' But I'm smarter than that. I know it's just a boiler. I lock everything up."

After leaving the concourse again, Mr. Petroski heard a noise getting louder and louder and louder as he crossed Church Street. "In retrospect, it must have been the sound of the engines," he said. "I turned. That's when the second plane crashed."

Dazed, terrified but uninjured, Mr. Petroski made his way home by subway to Brooklyn. He tried to return to work the next day in the store on the Avenue of the Americas at 21st Street. "But I just spent the morning crying in the stockroom," he said.

At the trade center, of course, one locked door made no difference.


Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Alonzo-ny]

Wow really good article, i cant wait for ground zero to stop being a haunted place and become the wtc again teeming with life. I pass through the path terminal sometimes when getting the subway and i hate seeing old parts of the wtc that just haunt me. It gives me a wierd sensation seeing old parts of the wtc because i never got to see them before 9/11 and there i am looking at a part of something ill never see

[Jake]

Jeez, looks worse than Berlin after WWII. I was under the impression that everything was cleared by now. Guess we still have work to do.

[BrooklynRider]

... i cant wait for ground zero to stop being a haunted place and become the wtc again teeming with life...

I can't wait for people to stop referring to it as "Ground Zero"

[BPC]

I can't wait for people to stop referring to it as "Ground Zero"

Me too. Most of my neighbors who I have spoken too about the issue are similarly offended by the term. (Imagine if the media renamed your neighborhood, or a large chunk thereof, as "Ground Zero.") While I don't think anyone means offense by it, I still think it's long past time to retire the term.

[TonyO]

Some news on the PATH hub from the Slatin Report (embedded in a story regarding Calatrava's new WTB in Chicago):

(The PATH station itself is being re-engineered for two reasons. The first was to address renewed security concerns, expressed long before the London Underground attacks and consistent with the police concerns that led to the redesign of the hapless Freedom Tower. The second was to bring costs back into line. One source told The Slatin Report that the projected $2 billion budget had ballooned to $3 billion; another source told us that the redesign had reduced the station’s size and altered the materials while leaving its appearance relatively unchanged. The new designs are expected to be unveiled at a public meeting of the Port Authority on Thursday.)

[BPC]

July 28, 2005
Approval Expected Today for Trade Center Rail Hub
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
In the name of security, Santiago Calatrava's bird has grown a beak. Its ribs have doubled in number and its wings have lost their interstices of glass.

The revised design of Mr. Calatrava's birdlike World Trade Center transportation hub and PATH terminal, which is expected to be approved today by the Port Authority board, appears at first to be nearly identical to the concept unveiled in 2004. But subtle changes have occurred to buttress the building against bombings and to control costs.

"We looked at various security enhancements around the base and how to fortify it," said Anthony R. Coscia, chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. "Those things were all done in a way that stayed faithful to the original vision."

Mr. Coscia said that the revised design had been reviewed by the New York Police Department and by James K. Kallstrom, who is overseeing security at the site for New York State, and that "everybody is comfortable" with the new plans.

The board is to vote today on the overall project and on the authority's $300 million contribution to the $2.2 billion budget. (The $1.9 billion balance comes from the Federal Transit Administration.)

Groundbreaking is scheduled in September, and the terminal is to open in 2009. Mr. Calatrava is also designing what would be the nation's tallest building, in Chicago. He is working on the trade center project with STV and DMJM Harris.

Their revisions are nowhere close to the alterations made recently to the proposed Freedom Tower at the trade center site, which was fundamentally redesigned after objections raised by the police. But the main transit hall, between Church and Greenwich Streets, will almost certainly lose some of its delicate quality, while gaining structural expressiveness. It may now evoke a slender stegosaurus more than it does a bird.

There are still 150-foot-high wings on either side of the hall's tapering arc, but there will not be glass or any other material between the ribs. The wings will still open on nice spring and summer days, and ceremonially every Sept. 11, exposing the concourse below to the open sky. But the width of the maximum opening has shrunk to about 30 feet from 45 feet.

Twice as many steel ribs will enclose the transit hall in the revised design. By reducing the space between the ribs to 5½ feet from 11, the designers have cut down on the amount of glass that would be exposed to a blast. The ribs themselves would create a protective shadow, depending on the angle of the explosion.

New beaklike prows - it is difficult to avoid zoomorphism when describing Mr. Calatrava's architecture - will extend from the Church Street end of the main transit hall. This hardened prow, about 25 feet long, will protect a critical structural juncture.

A solid wall more than three feet high will ring the base of the transit hall, where the glass bays once almost reached the pavement, and the hall itself will shrink in length to less than 330 feet from 360 feet. This will increase the distance between the hall and surrounding streets, a key means of limiting destruction from vehicle-borne bombs.

Inside, a cluster of escalators and elevators has been shifted from the west end of the concourse, opening views from the transit hall into the mezzanine beyond. Because the concourse is only 12 feet higher than the mezzanine, the designers can eliminate "PATH Hill," an imposing bank of escalators common to the original PATH station of 1971 and the temporary station of 2003.

But they are preserving the remnants of the travertine-paved vestibule that once led from the trade center shopping concourse to the E train terminus at Chambers Street.

Gov. George E. Pataki said in a statement: "Santiago Calatrava's inspiring initial design concept has endured despite security concerns, master plan revisions and cost issues. This is a testament to the brilliance of the design."

Speaking for New Jersey residents who make up the great majority of PATH riders, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey focused on more practical features "that will make commuting more convenient and more pleasant, like retail space for errands on the way home and easier links to the ferries and subways."

[expose05]

there is a picture of the new hub at nynewsday

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/showwtc.htm

Not quite as elegant.

[Alonzo-ny]

doesnt look any different to me, whats changed

[ablarc]

^ Twice as many ribs, no glass. Plus it's got a head like a stegosaurus.

Not nearly as penetrable, visually or with a truck bomb.

All for security.

[lofter1]

doesnt look any different to me, whats changed

Also about thirty feet shorter -- to maximize distance from the street.

Still looks great -- but without the glass in the ribs the "wings" will offer no protection from the elements whatsoever.

[Alonzo-ny]

At least something will finally be constructed on the wtc

[NoyokA]

Oddly enough the new design is much better. I feel the additional mullions make it look stronger, bolder, taller, and more refined.

[BPC]

I still love it. Let's start digging already.

[pianoman11686]

Architect Finds Spot for Flag Found in Ruins of 9/11 Site

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: July 29, 2005

On his way to present a revised design of the World Trade Center PATH terminal and transportation hub to the Port Authority board yesterday, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava made an unexpected discovery that may add an important memorial symbol to the future train station at ground zero.

Outside the boardroom, he spied an 8-by-12-foot American flag in a frame that almost fills an entire wall. The flag had flown over the main plaza of the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001, and survived in tatters. Mr. Calatrava was inspired.

A short while later, narrating a slide presentation to the board, he came to an image of a blank wall at the west end of the terminal mezzanine. "We would like to suspend a very symbolic object," he said. "It could be the flag who is hanging here in this house."

After Mr. Calatrava described the modifications made in the terminal design to increase security, the board approved the $2.221 billion project. Asked about displaying the trade center flag in the mezzanine, Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., the executive director of the authority, said, "I think it's a great idea."

"It would demonstrate the resiliency of Americans to the thousands and thousands of people who would be going through that transportation center every day," he said.

Mr. Calatrava said he had been thinking of placing a painting of the flag by Jasper Johns in the mezzanine until he spotted the trade center flag.

The flag was buried under rubble for three days after the Sept. 11 attack and torn in several places. It was surrendered by its rescuers to a National Guard colonel for ceremonial destruction, according to the authority. Instead, the colonel returned the flag to the Port Authority.

It flew over Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series and was displayed at the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans and at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It was also used at memorial services. Today, still dirtied, the rips still visible but stitched closed, the flag hangs at the authority's headquarters on Park Avenue South.

The flag would not be the only memorial element in the terminal. The two wings that form the top of the main transit hall at Church and Fulton Streets are intended to open to the sky on the anniversary of the attack. The long axis of the hall follows the Wedge of Light embodied in Daniel Libeskind's master plan, describing the sun's angle at 10:28 a.m. on 9/11, when the south tower collapsed.

"The building itself embodies the idea of the 11th of September," Mr. Calatrava said.

In the modified design by Mr. Calatrava and the firms STV and DMJM Harris, the amount of glass over the transit hall has been reduced while supporting structural elements have been increased or made more blast-resistant.

Groundbreaking is scheduled Sept. 6. The terminal is to open in 2009. Anthony G. Cracchiolo, the director of priority capital programs at the authority, told the board members, "We are now ready to build."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[fioco]

Without the glass between the ribs, it looks like an escapee from the Museum of Natural History. And with the controversy re the Freedom Center, this may be the Museum of Natural History's moment (kidding!). It is rather spikey, but I still like it. I think the main transit hall maintains its eloquence in spite of doubling the number of ribs. It reminds me of a gothic cathedral (or Gaudi without additional ornament). The structural elegance still speaks. And the mole people will find redemption.

[sfenn1117]

September 6th? Awesome!

[ZippyTheChimp]

Interior comparison

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubes/22cnd-path.650.jpg http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/images/WTC_Hub_InteriorOpend.jpg

[TonyO]

It looks better to me, I'm happily surprised.

[Johnnyboy]

beautifull. very exiting project and construction will begin sooner than i expected.wonderfull

[NoyokA]

NYTIMES:

July 29, 2005
Architect Finds Spot for Flag Found in Ruins of 9/11 Site
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
On his way to present a revised design of the World Trade Center PATH terminal and transportation hub to the Port Authority board yesterday, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava made an unexpected discovery that may add an important memorial symbol to the future train station at ground zero.

Outside the boardroom, he spied an 8-by-12-foot American flag in a frame that almost fills an entire wall. The flag had flown over the main plaza of the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001, and survived in tatters. Mr. Calatrava was inspired.

A short while later, narrating a slide presentation to the board, he came to an image of a blank wall at the west end of the terminal mezzanine. "We would like to suspend a very symbolic object," he said. "It could be the flag who is hanging here in this house."

After Mr. Calatrava described the modifications made in the terminal design to increase security, the board approved the $2.221 billion project. Asked about displaying the trade center flag in the mezzanine, Kenneth J. Ringler Jr., the executive director of the authority, said, "I think it's a great idea."

"It would demonstrate the resiliency of Americans to the thousands and thousands of people who would be going through that transportation center every day," he said.

Mr. Calatrava said he had been thinking of placing a painting of the flag by Jasper Johns in the mezzanine until he spotted the trade center flag.

The flag was buried under rubble for three days after the Sept. 11 attack and torn in several places. It was surrendered by its rescuers to a National Guard colonel for ceremonial destruction, according to the authority. Instead, the colonel returned the flag to the Port Authority.

It flew over Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series and was displayed at the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans and at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It was also used at memorial services. Today, still dirtied, the rips still visible but stitched closed, the flag hangs at the authority's headquarters on Park Avenue South.

The flag would not be the only memorial element in the terminal. The two wings that form the top of the main transit hall at Church and Fulton Streets are intended to open to the sky on the anniversary of the attack. The long axis of the hall follows the Wedge of Light embodied in Daniel Libeskind's master plan, describing the sun's angle at 10:28 a.m. on 9/11, when the south tower collapsed.

"The building itself embodies the idea of the 11th of September," Mr. Calatrava said.

In the modified design by Mr. Calatrava and the firms STV and DMJM Harris, the amount of glass over the transit hall has been reduced while supporting structural elements have been increased or made more blast-resistant.

Groundbreaking is scheduled Sept. 6. The terminal is to open in 2009. Anthony G. Cracchiolo, the director of priority capital programs at the authority, told the board members, "We are now ready to build."

[lofter1]

Here are contrasting views of the exterior at night...


Rendering of latest version:

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2005-07/18698071.jpg


Rendering of the original version:

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2005-07/18699496.jpg

[NoyokA]

To be honest I was never really a fan of the original design. I love the new design it is much more dramatic!

[billyblancoNYC]

Also about thirty feet shorter -- to maximize distance from the street.

Still looks great -- but without the glass in the ribs the "wings" will offer no protection from the elements whatsoever.

Not sure how the height is affecting proximity to the street.

[ablarc]

^ He means shorter in length.

[mkeit]

How can they plan a real groundbreaking for September if the contract has not even been advertised?

This will be like the Freedom Tower Cornerstone ceremony.

[TLOZ Link5]

Oddly enough the new design is much better. I feel the additional mullions make it look stronger, bolder, taller, and more refined.

I agree. It looks more solid and robust, and thus more dramatic. I loved the original design, but I couldn't help but think that it looked a bit too ethereal, if that makes sense.

In any case, this is still a welcome departure from New York's prolific boxy architecture. Still utterly sublime.

[BigMac]

More renderings from the Port Authority website:

http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/images/WTC_hub1d.jpg

http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/images/WTC_Hub_InteriorOpend.jpg

http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/images/WTC_Hub_interiord.jpg

[pianoman11686]

I agree. It looks more solid and robust, and thus more dramatic. I loved the original design, but I couldn't help but think that it looked a bit too ethereal, if that makes sense.

It more than makes sense. You hit the nail right on the head.

[elfgam]

I actually like the revised one more. The structure gives it more of a continuous, sinuous quality -- like the pier of a gothic cathedral.

[czsz]

I've always thought it looked too much like a bristled porcupine, and was quite revelatory of the security-obsessiveness surrounding the whole site, not to mention the contemporary Zeitgeist. The redesign only reinforces that perception.

[debris]

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that this is going to cost $2 billion, but somehow we couldn't come up with the extra $2 billion to secure the Second Avenue Subway, and now it has to be "delayed" for another 2-3 years?

I realize they don't directly compete for funding. The PATH station is being funded by post-9/11 transit funds, the SAS by the state and MTA. Still....the SAS and ESA actually expand the transit network, while this is just a $2 billion pretty subway station. Don't get me wrong: I love the design. But $2 billion? For a subway station? And that's basically what it is: PATH is merely an IRT subway line that the Port Authority calls a commuter train.

On top of that, the MTA is doing essentially the same thing at the Fulton Street Transit Center for another billion. I know this is an architecture forum, and I think its important that we care about these things, but does anyone else think we might have priorities mixed up? Or that these projects could be cheaper?

[czsz]

I think it's somewhat absurd that this vast terminal is intended, so far, solely for the use of New Jersey commuters, while the Fulton Street Transit Centre is increasingly scaled down and insignificant by comparison. When are New Yorkers going to be able to move around their own city in such glamour as is showered on suburbanites at terminals such as this and Grand Central? Even Penn Station is vastly better designed and maintained than most of the subway system.

[ASchwarz]

The Calatrava station is much more than a typical subway station. It will connect PATH, the LIRR and NY subways in a central hub. There will also be retail and other amenities. It will serve as a downtown version of Penn and Grand Central.

[czsz]

In that case, debris has a point about this station and the FSTC being somewhat redundant.

BTW, isn't the LIRR connection essentially still a fantasy at this point?

[ASchwarz]

In that case, debris has a point about this station and the FSTC being somewhat redundant.

BTW, isn't the LIRR connection essentially still a fantasy at this point?

The Feds have budgeted $2 billion towards the LIRR link and the MTA has promised a (not yet specified) significant contribution. The Calatrava station is designed to accomodate a lower LIRR level. I regard the LIRR link as (by far) the most important investment in Lower Manhattan.

[JMGarcia]

The Calatrava station will also incorporate the 1/9, E, and R,W trains and will connect to the FSTC. I see them more as a dual portal to a single station.

Although it does show the PA has much deeper pockets than the MTA does.

[BPC]

I view the Calatrava Station and the Fulton Street Station as two different issues. I agree that the Second Avenue Subway should have been built ahead of EITHER of them. (BTW, they DO directly compete for funds, as both stations are being built with 9/11 transit dollars which could have been used to built, at the very least, the downtown mile of the Second Aenue Subway.) Nevrtheless, the Calatrava Station seems far more justified, as it is being built on the ruins of the WTC, which is what the 9/11 money was intended for, after all. The Fulton Street Station, by contrast, is being built on a spot currently occupied by 120 functioning businesses. It is causing destruction, not curing it.

[STT757]

The Calatrava station will also incorporate the 1/9, E, and R,W trains and will connect to the FSTC. I see them more as a dual portal to a single station.

Although it does show the PA has much deeper pockets than the MTA does.

I feel that the Port Authority is managed much better, it's has less corruption and is better suited for performing large scale projects.

Mayor Bloomberg made Education reform in NYC a priority and they are getting results, the City and State of NY should put similiar efforts in reorganizing the MTA.

The MTA is out of control, Capital Projects lag and riders pay more and more just because the agency is not doing a better job of controlling and maintaining costs.

They need to rationalize the entire NYC Transit/MTA network from the ground up, the riders and taxpayers deserve to have an agency that is deos not waste so much money so that it could hold back fare hikes and modernize and expand the system.

[czsz]

PATH has an extraordinarily lucrative route which is at the same time far shorter, newer and therefore more easily maintained than the MTA subways. New Jersey, I think, is also able to contribute more money to transit; there's little of the upstate/downstate, city/suburban budget competition which New York must deal with. Corrpution and mismanagement aside, it has advantages which the MTA will probably never enjoy.

[ablarc]

Why not put MTA under PATH?

[lofter1]

Not sure how the height is affecting proximity to the street.

30 feet shorter in length: originally it was 360+ feet long and is now ~ 330 feet.

The reason given was to create more space from the edge of the structure to the street so as to minimize impact of car bombs (similar situation to what was done with the F***dom Tower when it was moved farther back from West Street).

[michelle1]

World-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava unveiled a modified design hardened for security reasons of the planned World Trade Center transit hub for downtown Manhattan to the Port Authority board Thursday.

The $2.22-billion hub will keep its iconic birdlike "wings" but twice as many steel beams at the base have been added since Calatrava first unveiled his concept a year and a half ago. In addition, some of the glass that adorned the wings of the structure has been removed but glass remains on the "ribs" to allow light to come through.
The station's shape has been compared to an armadillo, a fish skeleton, a winged dinosaur and many other creatures with its comblike needles jutting out into the sky. But critically, the design has won much praise in helping to restore lower Manhattan's center of transportation and commerce.

Calatrava himself said he was inspired by the crown of the Statue of Liberty in designing the shape of the building. The revised terminal is just a little narrower at the base (now 330 feet instead of 360 feet) and is as high as 150 feet from the sidewalk. Calatrava stressed that his vision for the site has not changed, but that he has just made some modifications to address engineering, security and feasibility issues.

The design is meant to express how Sept. 11 "changed the life of the city, the lives of many people, the life of the nation," Calatrava told the Port Authority board. He also hoped to hang the American flag recovered from the ashes of Ground Zero in the center of the concourse.

Slated to open in December 2009, the hub will have up to 200,000 square feet of retail space and will serve as a gateway for several subway lines as well as the PATH trains and will eventually connect to the planned $6-billion JFK rail link via the Long Island Rail Road.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also approved spending $221 million for the center, clearing the way for a post-Labor Day groundbreaking on Sept. 6. The rest of the $1.9 billion for the estimated cost will come from the Federal Transit Authority.

The hub's ceiling has been designed to open to the sky using hydraulic motors on Sept. 11 and on other days the Port Authority designates. That feature is similar to Calatrava's design for the Milwaukee Art Museum, which "flaps" its wings every day at noon.

"He is an architect and engineer but he is truly an artist," said Port Authority president Ken Ringler.

[STT757]

Why not put MTA under PATH?

The NYC Subway does not link with NJ so the Port Authority has no role with a Transit agency that only operates within the City of NY.

[STT757]

They keep mentioning the future link to Long Island and JFK, they should be talking about the PATH extension to Newark airport which the Port Authority is going to build.

The PATH World Trade Center line ends a mere 1-2 miles from the Newark Airport rail link station, the PA is doing enginering and planning studies to extend the PATH to Newark Airport thus connecting the Calavatrava World Trade Center Transit hub with a major airport. It's also a fraction of the estimated cost to connect Lower Manhattan with JFK.

The Lower Manhattan-JFK rail link is estimated at approximately $6 Billion, the estimate to connect the World Trade Center to Newark Airport via the PATH is $500 Million.

[sfenn1117]

That would be awesome if the new World Trade Center was connected with 2 of the worlds busiest airports. I didn't realize there was a plan to extend PATH to Newark, but that's great news for sure.

[ablarc]

The NYC Subway does not link with NJ so the Port Authority has no role with a Transit agency that only operates within the City of NY.
So, make one.

Anyway, the MTA operates outside NYC (LIRR, Metro North); two of those lines pass through New Jersey and re-enter New York State (Pascack Valley and Port Jervis Lines).

Nearby New Jersey already has much planning integrated with New York's; it needs even more integration.

[JMGarcia]

I feel that the Port Authority is managed much better, it's has less corruption and is better suited for performing large scale projects.

Mayor Bloomberg made Education reform in NYC a priority and they are getting results, the City and State of NY should put similiar efforts in reorganizing the MTA.

The MTA is out of control, Capital Projects lag and riders pay more and more just because the agency is not doing a better job of controlling and maintaining costs.

They need to rationalize the entire NYC Transit/MTA network from the ground up, the riders and taxpayers deserve to have an agency that is deos not waste so much money so that it could hold back fare hikes and modernize and expand the system.

The MTA is out of control for 2 reasons. Pataki's favoring of the LIRR and Metro North over the subway and the fact that Pataki has forced the TA to issue so many bonds rather than properly funding it that we are now closing in on the TA spending close to half its budget on paying off those bonds.

[STT757]

So, make one.

Anyway, the MTA operates outside NYC (LIRR, Metro North); two of those lines pass through New Jersey and re-enter New York State (Pascack Valley and Port Jervis Lines).

Nearby New Jersey already has much planning integrated with New York's; it needs even more integration.

Those two lines that go through NJ are operated by NJ Transit, with NJ Transit crews. The MTA pays for new Comet V rail cars and to improvements to the rail in NY State, however it's a NJ Transit operation which the MTA supports financially.

[ablarc]

Those two lines that go through NJ are operated by NJ Transit, with NJ Transit crews. The MTA pays for new Comet V rail cars and to improvements to the rail in NY State, however it's a NJ Transit operation which the MTA supports financially.
There you go; they're co-operating across state lines already. All we need is a little more.

[debris]

We need much more NY/NJ co-operation. My fantasy is that the MTA gets folded in to the Port Authority one day. Sure, the PA is lousy, but the MTA is just atrocious. In fact, while we're at it, the PA should take over NJ Transit as well (which is also broke). It would be nice for the PA to control the entire mass transit system, because then they would control all the B&Ts as well (aside from the East River bridges), and they could co-ordinate a congestion pricing road scheme with mass transit fares. Hell, you could probably even connect the PATH trains to the IRT lines (WTC branch on the 6, Uptown branch on the 7 train). Aah, but this is all fantasy.

In the real world, we need to make a committment to finish SAS, ESA, and the new Hudson River tunnel by 2015. Everything else is secondary. And if the $6 billion LIRR downtown link is for commuter trains, instead of the obvious choice (extending the E train to run super-express through a new tunnel, with stops at the Atlantic Terminal and Broadway Junchtion, on to Jamacia), then I'll slit my wrists. I mean, c'mon, even with a LIRR commuter train link to downtown, riders will still have to switch trains in Jamacia. What good is that?

[BPC]

Calatrava was on Charlie Rose tonight. He said that construction on the terminal is going to bein on September 7. Yea!

[mkeit]

I hope he isn't holding his breath. Unless the PA is negotiating the contract in secret, it is at least 6 months away from starting construction.

[lofter1]

World-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava unveiled a modified design hardened for security reasons of the planned World Trade Center transit hub for downtown Manhattan to the Port Authority board Thursday.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also approved spending $221 million for the center, clearing the way for a post-Labor Day groundbreaking on Sept. 6.
This was in the news last week so I'm not sure why groundbreaking won't take place as stated. And that "construction" (a word that covers a lot) will begin on Sept. 7.

There will be a truck load of politicos with egg on their faces if this doesn't get started right after labor Day.

[Alonzo-ny]

Ill believe it when i see it, remember freedom towers groundbreaking was 4th july 2004! I honest find it hard to believe that anything is solid on this site until i see physical evidence

[mkeit]

I have not seen the contract listed on the PA contract web site yet.

Date of ad to date of opening-6 weeks minimum
Opening to award-1 month minimum
Award to actual start-6 months

Total-8 months==April 2006

[Alonzo-ny]

I wont be surprised if that is when construction starts

[Kris]

Slide Show (http://www.lowermanhattan.info/construction/gallery/album.asp?album_id=35)

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/construction/gallery/photos/wtc_th_0805_12.jpg

Pure Calatrava

[lofter1]

Slide Show (http://www.lowermanhattan.info/construction/gallery/album.asp?album_id=35)
WOW!!!!

[billyblancoNYC]

Very impressive. Futuristic, clear, beautiful. This is a station, baby. There gonna need a lot of Mr. Clean for this place.

[Alonzo-ny]

Very cool, i kind of looks like everything is made for marbel or ivory or something like that, has a very light feel about it. Also all r n w trains arent stopping at cortlandt any more construction cant be far off, unless it coincidental

[ZippyTheChimp]

The Cortlandt St station closure is due to the MTA Fulton Transit Center project - constructing the underground passageway that will connect with the PATH station.

Good news anyway.