http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/ar...a.html?_r=1&hp
Post-9/11 Realities Warp a Soaring Design
The architect Santiago Calatrava with his current model for a transportation hub at ground zero in downtown Manhattan.
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
May 10, 2009
When Santiago Calatrava unveiled his design for a luminous glass-and-steel transportation hub for ground zero in January 2004, government officials touted it as a 21st-century version of Grand Central Terminal — one of the few bright spots in a development plan crippled by politics, petty self-interests and the weight of the site’s history.
We should have known better. During the next several years the project’s cost spiraled to $3.2 billion from $2 billion. The scheduled completion date was delayed, first by a couple of years, then several more. Mr. Calatrava, determined to save his design, worked slavishly to get the budget under control. In a misguided effort to avoid more controversy, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey enveloped the project in secrecy, essentially shutting the public out of the design process.
But
even for those of us who had given up on the idea that anything good would ever emerge from ground zero, the unveiling of an elaborate new model of the revised design on Saturday at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute was heart wrenching.
The model gives us the clearest picture yet of Mr. Calatrava’s vision. Dozens of minor improvements have been made; his structural pyrotechnics look as dazzling as ever.
Even so, Mr. Calatrava remains unable to overcome the project’s fatal flaw: the striking incongruity between the extravagance of the architecture and the limited purpose it serves. The result is a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else. And it reinforces the likelihood that one day, decades from now, when the site is finally completed, it will stand as a testament to our inability to put self-interests aside in the face of one of America’s greatest tragedies.
The seeds of the design’s failure were there from the very beginning, in the byzantine politics of ground zero. At Grand Central the main hall plugs directly into a dense network of tracks. The power of the space stems as much from the constant movement of people across it — spilling down its grand staircases and in and out of the gates — as from the great vaulted spaces that frame it. It is a stunning tribute to a mobile society and the freedom that implies.
An obvious place to put a station at ground zero would have been at the northeast corner of the former World Trade Center site, just above the PATH tracks and the No. 1 subway. But by the time the Port Authority began planning the hub, this area had been declared sacred ground, and the loaded politics surrounding the site made it impossible to rearrange any of the pieces. Instead the hub was set on a large plaza on the other side of Greenwich Street, where it could connect to the N and R subways and the Fulton Street subway station further to the east.
To enclose the hub, Mr. Calatrava created a vast central hall, something like Grand Central Terminal’s, 50 feet below ground and underneath a soaring elliptical glass-and-steel dome. The dome was supported by a system of curved white beams that suggested the rib cage of a gigantic prehistoric bird. Two enormous wings rise out of the top of this form, partly sheltering a plaza on either side.
The magic of the design was a structural sleight of hand. In a traditional vaulted roof the two sides press in toward the central spine, which helps support them. Mr. Calatrava’s mechanical roof would open along this spine — with its wings moving up and down — and when it did, the entire structure would seem to be defying gravity.
Yet the impressive roof trick also served to detract attention from what was going on underground.
To bridge the distance between his central hall and the trains Mr. Calatrava was forced to create a second hall that serves the PATH platforms at one end. At the other, a doorway connects to a corridor leading to the Fulton Street subway station a block away. The massive domed hall becomes a void at the center of a convoluted underground labyrinth that stretched four blocks from Battery Park City to Broadway.
The reason for the hall’s enormous scale was further put into question when state and city officials dropped the idea of creating a link to La Guardia and Kennedy airports. Though Mr. Calatrava’s hall was 14,000 square feet bigger than Grand Central’s, it would now serve only a small fraction of the passengers.
Mr. Calatrava has been struggling to solve these problems for years now. The model at the Spanish Institute shows a new version of the roof structure, which will have fixed wings to cut down on costs.
The entries to the No. 1 and the N and R trains have been moved to the main axis at either end of the hall, making them more accessible. An elegant grand staircase now leads up to the Fulton Street corridor.
But more often than not, what you feel is the immense strain Mr. Calatrava and his clients are under to try to justify the hall’s existence. Retail space has been added along the base of the great hall and along a second-floor balcony, which should draw a few visitors but risks transforming the entire space into one of the world’s most excessive shopping malls.
And in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be.
These problems are amplified by Mr. Calatrava’s seeming refusal to disturb the sculptural purity of his creation. Some have already pointed out that only two small entries, at each end of the dome, connect the main plaza to the hall, as if the architect were afraid of exposing his inner world to the chaos outside. I noticed something else on my visit to the show: a ring of marble benches now surrounds the base of the glass dome, so that standing in the plaza you will be able to see only a small segment of the great hall below. Instead the eye is drawn up to the grandeur of Mr. Calatrava’s structure. Life is secondary.
All of this would be discouraging enough given the number of other worthy transportation projects in New York City. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had to redesign its new Fulton Street station to keep within its tight budget, even though it will serve thousands more passengers a day. Despite years of planning, Pennsylvania Station’s cramped dehumanizing spaces remain one of the most shameful chapters in the city’s architectural history, partly because authorities can’t find a way to pay for a renovation.
Mr. Calatrava’s design also embodies a deeper, more troubling history: the toxic climate of those first years after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the city grieved, politicians were vowing to rebuild as fast as possible, as if that would somehow accelerate the healing process. Practical considerations were set aside. Jingoism ruled. Egotism dominated over softer, gentler voices.
Under such conditions it should surprise no one that what once promised to be one of ground zero’s most triumphant architectural achievements is hollow at its core.
A computer rendering of the interior of the World Trade Center transit hub as set out in Santiago Calatrava’s current design .
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