(rshsdepot) New York, NY: An Architect's Grand Vision for a TradeCenter Transit Hub

["jdent1_@_optonline.net" <jdent1@optonline.net>]

From the New York Times...

An Architect's Grand Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub
October 22, 2003
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

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. 

 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company



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