WTC Transit Hub - by Santiago Calatrava

[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.







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


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.


Train platforms at the Orient Station in Lisbon. The architect, Santiago Calatrava, said their sort of monumentality might be appropriate at the PATH station.



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

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/neighb....html#terminal



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.