Update new on Calatrava's Ground Zero project: New York

Interview by James S. Russell

Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A set of delicate, rib-like columns was recently roofed over in the World Trade Center pit in downtown Manhattan. They are the first visible elements of the new transportation hub, the celebrated $3.2 billion work of architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava. You won’t see the dramatic winged entrance hall until at least 2012.

The breathtaking price tag and slow progress at the site have soured many New Yorkers on the station, once the most- admired element of the reconstruction. Calatrava has remained largely mum through it all, but agreed to speak to Bloomberg News about the project from his office in Zurich on the occasion of an exhibition of the project at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in Manhattan.

There have been cuts to the project. The iconic wings above the station entrance have been clipped and they will not majestically flap up and down. Skylights over the train platforms have been eliminated. Still, one question is inevitable: How can the project possibly cost $3.2 billion?

“The station itself is a fraction of this cost,” said Calatrava. Indeed the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey has swept a great amount of peripheral work into the station project -- including 500,000 square feet of retail -- which may prove far too much. The four-platform expanded station serves the PATH train to New Jersey, but an underground web of pedestrian passages links to streets, subways and buildings in every direction.

Most Complex

“I have designed stations in Zurich, Lisbon, and Lyons,” Calatrava said. “And this is the most complex I have done.”

That admission surprised me, because Calatrava has designed flowing structures that appear far more complex. They spin steel and concrete into astonishingly delicate fretworks of vaults, arches, braces, cables and ribs. They intersect and overlap like the skeletons of gigantic birds.

Calatrava explained that the most expensive work at Ground Zero is underground and largely invisible: “It was a challenge to make a building that is secure yet very generous.”

His first design lacked the fortress quality of much else at the site, but the delicacy did not endure. The ribbed supports of what Calatrava calls the oculus -- the grand oval entrance hall -- are much beefier. All this added heft (plus an additional $591 million in costs) came, Calatrava explained, after the terrorist bombings of Spanish commuter trains in Madrid in 2004 and the London Underground a year later.

Keep It Light

I asked him if this more earthbound and monumental version was an improvement over the elegant lightness that had attracted so many to his first design.

“We put enormous effort into maintaining the lightness and airiness of the structure,” he said. “You will enter the oculus and it will be full of light.”

Next to the very large office towers that will one day rise on the site, Calatrava’s winged station entrance looks small, but it stretches nearly a block. Is such a large station grandiose, as critics have claimed?

He said the station was sized for growth. Also, the long, clear sightlines of the large oculus and the shallow undulating vaults above the tracks are essential, Calatrava argued.

“The goal of any transportation project is to find your way through the logic of the design and to have as little signage as possible. You are more comfortable when you can sense which movement is the right one. The oculus stretches from the Trade Center station on the No. 1 subway line east to the R and W station. It could not be more clear.”

Hanging Escalators

The dramatically suspended escalators that hang at either end of the oculus also aid security, he said, and are easy for people to comprehend.

“Entering and getting down is a very important process. I think it will be a very beautiful experience, to descend from the street, seeing into the subway stations, then turning to a deep perspective into the oculus and beyond to the train mezzanine,” Calatrava said. “It took a lot of time to satisfy all the needs there and to clarify very confused circumstances.”

September sees the opening of a rail hub in Liege, Belgium, part of Europe’s growing high-speed rail network. He’s adding to a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed campus in Florida, as well as universities in Rome and Taiwan. He’s building a dramatically arched bridge in Dallas.

The most important of those projects, he said, “is Ground Zero.”

The exhibition continues through Aug. 31 at the Spanish Institute, 684 Park Ave. Information: +1-212-628-0420; http://www.spanishinstitute.org.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net.