May 9, 2008 9:26
Everything is Less Than Zero
Proposal for World Trade Center PATH Station, Santiago Calatrava/PORT AUTHORITY
I see that the big transit center by Santiago Calatrava that's planned for the World Trade Center site is being whittled away again for cost-cutting reasons. This doesn't come as a surprise. The New York and New Jersey Port Authority, which is overseeing the project, has watched the budget climb to $2.5 billion. (Actually higher for a while, until it was yanked back down.) But it's also in keeping with the general willingness to walk away from the idea that Ground Zero should re-emerge as anything other than a business-as-usual business district that happens to be built around a memorial. The cultural facilities that were supposed to be a feature of the place are either gone from the plan or iffy. (Museums? We don't need no stinking museums.)
A few weeks ago it was the design for the separate subway hub nearby, which has already been dumbed down once, that was put under pressure again. Part of the thinking now for that dwindling project involves moving the planned Frank Gehry-designed theater off the Trade Center site and plunking it on top what was supposed to be the light flooded, glass domed station, thereby screwing up two projects at one time. (Theaters? We don't need no stinking theaters.)
That leaves the Calatrava station, which is scheduled to be complete in 2011, as one of the few surviving elements of the Trade Center master plan that isn't just one more office building. It's been undergoing a slimming process almost from the time it was proposed. Now we're promised more "value engineering", which any architect will tell you is a process that has a way of arriving at "blander and cheaper". The Port Authority promises that the overall integrity of Calatrava's bird-like design will be respected. But it also says that more revisions to the design may be needed if it can't find a contractor to build the station within the $2.5 billion budget.
I'm just waiting for the other wing to drop.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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Reader Comments (1)
Every time the words Ground Zero strike my eyes, they remind me of that Sunday evening in May 1995 when I was standing right in front of the giant sculpture erected between the two enormous towers. And each time melancholy sets in surreptitiously without fail.
I was completely overwhelmed by the massive structures then, more so while gazing at them from the window at the 43rd floor of Millennium Hotel nearby where I put up for two nights.
Sadly, there have been far too many changes of mind as to what is to be built on the empty space ever since after 911 (apart from the memorial). The world top architects strived to put in their very best, only to be told later that something new would be cropping up.
Why not just let the lost souls rest in peace eternally without being hassled any more on what super-striking mega-structure would be constructed to replace the lost towers?
Posted by Tan Boon Tee | May 10, 2008 12:00 AM