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World Trade Center Transportation Hub Shows We Need to Think Smart, Not Big

The staggeringly over-budget plans for the new hub has made it clear that smart infrastructure does not have to be monumental.

(TNS) -- NEW YORK — It’s a bird! Actually, it looks more like a cross between a stegosaurus and a porcupine.

For those who expected architectural greatness, not just over-the-top grandiosity, from Santiago Calatrava’s $4 billion (yes, $4 billion) World Trade Center Transportation Hub, the outcome is deeply disappointing. A year after it opened, as President Donald Trump and Congress contemplate $1 trillion in infrastructure spending, the staggeringly expensive structure presents a cautionary tale in aesthetic ambition run amok.

The passage of time and the opening of stores have also revealed something that critics who eyeballed the partly-completed project a year ago could only anticipate: The hub’s ellipse-shaped centerpiece, known as the Oculus, is as much a shopping mall as it is a transit crossroads. And it’s no Grand Central Terminal that makes seamless connections to the streets around it.

All Americans have skin in this game: The federal government provided $2.87 billion of the hub’s cost. That essentially gave the agency that developed the facility, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, a chance to play with other people’s money. You sense the authority’s extravagance as you gaze out over the hub’s glistening expanse of Italian marble floors. Good luck keeping them clean.

Chicagoans are intimately familiar with the central figure in this drama — Calatrava, the charming, determined, Spanish-born architect and engineer who designed the popular, bird-shaped addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, now nearly 16 years old. He also drew up the Chicago Spire, a proposed 2,000-foot skyscraper that captivated the public with its twisting profile but ultimately amounted to very deep hole in the ground.

When Calatrava was in Chicago eight years ago, with the hub already beset by rising costs and delays, he observed that it is much easier to build a skyscraper than a transit center. “These horizontal buildings are enormously complex,” he said, explaining that while a skyscraper simply goes up, a hub like one at the trade center must negotiate an underground maze of utilities and transit lines, along with clashing institutional and political agendas.

That remark has proved prophetic, certainly more accurate than predictions that the transit hub would supercharge lower Manhattan’s redevelopment by dramatically boosting ridership. According to Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman, an estimated 250,000 subway riders, PATH commuter train riders and visitors use the hub on a typical day — about one-third the number that course through Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux-Arts landmark in midtown Manhattan.

At this stage, the hub seems to be the equivalent of buying a 12-seat van when a four-seat sedan would have done just as well and cost far less. Even the Port Authority’s executive director, Pat Foye, is holding the project at arm’s length.

“Time will tell whether the number of passengers using the facility will fully justify the investment that was made,” Foye said in an email. While the agency is “gratified” that the long-delayed project is finally open the public, Foye said, “money spent on this facility would have been prioritized much differently for more critical transportation projects” in the agency’s newly-adopted $32 billion capital plan. It seeks to upgrade the New York region’s aging bridges, tunnels and airports.

Port Authority officials displayed no such ambiguity when Calatrava unveiled his design in 2004, three years after terrorists flying hijacked jetliners brought down the trade center’s twin towers.

The project, budgeted at $2 billion and scheduled to open in 2009, sought to form a bold gateway into lower Manhattan for riders arriving on PATH commuter trains from New Jersey. Its below-ground concourses would form an east-west pedestrian network that joined the trade center’s planned office towers, an existing office complex to the west, and another planned transit center to the east. There would be links to 11 subway lines — and Calatrava’s penchant for poetry.

At a news conference, the architect sketched a picture of a girl releasing a bird into flight and predicted that his transit hub would become “a lamp of hope” for a city still emerging from the darkness of the 9/11 attacks.

The design, whose above-ground centerpiece was a steel-and-glass pavilion topped by movable, spikelike wings, offered an appealing alternative to the giant scale and anonymous bearing of ground zero’s planned office towers. If the towers failed to provide a stirring symbol of rejuvenation, the transit hub would assume that role.

So what went wrong? Just about everything, as New York Times reporter David W. Dunlap documented in a definitive 2014 account of the hub’s swelling costs and thwarted visions.

After the 2004 and 2005 train bombings in Madrid and London, Calatrava was forced to double the number of steel ribs on the Oculus to improve blast resistance. Soon after, New York City officials turned down his proposal for skylights that would have been built into the pavement of the neighboring National September 11 Memorial in order to draw natural light into the hub’s subterranean passageways. Trying to curb soaring costs, Port Authority officials canceled plans for the hub’s wings to move, as they do in Milwaukee. Rising construction costs, spurred by Manhattan’s building boom, added to the budget bloat.

As I discovered during a recent visit to the transportation hub, the result is a compromised icon: Instantly recognizable, yes; gracefully refined, no.

It’s a given that you will come upon the Oculus’ birdlike shape and stop for the requisite smartphone photo. But such a reaction and the inevitable elicitation of the word “wow” hardly constitute the standard of aesthetic success. If they did, bizarre roadside buildings that resemble ducks or doughnuts would be considered masterpieces.

The Oculus and its asymmetric wings look weighted down — more about body armor than taking flight. The hub’s beak has a crudeness that belies Calatrava’s ability to transform the prose of transportation facilities into architectural poetry. At his best European train stations, intricately-detailed canopies resemble trees or floating clouds. He has not achieved that level of refinement here.

Nor does the Oculus match the urban design standard set by Grand Central Terminal, the block-filling landmark that is deftly woven into the fabric of the streets around it. The hub, by contrast, is a free-standing object and it’s internalized, like other malls. Instead of re-urbanizing the trade center with street-oriented retailing, the mall suburbanizes it.

That fits the suburban-style playbook of Westfield, the big mall operator that’s paying the Port Authority about $1.4 billion for the rights to the hub’s retail facilities. To date, there are more than 75 stores, from Apple to Zaro’s bakery, in what is called Westfield World Trade Center, as though this were any mall. Many of the stores face inward, toward the Oculus’ interior. The interior itself, a classic Calatrava composition of symmetrical white structural members, is at once breathtaking and a letdown.

The hub’s vast space soars from a floor well below street level to a glass spine incised into the roof. As Calatrava intended, the effect is to make the hub feel less like an underground space than a street-level urban plaza. Its elbowlike columns, a structural tour de force, prevent stores from being trapped behind a colonnade and eliminate spots where terrorists could hide a bomb.

Yet the space disappoints for a variety of reasons: Its closely-spaced ribs cut off views to the outside and restrict the enlivening presence of natural light. It’s needlessly towering, lacking the supple combination of grand space and human scale delivered by Grand Central’s extraordinary interior. In crossing the line from grand to grandiose, the hub reminds us that structural spectacle alone does not make architectural art.

Similar tensions afflict the hub’s tentaclelike concourses and its mezzanine-level PATH entrance hall, which has a striking ceiling of curving ribs. These are lively, almost lyrical spaces — the polar opposite of the cramped underground of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station, where in the immortal words of architectural historian Vincent Scully, one scuttles into the city like a rat. Yet the absence of natural light renders these spaces practically cavernous.

Calatrava gets props for his PATH train platforms, which greet the riders with light coves that foreshadow the teepeelike form of the Oculus. He also provides attractive benches. I wish there had been comparable seating in the Oculus, but the Port Authority did not put in benches due to security concerns, according to Coleman, the agency spokesman.

When the hub opened, its defenders sounded the familiar argument that today’s boondoggles often become tomorrow’s beloved icons. Perhaps. Yet such a transformation seems unlikely. Initially viewed as an antidote to the gigantism of the trade center’s towers, the hub has come to represent another form of gigantism — a bloated architectural spectacle that stripped resources from other, much-needed works of infrastructure.

One can appreciate the aspirations of Calatrava and his clients even as one rues that they went too far and spent too much. The obvious lesson for today, especially when we have a developer-president who talks endlessly about thinking big, is the need not just to think big but to think smart. Yet the most important takeaway is that future infrastructure projects need to be put into tough-minded perspective, measured not in isolation or by the emotions of the moment, but by what they promise to give — or take — from the nation’s needs.

©2017 Chicago Tribune Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.