The new World Trade Center transit hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava, on Thursday. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
For a dozen years, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub was a train wreck. Santiago Calatrava’s winged dove, beefed up to meet security demands, devolved into a dino carcass. The project’s cost soared toward a head-slapping, unconscionable $4 billion in public money for what, in effect, is the 18th-busiest subway stop in New York City, tucked inside a shopping mall, down the block from another shopping center.
And it’s not really a hub. A maze of underground passages connects the site to far-flung subway lines, but there are not free transfers. The place is a glorified PATH station for some 50,000 weekday riders commuting to and from New Jersey. Predictions by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which built the hub, that this number will somehow double when the site opens seem as reliable as the authority’s initial promises that the project would take five years and cost $2.2 billion.
But wait. The hub opens on Thursday, or at least a part of it is opening, including most of the main hall, or Oculus, as it’s called. And at first blush, Mr. Calatrava’s architecture can almost — almost — make you forget what an epic boondoggle the whole thing has been. That virgin view, standing inside the Oculus and gazing up, is a jaw-dropper.
Curved, steel-ribbed walls rise 160 feet like a pair of immense clamshells toward a ribbon of glass that is the giant hall’s skylight. I visited the other morning, when sun spilled through windows between the ribs, dancing with the dust motes, splintering into fingered beams. It poured through the skylight, whose glass panes can slide open. I could imagine some poetic-minded, devil-may-care soul at the Port Authority allowing a shimmering scrim of snowflakes to waft down into the hall and dissolve on the vast white marble floor.
Of course, today’s pristine new cathedral of public space soon becomes the temple ground for another Apple store and John Varvatos. Shops move in later this year. The Oculus will be leased out as an event space. The authority needs to recoup the fortune it will spend on white paint to keep the place from instantly looking shabby.
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Assuming the best, commuters will head to bright, inviting train platforms — picking up a carton of orange juice and a copy of The New York Times at a Hudson News stand — and the hub will not suggest some bloated Soviet folly, a pretend Palace of the People testifying to broken government and chutzpah.
The skylight in the main hall, or Oculus, of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
We’ll see.
Meanwhile, the city has an Instagram-ready attraction whose defenders insist no one will remember it is the most expensive train station ever. Who recalls how much Grand Central cost?
Actually, I do. It cost $80 million, or about half the cost of the hub, adjusting for inflation, which was private, not public, money. Grand Central spurred a building boom that transformed the surrounding blocks and the city’s economy. This new hub is shoehorned into an unfinished office park in Lower Manhattan whose development it has complicated, not hastened — while the whole area has been evolving into a livelier live-work neighborhood despite what’s happening at the World Trade Center, not because of it.
The west concourse of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, connecting the PATH station and Brookfield Place. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times
I said “at first blush.” The genius of Grand Central, which accommodates many times the number of riders as the hub, entails more than that uplifting “wow” moment encountering its lofty main concourse. It is expressed in the ingenuity of its layout, its integration with the streets, the serendipity of its art, the richness and variety of its materials and ancillary spaces. It remains an endless discovery, even a century later.
And it works.
The downtown hub is not Grand Central. Any really big or unusual object or immense hole in the ground triggers awe. Mr. Calatrava is a sometimes very inspired sculptor of structural engineering. His best projects are rail stations. I’ve long admired the modest one he designed for Zurich years ago, which accomplished a lot with relatively little.
The hub’s exterior. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
But he has become a one-trick pony. The World Trade Center Hub conjures up his station in Lyon, France, and his museum in Milwaukee. Aside from the obvious Pantheon allusion, I no longer know what the hub is supposed to mean, symbolically, with its now-thickened ribs, hunkered torso and angry snouts on either end, weirdly compressing the entrances from the street. It’s like a Pokémon. Think of Eero Saarinen’s skylights at Kennedy’s TWA terminal, which resolve so elegantly into big, playful porthole windows. The imagery is clear. That’s great architecture.
Through those street entrances to the hub, the Oculus reveals itself all at once from awkward, tongue-shaped balconies. Mr. Calatrava gives the whole view away. The trip downstairs becomes a letdown. It’s better coming up from the PATH trains, where riders pass through a kind a vestibule (beneath the tracks for the No. 1 train) before stepping up to the nave of the Oculus, which appears suddenly, obliquely. It may put you in mind of entering the Guggenheim, with its sequence of compression and release, except there, space continues to unfold and surprise you along the ramp.
In its scale, monotony of materials and color, preening formalism and disregard for the gritty urban fabric, the hub is the sort of object-building that might seem at home on the Washington Mall. Its cramped mezzanine, where daily life should thrum, precludes the sort of bars and restaurants that have made the terraces at Grand Central a destination and heartbeat of the neighborhood. Westfield Group, which oversees retail at the hub, doesn’t intend for there to be cafes with tables spilling across the floor of the Oculus. So the hub clearly won’t be like the Galleria in Milan or the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Or even like the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin.
I toured the site recently with an architect who admired Mr. Calatrava for sticking to his guns and conceiving an ambitious public space. Cost was the Port Authority’s responsibility, he said, and besides, cost isn’t value, all of which is true.
Mr. Calatrava has given New York something for its billions. But if the takeaway lesson from this project is that architects need a free pass, a vain, submissive client and an open checkbook to create a public spectacle, then the hub is a disaster for architecture and for cities.
Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter: @kimmelman
The World Trade Center Transportation Hub can be reached by subway: Take the 2 or 3 train to Park Place, and then walk west. Or you can take the PATH!
