There has been so much emotion, so much wheeler-dealing, so much flummery, so much disappointment surrounding the rebuilding of Ground Zero in New York. Now, at last, a bespectacled celebrity architect has come up with a design for a building there that everyone applauds. It is not Daniel Libeskind, winner of the original competition. It is a scholarly-looking Spaniard, Santiago Calatrava.
Calatrava had won the commission to rebuild the transport interchange at the World Trade Center. A skein of subway lines passes beneath the site. It seemed incidental to the main unfolding twin dramas of the story, namely: would Libeskind be able to hang onto the spirit of his master plan, culminating in his 1,776ft Freedom Tower? And would the subsequent competition to design a ground-level memorial to the tragedy produce a sufficiently dignified and timeless winner? As these sagas ground relentlessly on, nobody thought too much about the rail station, even if it alone is worth $2 billion. Then, Calatrava stepped forward, blinking owlishly, and produced the design of his lifetime: a great, asymmetrical winged building in glass and steel, right in the plaza of the proposed redevelopment, providing shelter and focus, capable of sliding open to the sky.
It was an extraordinary moment, captured on camera a few weeks back. Clearly nervous in the presence of bigwigs, including Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki, stammering slightly, Calatrava forsook the language of words and reached instead for the architect’s comfort blanket: the big felt-tip pen. Quickly, with a few deft movements, Calatrava produced Picasso-like sketches explaining his concept. A bird, being released into the air by a child. It sounds almost mawkishly sentimental. But this germ of an idea has generated one of the great railway- station designs.
Standing by at the presentation was Libeskind, applauding wildly, that now-familiar huge grin on his face. He, more than most, appreciates the power of a good metaphor. Calatrava’s overtly organic, derived-from-nature style is not Danny’s thing, but he knows good architecture when he sees it, and he took the stand to say so. Not only had Calatrava adhered to his master plan, he had enhanced it, he said. “It’s a brilliant interpretation, and an inspiring one. Such a beautiful plan.”
New York breathed a collective sigh of relief. There was, it seemed, to be no clash of egos here, no jostling between competing architects of the kind that had marked out the design of Freedom Tower, where Libeskind found himself unwillingly yoked with David Childs, the architect preferred by the site’s developer, Larry Silverstein.
Instead, the city had been given a surprise present, a delicate, crystalline object that somehow revived the spirit of the enterprise when it was clearly flagging. It was all very courtly. One can imagine it as a society play. After you, Danny, says Calatrava. No, after you, Santiago, dear boy, replies Libeskind.
Calatrava’s architectural reputation has been transformed. In commercial terms he was huge anyway, with a new opera house in Tenerife and a big extension to the Milwaukee Art Museum among the recent additions to his port- folio. His stadium and sports complex for the Olympics in Athens this summer are under way. At 52, he is five years younger than Libeskind and has built exponentially more.
A rare, possibly unique, example of a combined architect, engineer and sculptor, he started his prodigious career in the early 1980s with a station in Zurich, came to the world’s attention at the Barcelona Olympics of 1984 with the first of a long and continuing sequence of flamboyantly beautiful bridges, and quickly found himself with the complimentary first-class champagne as one of the world’s elite handful of globe-trotting “signature” architects.
But it looked as if success had gone to his head. There is no doubt that he pushes engineering in ways it does not always want to go, usually making his structures overelaborate. Some of his buildings started to go way over the top. Projects such as airport buildings in the form of abstract birds were acclaimed — the imagery seemed right — but he marched on into ever more overtly expressive works. His City of Arts and Sciences in his native Valencia includes a planetarium in the form of a huge human eye. The Tenerife Opera House has a frankly alarming canopy in the shape of a giant concrete breaking wave (or protruding tongue, if you prefer). In Milwaukee, he explored several of the ideas he has now revisited at Ground Zero, but again, it is more than a little overwrought. A building with slowly flapping wings, which alternatively looks like the tail of a diving whale? What’s that all about? Calatrava’s academic mien is misleading. He is a rampant exhibitionist. He needs to calm down a little. No, make that a lot. Given which, it is strange that it should be the hothouse atmosphere of New York that has done him most good. The new station certainly has the wow factor, but for Cala-trava it is positively restrained. You can see that he has worked and worked at it, thinking about the context, thinking about getting light right down to the underground platforms, thinking about how it will look from above, how it will provide a gathering place in the park, thinking about how best to capture Libeskind’s cherished “wedge of light” as it falls across the site on September 11 every year: indeed, sliding open the roof hydraulically to welcome and celebrate it. The angles of the wings of the building are set out from the two positions of the sun that day, between the time of first impact and final collapse, an hour and three quarters later.
Already in New York they are talking about how the new building stirs memories of the glory days of the old, much-lamented Penn Station, demolished in the 1960s, which was even grander than the now restored Grand Central. Of it, it was said: “You entered the city like a god.” The World Trade Center interchange may only be a nexus of commuter lines for now, but the plans are to extend the new airport rail link in here.
So, in a few years’ time, this place could well be your point of arrival in Manhattan. You will emerge into the daylight at platform level, 60ft below ground, make your way up through the gradually unfolding layers, arrive in the main 360ft-long concourse, and look up and find yourself at the foot of the Freedom Tower, with all of New York before you. In which case, this very ambitious building will take on a new functional and symbolic importance.
Given all this, Calatrava’s metaphorical response is not overblown. He has had the good sense not to be too strident in this intense context. As a result, he has struck exactly the right note of optimism and rebirth, in what ought to be the best building of his career so far. Who knows if they will build it the way he has drawn it, but let us fervently hope so.
www.calatrava.com
The great expressionist at work
