PATH Forward: Connecting New Jersey and New York
Santiago Calatrava’s new transport terminal will encourage Downtown residents, commuters and tourists to look up and marvel.
Published July 1, 2006
By Fred A. Bernstein
Academy Contributor
In his first completed project in New York, the Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava designed a time capsule meant to be opened in the year 3000. Calatrava’s bulbous, polished metal box, which stands outside the American Museum of Natural History, was clearly inspired by nature. But it would take experts from several departments of the museum to pin down all the referents. Some observers see a seashell; others, a flower or a seedpod; still others, an elaborate crystal. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
In a world where most buildings are simply containers, their forms influenced only by other buildings, Calatrava’s blatantly biomorphic structures have made him, at 54, the most accessible of the current generation of superstar architects.
Most of Calatrava’s structures— bridges, airports, train stations, and museums—are in Europe, but as many as three more could arrive on the Lower Manhattan skyline by the end of the decade. The largest (and the one most certain to be built) is the $2.2 billion PATH terminal at Ground Zero, scheduled to open in 2009.
Hands in Prayer? Or Birds in Flight?
The terminal, just east of where the Twin Towers stood, will be topped by a pair of curved canopies of glass and steel that reach high into the sky as decoration. A hydraulic system will allow the canopies to rise, creating an opening about 35 feet wide at its center, bathing the huge concourse in sunlight.
Some visitors will see the canopies as hands interlocked in prayer; others will see birds in flight (to heighten the allusion, Calatrava released a dove into the air when he unveiled his design). Or perhaps it isn’t the bird but the birdcage, opening to the sky in a symbol of freedom. The building has been particularly welcome news at Ground Zero, where architectural squabbles—some growing out of forced collaborations— continue to make headlines.
Calatrava collaborates with no one, and it’s just as well, since he has too many ideas already. Born in Valencia, he speaks nearly a dozen languages and sometimes uses all of them—citing the works of philosophers, composers, poets, and painters—in a single sentence. He has no compunction about mixing metaphors in his buildings; how else can he hope to get a fraction of his ideas built in just one short lifetime?
Thirty years ago, after receiving an undergraduate degree in architecture, Calatrava moved to Switzerland to study engineering. He quickly developed a style all his own. His student work resembled the streamlined forms of one of his idols, Robert Maillart, an early 20th-century designer of bridges in the Swiss cantons. Maillart’s goal was to remove excess material, which resulted in concrete bridges so thin, they appeared to be stretched almost to breaking.
Bridging Twist and Turn for Decorative Effect
But unlike Maillart’s strictly economical structures, Calatrava’s bridges twist and turn for decorative effect. Not surprisingly, the great Catalan architect, Antonio Gaudi, who rarely used right angles and whose buildings ornament Barcelona, is another one of Calatrava’s idols.
Since the advent of modernism, architects have almost universally tried to explain form as the direct result of function, as if anything less rational were suspect. But Calatrava has joyfully shaken off that stricture. His design for a music school in Switzerland uses five exposed steel cables. Calatrava has said “I chose five, even knowing that I could have used only two, because music is read over five lines.”
More recently, he designed an opera house for Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, with a vast curved wing that resembles a crescent moon, a wave, an orchid, or about half a dozen other forms from nature. Asked about the origins of the wing, which significantly increased the cost of the building, Calatrava didn’t pretend that it served any practical purpose—except the purpose to inspire.
Lately, the architect has been creating buildings that don’t just look ready to move; they do move. Shortlisted to redesign the Reichstag in Berlin, Calatrava proposed a glass dome that would open when the Bundestag was in session, symbolizing openness in government. That design was never built. But in 2001 his ideas took flight in an entry pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. There, a roof that resembles a bird’s wings opens to the sky in good weather. Getting the wings built was tricky—after long delays and huge cost overruns, Calatrava had the pieces assembled in Spain and flown across the Atlantic in a giant Soviet transport plane. Even then, there were minor problems with the mechanism.
A Secular Version of Gothic Cathedrals
In the end, Milwaukee garnered an important civic symbol—and even skeptics find the building’s now-reliable daily displays irresistible. The expense is of little concern to Calatrava’s fans, who see his buildings as the modern, secular version of Gothic cathedrals: uplifting symbols of humankind’s highest aspirations.
Private developers in the U.S. are just beginning to see whether Calatrava’s panache can produce profits. If completed in Chicago, his Fordham Spire, a mixed-use tower that twists a few degrees with every floor, would be the tallest building in the United States. For South Street in Lower Manhattan, Calatrava has designed a tower of 45-foot cubes hanging from cables—a plan the architect worked out with blocks of wood and marble.
Each cube would contain a single “apartment” priced at $30 million or more. He has also designed a gondola that could bring visitors from Manhattan to Governors Island—a pro bono project that he accepted at the request of city and state officials hoping to spark interest in the island’s redevelopment.
There’s only one problem with a Calatrava gondola: There had better be a very special building at the other end, or the trip will be an anticlimax.
Also read: An Architectural Historian’s Perspective of NYC
About the Author
Fred A. Bernstein studied architecture at Princeton and law at NYU, and writes about both subjects.
