Words by Rome Jorge
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s… a stegosaurus fossil. It’s the ribs of whale skeleton. It’s also breathtakingly gorgeous.
Like Superman of comic book lore—the Oculus, Santiago Calatrava’s design for the World Trade Center (WTC) Transportation Hub for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH), has the citizens of the metropolis of New York gazing up.
The Oculus perches upon hollowed zero—the site of the 2,753 murders of the September 11, 2001 terror attack that saw the destruction of WTC towers 1, 2, 7, and the previous terminal—and is within the vantage of the National September 11 Memorial Complex and Museum.
Calatrava is the award-winning and globally acclaimed architect famous for his highly sculptural buildings such as the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, and the Ciudad De Las Artes Y De Las Ciencias in Valencia, Spain.
His website declares, “The form may be summed up, according to Santiago Calatrava, by the image of a bird released from a child’s hands,” further explaining, “At night, the illuminated building will serve as a lantern in its neighborhood. Santiago Calatrava speaks of light as a structural element in the WTC Transportation Hub, saying that the building is supported by ‘columns of light.’”
Hardened for terrorism
When the finals plans were finally approved, several crucial design changes were made. David W. Dunlap of The New York Times observed in July 2005, “Twice as many steel ribs will enclose the transit hall in the revised design. By reducing the space between the ribs to 5 1/2 feet from 11, the designers have cut down on the amount of glass that would be exposed to a blast. The ribs themselves would create a protective shadow, depending on the angle of the explosion. New beaklike prows—it is difficult to avoid zoomorphism when describing Mr. Calatrava’s architecture—will extend from the Church Street end of the main transit hall. This hardened prow, about 25 feet long, will protect a critical structural juncture. A solid wall more than three feet high will ring the base of the transit hall, where the glass bays once almost reached the pavement, and the hall itself will shrink in length to less than 330 feet from 360 feet. This will increase the distance between the hall and surrounding streets, a key means of limiting destruction from vehicle-borne bombs.”
With construction underway, rising costs began to garner criticism. Zoomorphism was indeed unavoidable. In an opinion piece entitled “New York’s $4B Shrine to Government Waste and Idiocy,” published in by the New York Post in August 2014, Steve Cuozzo created a portmanteau of stegosaurus and Calatrava: “Calatrasaurus,” and asks “Do the wings…suggest teeth whittled down by a sadistic dentist? Or a giant fishbone?”
Criticism extended to the design’s functionality. In an opinion piece titled “Why Can’t Transportation Mega-Projects Be Both Beautiful and Practical?” published by the The Atlantic’s CityLab in October 2014, Benjamin Kabak observes, “Staircases are too narrow to accommodate the morning crowds who come streaming out of the trains from Hoboken, Jersey City…Anyone trying to catch a train back to the Garden State risks a stampede. The marble, bright and sterile, picks up any spill, and a drop of water creates dangerously slippery conditions…Passenger flow and comfort, two of the most important elements of terminal design, seem to be an afterthought. The PATH Hub is shaping up to be an example of design divorced from purpose.”
When the Oculus opened in February 2016 at the cost of 4 billion USD, Pat Foye, Port Authority director, declined to hold any celebrations. In an interview with Dana Rubinstein of Politico, he explained, “I have been troubled with the huge cost of the hub at a time of limited resources for infrastructure so I’m passing on the event…The thing is a symbol of excess.”
In good company
One of the world’s most beloved architectural icons was also condemned by contemporaries when it was also under construction: The Eiffel Tower, originally the entrance for the 1889 World’s Fair designed by Gustave Eiffel who is equally famous for New York’s Statue of Liberty.
A petition titled “Artists against the Eiffel Tower” sent to the Minister of Works and Commissioner for the Exposition and published by Le Temps on February 1887 read: “We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.”
Like the Eiffel Tower, the Oculus has begun converting some of its critics into admirers. Jimmy Stamp, authored an article titled “New York’s Oculus Transit Hub Soars, But it’s a Phoenix with a Price Tag” published by The Guardian in March 2016 admits that “I, like Jonah in the whale, repented—at least for the moment.”
