Hey! It's a brand-new Dey!

The New York Post has a great scoop today about the new Santiago Calatrava PATH station at Ground Zero. Unfortunately, the Post spins the story as being about Libeskind's Wedge of Light: the headline is "PATH Plan May Dim Libeskind's Tribute". Of course, it won't, and as the story goes on to say, Libeskind considers the Calatrava design to fit perfectly into his master plan.

According to the Post, the Calatrava plan moves the new PATH station north a little bit from where Libeskind had it. That does two things, one minor and one major. The minor change – which the Post fixates on – is that the Wedge of Light becomes a little bit smaller. But the Wedge of Light was never about internal area: it was always about the angles of the walls abutting Fulton Street. The angles, we can safely assume, remain intact.

The real story here, the major development, is that Calatrava has resuscitated Dey Street. Under the original Libeskind site plan, Dey stopped at Church Street, right where it ends today. Post-Calatrava, however, it continues all the way on to Greenwich Street, as a pedestrian promenade. As ever, the more streets the better, so this is officially a Good Thing.

Interestingly, as the designer of the first major public building on the site, Calatrava has managed to do wonders for the commercial building next door. Now that it has a north-facing street frontage opposite the station, the tower between Dey, Church, Greenwich and Cortlandt can have shops on all four streets, including the most-trafficked side of all. Critics of the WTC redesign often play up the conflict between good public spaces and profitable commercial buildings; in this case, what benefits one also benefits the other.

Meanwhile, it looks increasingly as though Cortlandt Street, which Libeskind had as a pedestrian promenade between Church and Greenwich, is going to be upgraded to something which can accommodate cars. (Just because it can have cars doesn't mean it will, of course.) The office buildings planned for the WTC site are all going to be grade-A towers, full of lawyers, bankers and the like. Such tenants nearly always want a fleet of Town Cars at their disposal at all times, and those cars need to line up somewhere; Cortlandt Street seems as good a place as any. It's entirely possible, of course, that Cortlandt will be closed to all but fleet traffic.

The real thing to get excited about here is the prospect of genuine street life within the WTC site. Greenwich and Fulton streets were always going to be major pedestrian thoroughfares (albeit with cars as well, of course), but now the addition of side streets to the plan gives a little bit more humanity and a little bit less of a corporate theme-park feeling to the site. The more streets there are, the less likely it is that the area between Fulton, Greenwich, Church and Liberty is going to be another montrosity along the lines of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle. Thank you, Santiago Calatrava, for making a good site plan even better.

Posted by Felix at 13:58 EST

Comments

Having personally experienced Calatrava's building, inside and out (Milwaukee Art Museum) I can only wish he would be the one doing the whole thing altogether, not only PATH station. Mr. Libeskind with his false symbolism and concern for beautiful views from above is himself a symbol of PCness to me.

Posted by: Tatyana at 19:06 EST, January 02, 2004

If, as William Neuman writes in the Post article, Calatrava's "changes don't alter the basic principle of the Wedge," it is only because, thanks to Libeskind himself, there is no longer a "basic principle" to alter.

Four and a half months after The Phoenix Project published architect Eli Attia's shadow study last May disproving what Libeskind, the LMDC, and even Governor Pataki had claimed for months — that Libeskind's so-called "Wedge of Light" was a space within which the sun would "shine without shadow" between 8.46 and 10.28 every September 11th morning — Libeskind released his "refined plan" of 17 September 2003, now with the lesser claim that the "Wedge of Light Plaza" is "created through...symbolic geometry."

But the "refined" plan showed that Libeskind had dramatically altered the angles of the building elevations that previously had defined the wedge — the south facade of the base of Tower 2 (northeast corner of the site), on the north side of Fulton Street, and the north facade of the new PATH station, on the south side of Fulton.

It is these street-level facades that — according to the story Libeskind has been telling since late last summer — will be lit by the sun at the appointed times every September 11th morning,

But the new angles create a new problem.

Regardless of where the sun will or won't shine every 9/11, this much was always true of the original (December 2002) and revised (February 2003) plans: The angles of the tower base and PATH station facades did align with where the sun will be on that morning at the memorially significant hours of 8.46 and 10.28 am.

In the "refined" plan, the facades align with where the sun will be at the memorially INsignificant hours of about 7:50 a.m. and 9:46 a.m. Nor is the wedge mirrored in the "Park of Heroes," as before.

If, as Neuman writes, "Calatrava's proposal...pushes the station building north so that it partly overlaps with the Wedge of Light," the south elevation of the wedge — the north facade of the PATH station — will have changed again.

This has both public space and memorial implications. When The Phoenix Project published Eli Attia's shadow study in May, Newsday quoted Alex Garvin's attempt at a face-saving response: The real contribution of the "Wedge of Light," said Garvin, was to create what he called a "new main square" for Lower Manhattan.

The New York City Zoning Resolution defines "Public Open Space" as having a width-to-length ratio of NO LESS than 1:3. Applying that standard to the relevant area of the wedge — the south side of Fulton, in front of the PATH station — Eli Attia calculated Garvin's "new main square" to be about 0.78 acres at the time of Garvin's quote.

Libeskind's "refined" plan reduced the "new main square" to about 0.54 acres. Now, presumably, our "new main square" would be even smaller.

Of course, one also has to ask: When and where is the sun going to hit those facades every September 11th morning now?

Indeed, exactly what "symbolic geometry" is Libeskind using?

And how far can a "basic principle" be stretched before it just snaps like a dried-out rubber band?

JOHN LUMEA
The Phoenix Project

Posted by: John Lumea at 13:12 EST, January 09, 2004