I walk past a group of heavily armed soldiers who seem to be huddling around the base of a sculpture called America's Response by Douwe Blumberg. I notice that the protruding steel ribs - feelers, quills, fingers, feathers, antennae, whatever they're supposed to represent - are not symmetrical as I'd assumed them to be, but are angled back to fit the narrow site. It doesn't fold gently into the urban tangle of buildings and streets, but more accurately descends, and I find myself thinking about the trajectory of the second plane when it hit the south tower at 9:10 a.m. It is neither a comforting nor a healing gesture, as some had promised, but more dissonant, even dystopian - a bone snagged in the city's gullet. It's about the sudden sweep of scale and the way the thing sort of dives into the mosh-pit of Lower Manhattan with its fangled crown of steel spikes. There's a velocity to the architecture that one hasn't seen before. Still, right away I'm thrown violently against my own expectations. There's construction going on, and it's hard to get a good view of the building because of the concrete mixing trucks. Even 15 years after the terrorist attacks, this is still a semi-militarized zone with armed troops, concrete bollards and anti-blast barricades. Paul's churchyard just around the corner from Wall Street. Like many, I arrive expecting to dislike it, and I sneak up from the east, past St. The perfect word to describe it may not yet exist. And when you see it for yourself in the right light, at the right time of day, the thing speaks of a post- 9/11 future that we haven't even processed. The ever-whimsical New York Post dubbed it “Calatrasaurus,” while The New York Times called it a "stegosaurus.”īut it doesn't really matter what any of them say or think, because the deed is done. Some observers have compared it to an immense clam shell, a porcupine, a winged dove and a beached whale. New Santiago Calatrava-designed Transportation Hub at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, as seen from across Memorial Park.Įditors, critics and citizens of Greater Gotham have been straining to find the right metaphor for Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub, finally open this week after years of controversy, political in-fighting, delays and a $4 billion budget double the original estimate.“Boondoggle,” “lemon,” “dino carcass,” “train wreck,” “winged defeat” and simply, “the monster,” are some of the epithets hurled at the 75,000-square-foot complex in the past week or so.
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