Friday, August 1
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava will design the $2 billion
transportation terminal at the World Trade Center site, the Port
Authority announced yesterday. Intended as a kind of Grand Central
Terminal downtown, the station will link a rebuilt PATH station with 14
subway lines. Calatrava, famous for designing train stations in Europe,
including the Orient Station in Portugal, will work together with two
design and engineering firms to design the building. The team will
collaborate with Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the master plan for
Ground Zero. In choosing Calatrava, the Port Authority in effect nixed
the idea of putting the proposed 1,776-foot tower atop the terminal, as
developer Larry Silverstein had preferred.
The Port Authority also reached an agreement yesterday with the
federal government to move the United States Customs House, which was
located on the northwest corner of the World Trade Center site, to a
different location. This would allow the 1,776-foot tower that Libeskind
designed to be built on the northwest corner, as the architect planned.
Silverstein has proposed building the tower closer to the transit
station.
These and several other rebuilding developments this week, the Times
reported, make it clear that, after months of disagreements over Daniel
Libeskind's design for the site of the World Trade Center, it is
Libeskind's vision that is emerging as the consensus choice, and the one
that is likely to be built "in substantially recognizable form."
Half of lower Manhattan residents support building a single memorial,
with no special distinction for firefighters and rescue workers, at the
World Trade Center site, according to a Pace University poll released
this week. About 25 percent support one memorial that "especially
identifies the firefighters and rescue workers," while 21 percent said
that there should be two separate memorials. Forty percent of those
polled said that decisions about the memorial should be made by family
members of those who were killed. The memorial will be selected by a
special 13-member jury, which includes one family member, this fall.
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