The opening of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub's Oculus will take a rain check on the 17th anniversary of 9/11, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesperson for the Port Authority. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the 335-foot-long skylight was designed to allow the “Way of Light” to pass through the main hub of the transit hall at 10:28 a.m.—the moment that the North Tower of the WTC collapsed on September 11, 2001. Symbolizing the light that continues to shine through after the darkness of the tragedy, the Oculus opening allows light to fill the massive space as a memorial to the attacks on the twin towers.
Stretching over one mile (1.5 kilometers), the cable car links the two thriving residential districts of Amsterdam-West and Amsterdam-Noord through a system of three slender pylons and two stations. The cable car has been designed to accommodate a future third station depending on the pattern of growth for surrounding districts.
Major changes are on the way for Los Angeles’ Union Station that will improve connectivity between the stations various train, metro and bus lines. In a new video released by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, one possible future – a ring-shaped passenger concourse floating over the train platforms below – is visualized for the first time.
Foster + Partners and Juan Cabanelas have unveiled updated designs for the refurbishment and extension of the Ourense FFCC Station in Galicia, Spain. The firm was originally selected as the winners of an international competition for the design in 2011 with an expansive new structure spanning the tracks. The new scheme will instead utilize the existing station building, expanding with a series of columned canopies arranged to create a new urban square and easily-accessible multi-modal hub.
View from City Center. Visualization by Brick Visual. Courtesy of Lahdelma & Mahlamäki
Lahdelma & Mahlamäki, with associate architect Arkkitehdit m3, has won a competition for the design of a new Travel Services Center and residential block to be located in the city of Oulu, Finland. Located between the low-lying neighborhood of Puu-Raksila and the high-rising city center, the complex will connect districts through large, arching openings puncturing through a dynamic, horizontal profile, while providing new housing for the city.
Ben van Berkel and UNStudio have collaborated with a multidisciplinary team including Goudappel Coffeng (mobility consultants), GeoPhy (data specialists) and 2getthere (automated transit systems) to produce a study examining the future of infrastructure and city development for the area around Amsterdam’s A10 ring road and the Leylaan district.
Proposals resulting from the study comprise a new multimodal transportation hub located at the intersection of Cornelis Lelyaan and the A10, and new urban districts flanking the highway that will link to adjacent neighborhoods while provided a much needed new address in Amsterdam.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has released plans for a new mixed-use urban district for Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station Precinct. In response to projections showing significant increases in transit activity in the coming decades, the project calls for a transformation of the existing Beaux Arts train station and surrounding neighborhood of University City. The design will improve transportation throughout the city, and will activate the area with new shops, restaurants and public plazas.
After 12 long years and a series of construction headaches, Santiago Calatrava’s $4 billion World Trade CenterTransportation Hub has finally opened to the public. Once widely regarded as a symbol of hope for post-9/11 New York, the project’s ballooning budget and security-related revisions gradually soured the opinions of the public and top design minds including Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, and provoked a multitude of mocking nicknames ranging from “Calatrasaurus” to “squat hedgehog” to “kitsch dinosaur.” All the while, Calatrava urged critics to reserve their opinion until the project’s opening. Now that day has arrived - did Calatrava receive the vindication he was insistent would come? Read on for the critics’ takes.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has laid out plans to transform New York's congested Pennsylvania Station and neighboring James A. Farley Post Office into a world-class transportation hub. Penn Station, North America's busiest train station, was originally designed in 1910 to accommodate 200,000; currently it's serving more than 650,000 passengers each day. Though a number of firms have been enlisted in the past to re-imagine the station, the project's developer has yet to chose an official architect.
“Penn Station is the heart of New York’s economy and transportation network, but it has been outdated, overcrowded, and unworthy of the Empire State for far too long,” said Governor Cuomo. “We want to build Penn Station to be better than it ever was, and that is exactly what we are going to do. This proposal will fundamentally transform Penn Station for the 21st century, and we are excited to move forward with the project in the days to come.”
Adding to the controversy surrounding its construction, Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Hub - set to be the world’s most expensive transit hub with a now-estimated budget of $3.7 billion - has delayed its opening until the first half of 2016 due to leaking water, according to an article in The New York Times. The water, originating from the site of an office tower to-be at 3 World Trade Center has been traced back to workers constantly spraying water to handle dust while breaking up concrete, exposing the construction site of 3 World Trade Center to the elements. Though the centerpiece of the Hub, The Oculus, has nearly finished construction, several retail spaces of the Westfield World Trade Center luxury shopping centre have been affected by the leaking and the Westfield Corporation has decided to postpone the move-in of all stores until the problem has been fully addressed. Despite the problems, the Westfield Corporation remains optimistic of the final result that the Oculus will produce and are working aggressively to remedy the leaking.
In this additional scene from our interview with Spanish architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava, the designer discusses the monumental timespan and demanding criteria of his transportation hub for the World Trade Center. Following Calatrava’s aesthetic calling card, the project’s ribbed vocabulary and “birdlike” form features a 355-foot-long operable Oculus - a "slice of the New York sky" - that casts a soft glow onto the pristine white surfaces of the interior. New areas of the building opened to the public this summer, with the project slated for a grand opening this December.
Foster + Partners has won the competition to design Cardiff Interchange, the city’s central bus station. Part of the wider Central Square regeneration masterplan for the area, also by Foster + Partners, the interchange is being relocated closer to the Cardiff Central train station in an effort to allow greater integration of all transportation networks and accommodate future growth in passenger traffic.
RTKL, a global architecture and design practice, announced its HALO project will be featured as part of the TransformKC Exhibition (October 4th - 25th in Kansas City, Missouri), which seeks to illustrate what the future could look like for Kansas City transit and innovative rail projects. The HALO concept is a modular, five-foot panelized, glass-enclosed, sustainable walkway for bus passengers that will utilize new technology to capture kinetic energy expended from foot traffic - approximately 7 watts per tile per footstrike. More info here.
The World Trade Center Complex in Lower Manhattan is slowly progressing, now more than a decade after 9/11. The Memorial was unveiled on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, while the Freedom Tower is well on its way to completion, proudly displaying the spire that was mounted just a few weeks ago. The site still is - and will be for many years to come - a maddening array of construction equipment, scaffolding and cranes that are working busily at the various components of WTC's rebuilding. Yet while all this development is moving forward, the cost of the construction is ballooning.
According to an article in The Observer, the site now boasts one of the most expensive office buildings in the world - the Freedom Tower - and one of the most expensive parking garages in history - the Vehicle Security Center. And to add to this grandiose display of New York City's perseverance over tragedy, Santiago Calatrava's Transit Hub - Port Authority's PATH station to New Jersey - has become an exceedingly controversial point of contention for its skyrocketing budget, now reported at $3.47 billion still two years away from completion. This may be one of the most expensive transportation hubs in the world, considering that its passenger volume does not justify this expense as much as its location might.
The revamped Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco broke ground earlier this week, a project that will introduce a 1.5 million square foot development that will be part transportation hub, part public park and urban space, and part offices and retail establishments. The massive undertaking, designed by renowned architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli will bring together 11 systems of local and national transportation, serving 45 million people per year. In addition to securing access to myriad transit lines, the project will also provide downtown San Francisco with a 5.4-acre rooftop park, designed by PWP Landscape Architecture, along with numerous cultural programs. The project is budgeted at 4.2 billion dollars and is projected for completion in 2017. It is funded in part by the construction of a 1,070-foot tower that is adjacent to the Transbay Transity Center. It is also designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli and is slated to be the tallest tower in San Francisco. The tower will secure 60 stories of office space and jobs and will contribute to the projected $87 billion of revenue through 2030.
Join us after the break for more details on this project.
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