06/2004

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Unveils Plans for Lower Manhattan Transit Hub
 

Illustration of extent of Fulton Street Transit Center, from WTC site at left to 23 Fulton Street station at right.The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) released drawings for a five-story glass cupola to top the new Fulton Street Transit Center hub in Lower Manhattan. The design, by the London firm Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners and engineer Arup, aims to bring order to the tangled collection of transportation portals underneath, with a high-visibility transit station that allows light to filter down. The hub would connect to Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH commuter train terminal, another soaring glass structure that rebuilding officials unveiled earlier this spring.

Illustration of Fulton Street Transit Center that shows the building view up to the entrance at the Fulton Street-Broadway intersection, with St. Paul’s Chapel in the background. Image courtesy Metropolitan Transportation Authority.A few blocks from the World Trade Center site, a 50-foot-high square glass building marks the station and is topped by a 110-foot-tall glass oval-shaped dome crossed by steel cables. The project is slated to cost $750 million and be completed in 2007. As part of the process, the MTA reports that they will buy out some existing buildings and retail, but preserve and restore the Corbin Building, an early brick and terra cotta skyscraper by Frances H. Kimball that once peered over its surrounding buildings.

Newsday’s John Davidson praises the design. “Passengers riding up the escalators will face the chapel of St. Paul’s through the glass, transforming the transit station into a display case for the church. The adjacency of the Corbin Building and the transit center will offer a lesson in two stages of advanced technology, more than a century apart,” he wrote. “In a single field of vision, we will be able to see structures grow lighter, masonry dissolve into glass, and an elaborately decorated wedge merge with a sleek, immaterial egg.”

The MTA unveiled its plans at the Center for Architecture, the AIA New York Chapter’s new home downtown. Some 250 people attended the event, which marked the first time a major public agency used AIA New York Chapter space as the venue for announcing the design of a significant project, reports AIA New York Chapter Executive Director Fredric Bell, FAIA. AIA New York Chapter President Mark Ginsberg, AIA, kicked-off the event.

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