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.
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.
Copyright 2004 The American Institute of Architects.
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