Architecture critic Martin Filler eviscerates the World Trade Centre development in NYC in this long and worthwhile article from the New York Review of Books; readers who care only somewhat about Manhattan will still enjoy the Battle Royal between architects, developers, politicians and, indeed, critics.
Filler reviews three books on the subject, and at one point quotes Lynne Sagalyn: “This was not city building. Architecture may be art and city building calls for art-like understanding of the fabric of a place, but a city is not a blank canvas to paint at will…”
Filler has never been a fan of Santiago Calatrava: “The most architecturally ambitious portion of the ensemble, Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub (commonly called the Oculus), opened to the public in March 2016, though with no fanfare whatever, doubtless to avoid drawing further attention to this stupendous waste of public funds. The job took twelve years to finish instead of the five originally promised, and part of its exorbitant $4 billion price will be paid by commuters in the form of higher transit fares. The fortune spent on this kitschy jeu d’esprit—nearly twice its already unconscionable initial estimate of $2.2 billion—is even more outrageous for a facility that serves only 40,000 commuters on an average weekday, as opposed to the 750,000 who pass through Grand Central Terminal daily. Astoundingly, the Transportation Hub wound up costing $1 billion more than One World Trade Center itself.”
Is there a cautionary tale here for Vancouver and the nascent plan to redo the downtown waterfront, including expanding Waterfront Station into a larger, more effective transit hub?
While there is a cautionary tale, New York seems to be uniquely bad at cost control for public works for all purposes. See several of the world’s most expensive subway stations, several of the most expensive per km transit lines, the multi-billion bus terminal proposal, and the $24 billion proposal to add another couple train tracks to New Jersey
There are very few ‘feel good’ stories in New York real estate development. WTC would’ve been designed by committee even if all the controlling players weren’t shameless s.o.b.’s. That fact that they were just prolonged the process. For example, Silverstein spent two years suing his insurance company into paying him twice the amount of his policy – because two towers were destroyed, not just one ‘complex’. He didn’t get it, but there was 2003-2005 and a couple of billion wasted.
You have to take architectural criticism with a fat grain of salt. The original WTC was panned as a hubristic, state-backed flop for almost ten years before it filled up and people got used to it. The Sydney Opera House was a project management failure that critics undoubtedly lampooned as a scattering of very expensive seashells. It ran about the same budget and schedule over-runs as the WTC train station. But who cares about that today?
Coming back to Michael’s probing question about a possible “cautionary tale” about a redeveloped Waterfront Station, or hub – yes, please let’s not expect only private development to pay for all the expensive infrastructure need there, including but not limited to decks over tracks, roads, plazas, and, most relevantly, the gigantic concourse itself. All three levels of government must come to the table, along with Port Metro, CPR and TransLink, to make a timely, coordinated and worthy placemaking outcome here.
Personally, I’d love to have a fast train terminus here, and I also wonder what the cultural slash art component will be. Even more convention centre (horrors!), a better VAG location, or what? We need to really push for great ideas on our Downtown Waterfront!
You’ve obviously know the Central Waterfront project, Frank.
Being an historic land connection to salt water from the nation’s third largest downtown, there is really nothing else like it in Canada. I agree that it has a huge potential for much greater connectivity between fast, slow and everything-in-between rail, buses, and local and coastal passenger ferries. This will likely be realized incrementally over 40-years, or probably not at all if a future council approves something stupid like a stadium over the water or a glass tower jammed into the plaza between The Station and The Landing.
Meanwhile, by about 2030 fuel surcharges on plane tickets will skyrocket as supply and demand work their inevitable forces on a finite and very troublesome world resource, and that will drive up the demand for electric high-speed rail on the continent. We are so far behind the evolution curve on that, yet the first steps are so easy to Seattle and salt water ferries. Taking these first steps will prime the pump for the more challenging crossing of five major mountain chains to join the nation together once again with rail. Even the French post office now leases TGV freight trains that run at 300 km/hr between passenger trains moving hundreds of millions of people a year.
I completely agree that government must be the key player(s) at the funding table, and that starts with land ownership. The Ontario public pension fund recently bought a hunk of Cadillac Fairview which owns The Station and Granville Square. If the feds truly cared about long-term planning, they’d instruct Port Metro to start negotiating now. I believe Francesco Aquilini still owns the railyards, and he should be next in line, though it may not be absolutely necessary to own the property as long as it can be decked over and hazardous cargo limited. Everything north of the railyards is already owned by the Port.
There are several possibilities regarding final ownership and financing. The pension fund could be invited to sell to the Port at a price discount under a long-term guarantee of a portion of ticket and / or discounted floor area leases. Alternatively, the pension fund could be invited to invest in the infrastructure in exchange for similar permanent revenue benefits. The Port needn’t own the Granville tower, but it should have the right to dismantle part of the parkade structure and continue Granville St to the waterfront and connect to Canada Place Way.
This is not the WTC, and we are so far away from discussing architecture. But this site is too important to allow it to develop without a long range vision of transportation in the latter half of this century. Such a vision may have played a role in the WTC, even though it was understandably also an acknowledgement to a terrible event.
Perhaps the lesson learnable for Vancouver is to not involve public authorities with such massive project as they lack accountability ? Also see Berlin airport cost overrun by a similar margin and years of delay ! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-23/how-berlin-s-futuristic-airport-became-a-6-billion-embarrassment
That’s not the lesson, Thomas. Public officials were the only ones who actually did have any accountability. That was the problem. There were too many cooks in that kitchen and a lot of pressure to build something-anything-as a symbolic gesture. The whole process was set up to ensure everyone walked away feeling angry and gross.
The lesson for Vancouver is ‘take your time’. As much as it may feel like it in our little bubble, the nation is not screaming for the City of Vancouver to complete a waterfront transit hub. It’s really not. We have the luxury of carefully weighing our options and figuring out something that works. It can not nor should not be done solely with private money.
The WTC hub probably wouldn’t be the best example to follow because it is loaded with national symbolism and there was pressure to make a statement.
How about analyses of other lower profile transit hub redevelopments?
Melbourne?
San Francisco?
London?
Cities, Nations, Royals, Religious Orders have all constructed great public architecture through out history. The Oculus in particular celebrates the spirit of man in the face of mass murder, a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It is a project about rebuilding a subway station that was destroyed, it is a project about defiance and resolve to prevail over terrorism. It is in my view an awesome public space. It is architecture of, for, and by the human spirit. It is the creation of an emotive realm, that connects us to above, to the world beyond the concerns of our daily lives.
The Oculus is a design response to a tragic event in American history. It has no relevance to the Vancouver waterfront.
Well said
Regarding Santiago Calatrava, I don’t believe everything about the controversial cost can be lain at his feet. Blaming the architect is essentially blaming the client who wrote the terms of reference and red-lined all the check sets of drawings over a year or two, the public who had input, the judges in any design competition, and the bureaucrats who proposed and approved every budget expenditure until completion.
Design is evolutionary and inclusive of all parties at the table. It’s almost stereotypical now to call well-known practitioners ‘starchitects’ which has evolved into a derogatory term of dismissal, which also dismisses the entire RFP process set up well before any architect appeared on the scene.
Calatrava designed a pedestrian bridge in Calgary that is at once elegant and structurally minimal (self-supporting, no cables or piers), yet its $25 million cost was derided in the conventional press as a waste of taxpayer’s money. How dare they spend so much on pedestrian infrastructure while committing 200+++ times that to a concurrent freeway ring road system! The press and the critics went after the architect as much or more so than they did the mayor and council.
Now the bridge is one of the most photographed elements in downtown and appears over and over in every postcard rack. It has generated architectural tourism. In Calgary!
Sometimes design IS substance.