Inaugurated in March and functioning by the end of 2016, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, also known as Oculus, is the project recently completed, after 12 years of work, by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
The new permanent building designed for the Downtown Manhattan, located immediately to the east of the original World Trade Center complex, replaces the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) railway system destroyed during the September 11 attack.
The primary aim of the architect was to create a bright and stimulating aggregation hub, and besides, optimizing the building that houses commuter trains linked to the central subway lines. Calatrava has rethought the plan with a new concept, thus creating a large free-standing structure: the Oculus, located along the southern edge of the “Wedge of Light” space designed by Daniel Libeskind.
Therefore, this area is interposes among the commercial towers, forming a leisure hub, connected to the green spaces stretching from City Hall Park to St. Paul cemetery, from the Memorial Gardens to Battery Park along the Hudson.
Oculus consists of steel and glass ribs disposed and forged on a large elliptical shell: the ribs extend to create two canopies which also cover the north and south areas of the square.
The access to the interior of the building from Church and Greenwich Street is made possible through the east and west arches of the Oculus. Escalators, lifts and cantilevered stairs provide access to upper and lower levels, all made more comfortable and usable by a lighting system that makes wayfinding easier. For this reason, an openable skylight of about 100 meters stands in the middle, making the entire node of the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub to be literally flooded with natural light.
According to Calatrava, light represents in fact a real structural element of the project, which he describes as the backbone, specifically created to support the Oculus. Therefore, brightness softens the sculptural forms of the structure, contributing significantly to a suggestive aesthetic rendering, which accompanies passersby even in the lower levels and runs along the pedestrian paths, in order to provide to New York City an unprecedented public space.
By contrast, night artificial lighting functions as a lantern to make shine the surrounding areas, establishing itself as a cornerstone of the district.
www.wtc.com © 2016 Silverstein Properties, Inc
Billie Ward from New York, USA (Oculus, illuminated.), via Wikimedia Commons
Photo credit © Santiago Calatrava
