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Originariamente inviato da libero81
peccato che nel progetto ci sia calatrava... non mi sembrava proprio il caso di affidare a lui un progetto tanto delicato..
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scherzi vero? Santiago Calatrava è uno degli architetti più bravi e rinomati al mondo e li, ovviamente, sono entusiasi... così come per Renzo Piano, che ha progettato il grattacielo della nuova sede del New York Times...
e cmq Calatrava disegnerà il Transit Hub, cosa che è perfettamente in grado di fare.
L'Orient Station di Lisbona
At Ground Zero, Finding Harmony In Design?
2 architects will try to carry out Libeskind's WTC vision
By Justin Davidson
August 5, 2003
The story of how Lower Manhattan's big hole is filled gets murkier all the time. One week it looks as though a great public works project is metamorphosing into a commercial real estate deal, with the developer Larry Silverstein leading the way. The next it looks as though the semi-public agency, the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corp., has grabbed back the reins. On Tuesday, it seems as if Daniel Libeskind's master plan is being nibbled away by compromise, his signature tower moved across the site and turned over to another architect. By Thursday it appears that, even if Libeskind himself does not design the buildings, his overall vision will remain pristine.
So what's going on? The answer is that, having appointed Libeskind the composer and conductor of downtown's rebirth, the managers are gradually hiring an orchestra. David Childs, New York's reliable supplier of elegant office towers, will design the 1,776-foot spire with which Libeskind crowned his plan. Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect of flamboyant, soaring stations and bridges, will be responsible for the transit hub. The first decision seems prudent, since Libeskind has never designed an office building. The second is downright inspired.
If Libeskind is the great enshriner of memory, Calatrava is a poet of forward motion. His best buildings seem to be poised in the instant before taking flight. Straining yet serene, as fast and frozen as a comic book swoosh, they look like icons of weightlessness. Almost a century ago, a group of Italian artists-ideologues who called themselves the Futurists published a polemic in which they declared "that the splendor of the world has been enriched with new forms of beauty, the beauty of speed." The Futurists approved of little, but they might have loved Calatrava.
His Alamillo Bridge in Seville consists of its span and a sleek steel prow, joined by a set of diagonal cables. The bridge, as many have said, resembles a harp at rest, its strings ready to vibrate in the river breeze. But it also has a seamless, aerodynamic form, like a racing bicycle component that slices right through the wind. This is a bridge that exhorts traffic not to putter but to flow gracefully across. If Calatrava's symbolic evocations of speed have even the slightest effect on the reality of rapid transit, New York's commuters will be extremely grateful.
It may prove esthetically difficult to reconcile the jagged angularities of Libeskind's design with Calatrava's sensuous curves, but the two architects are linked by a love of metaphor. Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin is a masterpiece of mourning, with oblique spaces ribboned by violent slashes. His master plan for the World Trade Center, full of non-right angles and unpredictable protrusions, invites a multitude of symbolic readings: as a representation of destruction, as a testament to the town's cockeyed optimism, as a reflection of the way the moneyed establishment and the penurious avant- garde coexist in lower Manhattan.
Calatrava's buildings, too, always seem to be saying, "Go ahead, interpret me!" At times, his buildings have a narrative charge. His recent addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum is surmounted by a tilted mast and a curved, billowing form like a pair of wings or a whale's tail, as if the building were illustrating the climax of "Moby-Dick." The nautical imagery seems out of place for Milwaukee, but the impression of an active building - one that plunges, leaps or hurtles, or barely skims the ground - is one of the architect's recurring themes.
The airport station in Lyon, France, has a similar, eagle-like swoop, as if passengers could become airborne merely by stepping inside. A latticework of steel trusses supports a high-flying roof and floods the main hall with daylight. New York's commuters, accustomed to the gracious gloom of Grand Central Station and the depressing warren of tunnels at Penn Station, would pass thankfully through such a sun-filled space.
It remains to be seen how ably Calatrava disentangles downtown's knot of transportation and renders it in sweeping lines. But his selection makes it far more likely that lower Manhattan will at last get a station to match its needs.
Already by the late 19th century, it seemed clear that the great buildings of mass transportation were the modern incarnation of the medieval cathedral. Instead of promoting the upward migration of souls, they were temples to the horizontal movement of bodies. Calatrava's work makes an explicit connection between transportation and the heavenward yearnings of Gothic architecture. Along with airports and bridges, he has drawn, though not built, an addition to the ultimate neo-Gothic house of worship: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. When it comes to designing places of entry and departure, he uses the vocabulary of medieval worship: pointed arches, high windows, distant ceilings and elaborate theatricality.
Calatrava's buildings tend to need a lot of limelight, and there seems little doubt that the conclave of downtown's designers will spend years fighting and trying to upstage each other. There is enough work at the World Trade Center to keep many of the world's most celebrated architects employed for years. The challenge is not to locate talent, but to ensure that the site does not become a permanent design exhibit, a neighborhood glutted with bold buildings vying for the public's attention.