.JDavidsonNYC writes on the Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church next to the World Trade Center, which is finally open 21 years after its predecessor was destroyed
Santiago Calatrava is best known for bridges that leap and budgets that soar, for vast and bony white-steel structures that evoke high-tech ruins of the future and cause fiscal ruin in the present. The Oculus, the $4 billion transit station–shopping mall he designed for the World Trade Center, has become a symbol of architectural excess. Now, just a couple of blocks away, a refined pocket project gives his reputation a shot of sobriety. The dense white nugget of St.
This two-story affair with a 4,200-square-foot sanctuary surrounded by a few vestibules, an upstairs office, and a small gathering place for wakes serves as an opulent replacement for the chapel that was crushed on 9/11. After two decades of argument, persistence, litigation, and fundraising, the $85 million building has become such a vast source of pride that the Orthodox Church designated it a national shrine and the Greek government kicked in a fortune’s worth of Pentelic marble .
St. Nicholas is the Oculus’s infant cousin, close in DNA and similar in aspiration but radically different in character. The Oculus consists of an immense steel-ribbed, glass-sided cupola vaulting above an expanse of white marble. The church has a small steel-ribbed cupola faceted in translucent sheets of marble. The Oculus’s snowy interiors are brightened by illuminated retail signage and pulsating screens.
Even so, that church is a precious object, whether you calculate the cost in years elapsed, lawyers’ bills, construction dollars, work hours, acres of marble, or units of devotion per square foot. Calatrava gravitates to — or generates — these slow-moving, high-priced projects, and though you can’t blame him for the Archdiocese of America’s desire to replace the destroyed chapel with a long-lived monument, or for its, the design challenged virtually every step of the builders’ habits.
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