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Work has been completed on the Vertical Panorama Pavilion in Sonoma, California. Designed by Studio Other Spaces, a Berlin studio founded by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, the pavilion will be used as a space for wine tasting by The Donum Estate, one of California’s... View full entry
Few things are as embarrassing for an architect than having a building you’ve designed spring a leak. Unfortunately for Santiago Calatrava, that is exactly what's happened at the World Trade Center Oculus, a $3.9 billion transit hub built to memorialize the September 11th terrorist... View full entry
The skylight that crowns the spiky, $3.9 billion World Trade Center Oculus has sprung a leak.
A rubber seal that runs along the spine of the retractable skyline is believed to have ripped during its opening and closing on the 2018 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The Wall Street Journal reports.
— Curbed NY
"Some $30,000 by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was spent this winter to repair the tear using black strips of Flex Tape, but the skylight at the massive transportation hub and shopping mall leaked again on May 5," Curbed summarizes the WSJ's account. The Santiago... View full entry
The opening allows for the “Way of Light” to pass through the main hub of the transit hall at 10:28 a.m.—the moment that the North Tower of the WTC collapsed on September 11, 2001. The path along which the light travels inside the hall symbolizes “the light that continues to shine through after the darkness of the tragedy,” says a spokesperson for the Oculus. — Curbed NY
How does Santiago Calatrava's Oculus encapsulate the complex history and significance of its site? In this brief video from filmmaker Jeff Durkin, Calatrava's elaborate transit hub canopy is sited in its aesthetic and social contexts via a series of carefully selected voice-over news clips and... View full entry
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey...has been so chastened by the cost overruns and construction delays that it declined to hold even a modest ribbon-cutting. When a bureaucracy turns down a major opportunity to pat itself on the back, you know things have turned sour. Turned acid, really.
Still, everyone seems to agree that the main hall, which stretches beneath a glass and white-steel roof and which Calatrava calls the Oculus, is beautiful. But I didn't find it beautiful...
— the Los Angeles Times
"...at least not in the way that Calatrava's finest work, fluid and precise, often is. I found it structurally overwrought and emotionally underwhelming, straining for higher meaning, eager to wring some last drops of mournful power from a site that is already crammed with official, semi-official... View full entry
