Calatrava’s Trade Center design to be scaled back

12 September 2008

MADRID — Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s grand plans for a new transport hub at New York’s World Trade Center site may not end up being so grand after all.

In an opinion piece published this week in the Wall Street Journal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for a scaling back of the column-free mezzanine design that the embattled Spanish architect had hoped would rival Grand Central Station.

"The… station’s design… is too complicated to build and threatens to delay the memorial and the entire project," Bloomberg wrote, coinciding with the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers. "It must be scaled back."

It is not the first controversy for Calatrava, who has recently come under fire over a bridge he designed spanning Venice’s Grand Canal that failed to provide wheelchair access and went over budget.

[El Pais / Expatica]