The PATH Not Taken

Yesterday morning I was sitting on the PATH train headed to work, scanning the arts section of The New York Times. I read with interest Nicholas Ouroussoff's report about the unveiling this weekend of a new design for Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center site PATH and subway station. He spoke of the budget challenges to the project and the architect's attempt to maintain the integrity of his glorious design, surely one of the boldest conceptions for a transportation center in New York since Grand Central Station opened in 1913. Calatrava is a great architect and this is clearly a beautiful building, but all is not well with this new PATH station. Ouroussoff points to the secrecy of the recent design process and some of the compromises that have been struck to preserve the experience of Calatrava's soaring winged roof structure. It seems that the experience of us daily PATH riders has been neglected, ". . . in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be." In fact this grand and very expensive building has a limited function, direct links to two transit stations under the building, the World Trade Center PATH stop and the Cortlandt Street stop on the N/R subway lines, and a secondary connection to the Fulton Street subway station several blocks away. To shortchange us PATH riders seems an odd and unfortunate decision by the planners.

What struck me about the failings of the building, as Ouroussoff described them, was the unwillingness of the designer to accommodate the experience of actual people in his building. As wayfinding designers who often work on large public facilities, we have a people-focused process that we use to create signage and wayfinding systems for buildings like this. We call this process user-centered design, whereby we focus on the needs of the users of a public space, anticipating what information they require and how they will navigate a place and find the destinations and pathways they need. It seems that on this project, there was no advocate for the user guiding or challenging the architect as the building's elements were being designed and arranged. If a user focus was the goal of this public design project, the building would not have become what Ouroussoff described as,"a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else."

Ouroussoff's review is surprisingly harsh. As a citizen and a PATH user, one wonders, where do we go from here? Perhaps the Port Authority has some explaining to do. Was this routing of PATH traffic designed to enhance the viability of the commercial element of the building? These days, most transportation centers are a mix of transport uses and retail, dining, and entertainment venues. Is there more we haven't seen in the way of public art, exhibits, and environmental graphics that might engage people on the circuitous journey that Ouroussoff complains about? I am an optimist, let's hope that the design evolves and the PATH experience is designed holistically and thoughtfully so us Jersey folks will celebrate our arrival each day in the Big Apple and not curse the moment we left our lovely Garden State.