THE SKY IN THE SUBWAY

摘要

In George looker's famous 1950 painting The Subway, a woman navigates a claustrophobic, disorienting space filled with shadowy figures. The artwork perfectly represents "perceptions of compression, anxiety, [and] unease that accompany being underground," says Vincent Chang, a partner at Grimshaw's New York office. And until recently, this is exactly how it felt to trudge through a certain maze of dark underground passages that linked nine subway lines in Lower Manhattan just east of the World Trade Center site. This site is Fulton Center, where a new transportation and retail hub opened this past November after more than a decade of work, and the new project reflects an altogether different vision of public transportation-a vision inspired, Chang says, by the soaring vault of Grand Central Terminal, which is pierced by oblique rays of sunlight. Among the many improvements to the Fulton complex, the most visible is the new "headhouse" building designed by Grimshaw with Arup, who oversaw work on the entire complex. For starters, there is a generous skylight, 53 feet in diameter and positioned 120 feet above street level, that allows daylight to reach all the way to the subway platforms underground.