A church rises in the shadow of 9/11

Receive free Architecture updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Architecture news every morning.

The void left by the destruction of the buildings at Ground Zero has been filled by another kind of void: the vast hall of the $4bn Oculus, which hosts an efficient (if still convoluted) convergence of New York’s Downtown subway and rail lines and a capacious but ghostly mall within steel bones of blinding white.

It is the work of Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava, the once-feted maestro of over-budget projects. He began his career with stations such as the dramatic winged canopy of Lyon Saint-Exupéry and the super-refined Stadelhofen in Zurich. So what is perhaps more surprising than his bleached monster at the World Trade Center site is a much smaller, more delicate and apparently mostly unnoticed building in a corner of Liberty Park.

When Tower 2 collapsed on 9/11, it took with it a small building built as a tavern but functioning as a Greek Orthodox church since 1916; it was, by 2001, surrounded by a rather scrappy car park. The city promised to rebuild it, and Calatrava was commissioned in 2014. The church, dedicated to St Nicholas, opened at the end of last year but attracted little international attention despite its starry architect and prominent position. Yet it is worthy of second look as this is a rare example of a new church on a prominent site with a very public function of not just worship but memory. It is has been named as a National Shrine, a cenotaph dedicated to the 3,000 victims of 9/11, open free to the public all day every day.

In Calatrava terms, this is a tiny building. If anything, it’s a little reminiscent of a 1930s radio (a nice touch, if intended, as this neighbourhood used to be known as Radio Row, thanks to all the workshops and repair stores). Clad in brilliant white marble, it has the slightly unsettling pallor of a new headstone but, with its faceted facade, shallow dome and bulbous corners it looks friendly and approachable, a kind of art-deco throwback to those radio sets, only more delicate.

From twilight, its central section and dome glow as the thinly-sliced marble radiates a warm light. It is a delicate effect pretty much overwhelmed by the lights of empty offices and the city’s background illumination, but it is also a welcome variation in scale and finesse, a highly articulated form set against the dumb glass towers around it.

Just as with the architect’s Oculus, the problems start when you enter. First, the marble is very white, clinical almost. Secondly, although the dome is allowed to glow, every rib and join elsewhere is backlit with bright white LEDs. The effect is garish, more Vegas than Athos.

Then there is the ornament. Calatrava normally creates theatrical effects without extra adornment; here, I’m guessing, the client wanted more traditional iconography. And boy, did they get it. There is carved foliage, crucifix-shaped door handles, relief vines and marble doors pierced with dozens of crosses. It looks a little like an upmarket mausoleum, money no object.

Using traditional Greek Orthodox images, the interior is festooned with brightly painted iconography. While I quite enjoyed the Virgin spreading her arms over a stylised Manhattan, there is an inescapable cheesiness to the interior. Those icons, which look so powerful against the gloomy background of a Byzantine church, here appear garish.

It’s a shame as this is Calatrava’s most modest and humane building in decades (though it did cost $85mn, perhaps making it one of the most expensive per square foot buildings in human history), an interesting exploration of the borders between the popular and the super-modern, between the sacred and the profane. It hoovers in everything from art deco to Constantinople and, in many ways, I think it is quite admirable.

It is also mostly empty, apart from the two ever-present security guards. And that makes it an oddly pleasing place to be, despite its contradictions. Calatrava may now be much derided, but he is also a rare and intriguing figure, one still potentially capable of producing a genuinely popular, if pricey, architecture.

stnicholaswtc.org