This is the year of the train station in New York City. Santiago Calatrava, FAIA's showstopper, 13 years in the making, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, finally opened to the public in March. And the project we've been waiting for even longer, a rebuilt Penn Station, on the verge of happening several times over the past two decades, is once again a top priority, according to a January announcement by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. When you follow one of these sagas for a decade or more, it's always a little startling to finally see a project reach completion. The place you know from endless renderings and glimpses through the construction fence is, in real life, an uncanny mixture of familiar and alien, of old and new. A few weeks ago, for example, I was standing on a marble floor so virginal and white that it looked like ice, beneath a 168-foot-high A-frame, composed of snow-colored steel ribs, that forms the instantly recognizable heart of Calatrava's magnificent invention. I felt very much like I was going back in time. In part this was because Steven Plate, the chief of major capital projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey-in essence, the guy who built the place-was telling me about "the wedge of light."
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