At the most basic programmatic level, Fulton Center'New York's new $1.4 billion transit hub'is a way for commuters to descend 40 feet from the street to the platforms for subway lines that overlap each other in a mazelike tangle in Lower Manhattan. One of the primary aims of the station, which opened in November and was conceived in the wake of the September 11 attacks, was to simplify access to these platforms. It was also intended to ease the cumbersome transfers among the lines, which were originally built by separate and competing commercial entities, some more than a century ago.
However, its design team set its sights on grander ambitions. 'The aspiration was to create a space with the civic quality of Grand Central'one animated with daylight,' says Vincent Chang, a partner at Grimshaw, the architecture firm responsible for Fulton Center's primary above-ground component'a dramatically skylit glass-and-steel pavilion, approximately 140 feet square and 100 feet tall.
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