NEW YORK — The soaring, white transportation hub opening next week at the World Trade Center was designed to evoke a bird in flight, but it is hatching under a shadow.

There will be no ribbon-cutting celebration when the train station’s grand hall, called the Oculus, opens this week because the head of the bistate agency that controls the hub has blasted it as a ‘‘symbol of excess,’’ with costs approaching $4 billion.

That’s roughly the same price as the nation’s tallest skyscraper, next door — the 104-story One World Trade Center.

‘‘The cost of projects, big and small, matters — a lot,’’ Patrick Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said in a statement. ‘‘Whether due to unforeseen conditions, errors, or misconduct, cost overruns consume precious resources and undermine public confidence.’’

The authority said the transit facility will partly open on March 3 and there will be a ceremony when it becomes ‘‘fully operational’’ this spring.

The hub, which includes a commuter rail station, retail shops, restaurants, and connections to several subway lines, appears destined to take its place among the city’s most talked-about landmarks.

Intended to serve partly as a monument to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, it was designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava to convey the feeling of a bird released into the air, with steel wings poised for takeoff. Some critics have compared it to a dinosaur skeleton or an armadillo.

Adjacent skyscrapers can be seen through the bird’s curved white ribs, which enclose a vaulted, cathedral-like space.

‘‘It is a monument to life, it is a monument of faith in this city and a monument dedicated to the people,’’ Calatrava said.

The station will replace one that served PATH trains to and from New Jersey and that was destroyed along with the twin towers in 2001.

Steve Plate, the chief of major capital projects for the Port Authority, called the hub ‘‘the eighth wonder of the world’’ and described how the building ‘‘is aligned precisely to allow the sun to come in exactly in that opening on Sept. 11 at 10:28, when the last tower fell, to capture that light and remember that moment.’’

In a marvel of engineering, the new complex was built around, beneath, and above an existing subway line.

When Calatrava’s design for the transportation hub was announced in 2004, it was budgeted at $2 billion, and was expected to be finished by 2009.

The Port Authority puts the current cost at $3.9 billion because of overruns and delays blamed on factors including the architect’s exacting demands and the complexity of building the hub while the Sept. 11 museum and new office towers were also under construction.

Plate defended the building’s high costs. ‘‘We had an obligation to do something very special,’’ he said. ‘‘We did it very wisely, very prudently, very intensely to make sure we got the best product, the best quality, and the most historic structure.’’