Regrouping after the abrupt departure of renowned architect Santiago Calatrava last year, Denver International Airport officials will unveil a modified plan for a new hotel and transit hub today that keeps the Spanish designer’s horizontal fins but omits his signature flourishes.

The new design is more of a box than the bird Calatrava envisioned. Gone are the rounded, white-tipped wings that made the original concept delicate and graceful. In their place: muscular 14-story walls of glass that thrust upward and, on each side, outward at about a 45-degree angle.

Also gone are Calatrava’s boney structural support elements that made the transit station and hotel lobby look much like the inside of a giant dinosaur skeleton. Instead, the new designers have created webs of steel that form canopies to welcome trains and guide passengers from the addition to the main DIA building.

The changes were worked out under a detailed agreement with Calatrava, who left the project in September after the budget was cut to $500 million from $650 million, a figure he said could not fund his vision.

DIA was allowed to keep the architect’s basic plan but not those touches that define his work. Calatrava has built his worldwide reputation on a pointed, swanlike elegance and his trademark color of white.

The new design, as amended by two firms, Gensler and Anderson Mason Dale Architects, is dominated by clear glass rather than white steel. And while it may not be as finessed, it is still a modern expression that fits in with design of DIA, one of the city’s most popular buildings, designed by Denver architect Curtis Fentress.

Calatrava was paid $12.9 million for his conceptual design work.

The reconfigured 700,000-square-foot complex maintains the same two main functions. The 500-room hotel will allow DIA to offer on-site overnight accommodations to travelers, while the train station has the ability to handle the thousands of commuters expected to arrive by rail as RTD completes it FasTracks system.

DIA airport manager Kim Day said Tuesday that the rethinking allowed the airport to fine-tune a few issues with the original scheme and to expand the vision for what the building can be. Passengers at the busy airport will be happy to learn the new plan allows the immediate addition of nine more TSA security gates, bringing the total to 41.

It also makes space for a football field-size plaza between the train station and the hotel that Day hopes will host farmer’s markets, fairs and concerts and transform the airport grounds into a civic plaza that draws people who aren’t boarding planes.

The design also maintains the center dip in Calatrava’s original facade, preserving a fifth-floor hotel bar with great views of the original, tented DIA building as well as the downtown Denver cityscape.

“This will be the place to be,” Day said.

The project is scheduled for completion in late 2015.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dparchitecture

On display

Denver International Airport officials will show the plan at 1:30 p.m. today to the Denver City Council’s Business, Workforce & Sustainability Committee at the Denver City and County Building.