25 March 2007

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The city of the future is leaving from platform 4.


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We’ve seen stations used as atmospheric backdrops for films and recently as museum spaces, like Gae Aulenti’s  Gare d'Orsay. Whatever its purpose, the station often retains a strategic importance in the modern city.  It’s a place of arrival and departure for people travelling long distances, the nerve centre where city transport connects up, the focal hub where all the city’s communication systems come together, and the point of contact with the territory beyond the city itself: a “piazza”, as Aldo De Poli said, for travellers, and also often for the homeless and the lost.
But more and more, in the global reality where communication and connections are synonymous with progress and efficiency, the station is becoming a symbol of the city’s rebirth, a starting place for the  modernisation of the urban landscape itself.

That is certainly the thinking behind Afragola, the New High Speed Station in Naples designed by Zaha Hadid, where from 2008 on the fast trains from Rome will stop, allowing passengers to transfer to regional trains and the  Circumvesuviana (“Round Vesuvius”) line.
The project, stretching like a bridge over the railway lines for 350 metres and extending to a maximum height of 25 metres, makes a strong territorial statement in terms of announcing your arrival in Naples.

A similar effect is made by the Guillemins station in Liegi.
Inaugurated a few months ago, this work tries to recapture a sense of the city’s past importance to the region and at the same time upgrade an area that had become terribly neglected.
Until the end of the 1960s, Liege had been an important economic centre due to the nearby coal and iron industries and the intense development of the iron metallurgy industry, but afterwards it went through a period of severe crisis with employment at one point running at 20%.One of the main aims of the project therefore – commissionedfromSantiago Calatrava by EuroLiègeTGV –  was to strengthen connections with the great European capitals such as Brussels, Frankfurt, Maastricht and Luxembourg, so that Liege was no longer dangerously marginalised by the rest of the region. Above all, it was necessary for the project to create a structure suitable for high speed trains as well as communicating a powerful sense of innovation.
It was also important to take measures to save the whole area around the station, situated as it was in a deeply depressed zone isolated within a triangle formed by the motorway, the river Meuse and the railway.

The two different targets produced two main results: the new station is a monumental structure with a powerful visual impact, a traditional feature of the Valencian architect’s work, but at the same time it possesses a great sense of transparency and agility.
Conceived as a point of interchange between fast forms of transport – you can get from Liege to the centre of Brussels in just 35 minute – Calatrava’s work is permeated by a feeling of openness and accessibility.  The station is not closed in by facades but completely open, like an enormous steel and glass cover that extends over a distance of almost 190 metres. The station’s  different levels allow passengers to make their way there from the hill of Cointe, at the back, from the motorway, across a new bridge, or from one of the big new streets that were built together with the station.

To improve the rest of the zone, the project included a large piazza in front of the station with a wide access road, similar to the Champs-Élysées.  Crossing the area as far as the river, the road runs over a bridge on the Meuse to the island that hosted the 1930 International Expo, forming a continuous line from the island on the river to the green belt of the Cointe hill. This achieves the vital effect of seeming to lift the entire area out of the isolation which imprisoned it, helping to weave both it and the station more tightly into the urban fabric as a whole.