Zaha Hadid Architects   Saudi Arabia   The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is a centerpiece of Riyadh’s ambitious metropolitan railway system, which inaugurates its first lines on 1 December 2024. Able to accommodate 3.6 million commuters daily,

gmp Architekten   China   In the eastern part of the city of Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, a recently completed station becomes part of the country’s high-speed rail network. With a gross floor area of approximately 100,000 square meters, it provides eight platfo

Kengo Kuma   France   Through a series of stairs and ramps that follow a spiral formation, Saint-Denis Station expands public space and connects with the urban scheme of the Pleyel district in northern Paris. A work of the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the complex includ

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Italy   In 2004, the city of Naples invited, under the motto AAA (Architecture, Archaeology, and Art) invited prominent firms to propose designs for the new metropolitan line. The plan, aside from improving the connection between the outskirts and the city c

Foster + Partners   United States   Foster + Partners have unveiled the latest schemes, drawn up in conjunction with Arup, for California High-Speed Rail’s first four stations. These will be in the cities of Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Hanford. Located close to the latter, Kings T

Henning Larsen   Czech Republic   The Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with the engineers of the Ramboll group, has won the competition to transform the main railway station of the city of Prague. The project reconnects the historic station with the Vrchlického

Dorte Mandrup   Sweden   The station has been renovated several times on the basis of the same element: the vault. The new design respects this geometry and is inspired by the city’s yellow brick facades to rebuild a large double-height hall in the three-story building…

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group IDOM AREP   Spain   The roof of solar panels will protect both travelers waiting in the station itself and the terraces of the blocks of offices, and adopts the form of a series of catenary arches that evoke that profile of the city with the sierra of Madrid in the back

Zaha Hadid Architects Ayesa arquitectura Italferr   Spain   The north terminal, inspired by the mountains in the backdrop of the station, is a geometric response to the vaulted system of the south terminal. In both cases, the double-height floors offer visual and spatial continuity with the exterior…

Foster + Partners Arup Associates Junquera arquitectos   Spain   This flexible system organizes the ensemble by means of a geometric grid inspired by the current domes. The proposal consists of a modular terminal, a system of raised platforms, and a minimum intervention on the old passenger terminal…

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture Porras Guadiana Arquitectos Nexo arquitectura   Spain   The perimeter blocks enclose the central space, in a manner similar to that of the typical plazas of the historic centers in Spanish cities. In contrast, a technological aesthetic prevails in the metallic forest of canopies that protects the platform

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) Luis Vidal Meta Engineering Carlos González Casado Fhecor   Spain   The solar roof, formed by a simple structure of individual pitched modules, protects more than 130,000 square meters of station, and adopts a dynamic parallelogram shape that softens its encounter with the city along its four orientations…

AECOM    Spain   The station, covered by a textile canopy, constitutes two referential urban spaces: the platforms and the inner streets. The perimeter paths connect the four sides of the complex and generate different atmospheres for public use…

Grimshaw Architects TYPSA Rubio Arquitectura   Spain   The proposal’s main aim is to improve the connection between Chamartín and the city, turning the plaza into a destination in its own right. Modular and prefabricated construction is used both on the roof and on the short-distance train platforms…

Eduardo Souto de Moura Francisco Mangado Ezquiaga Arquitectura Saitec Engineering WSP Spain   Spain   A series of large chimneys designed to bring in light and ventilation gather the structural elements of the urban park planned to cover the platforms of the intermodal station, and whose distribution is inspired by the form of the tracks themselves…

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos ESTEYCO UNStudio   Spain   The railway complex is transformed into a large courtyard that generates several internal itineraries around the platforms and the tracks, guaranteeing connectivity and improving pedestrian circulation between the accesses from each side. The archite

estudioHerreros   Spain   One hundred years after the arrival of the railroad to Santiago de Compostela, the trench occupied by the extramural rails continues to be an almost insurmountable barrier between the historic center and the neighborhoods that emerged along the roads

Zaha Hadid Architects   Lithuania   With a scheme titled ‘Green Connect,’ the British firm Zaha Hadid Architects has won the competition to redevelop the train station of Vilnius and the areas around the complex. It will be part of the Rail Baltic line, for which the same architecture

Ingenhoven Architects   Germany   Like many other European cities in the 19th century, during the years of the railway boom Stuttgart grew around its central station. With the city center already packed, today the train tracks have become a barrier between the East and North district

Buchner Bründler Architekten   Switzerland   The urban scale, geometrical regularity of the structure, the linearity and proximity of the railway and bus lines are a few of the characteristics of the Altdorf station, which is going to be transformed into a New Railway Link through the Alps...

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture gmp Architekten   China   The firms Rem Koolhaas – OMA and gmp Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner are the winners of the competition to draw up the masterplan and architectural design for Chengdu Future Science and Technology City, located 50 kilometers from Chengdu and

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The result of a competition won in 2006, the intermodal station of Logroño was part of a much larger urban plan to bury the railway line as it traversed the capital of La Rioja region, and which also involved creating a large linear park and five res

Foster + Partners   China   The firm of Norman Foster has won the competition to design Guangming Hub, a transport-oriented development on the high-speed rail link that connects Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, with three new metro lines incorporated. The latest technologi

Tras casi treinta años de trámites burocráticos, falta de fondos, un terremoto e incluso la sombra alargada de la camorra, la línea 1 del metro de Nápoles abrió en 1993 conectando con modernos apeaderos las colinas y el borde del casco. En sus sucesi

Neither the dictator Primo de Rivera nor the Republic saw the materialization of the dream of a hub in the north of the capital that would untangle the city’s rail network. This was not achieved until the years of Francoist developmentalism, when Cor

John Puttick Associates was awarded the 2021 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize, recognizing its thoughtful and detailed conservation of Preston Bus Station, located in Preston, UK, a civic monument of central importance that serves as a hub

The firm led by the British architect Norman Foster has been selected to design Guangming Hub, a high-density urban development linked to the railway that runs through Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Following the model known as TOD (transit-orie

Adif has publicly named the teams selected to go on to phase two of the competition to transform the Madrid–Chamartín station: UNStudio with b720; RSHP with Luis Vidal; Souto de Moura with Francisco Mangado and José María Ezquiaga; Grimshaw with Carl

Chinese president Xi Jinping a few years ago lambasted the ‘weird architecture’ that international stars were building in his country (see Arquitectura Viva 169), but his denouncement does not seem to have been much heeded. Otherwise there would be n

A posthumous work of the architect Antonio Jiménez Torrecilla, who passed away in 2015, has been inaugurated: the Alcázar Genil station of the Metro of Granada. Characterized by the particular povera and at the same time minimalist image that its aut

Barcelona has officially opened the latest segment of line 9 of its metropolitan raiway system, to which the team formed by Jordi Garcés, Daria de Seta, and Anna Bonet has contributed three stations: Amadeu Torner, Parc Logístic, and Mercabarna. Each

Anyone able to look back on the times when Zaha Hadid was still an ‘underground’ architect will easily manage to see the recently opened Napoli Afragola Station as an exaggerated materialization of the project with which the Iraqi-British architect w

The Seville-based firm of Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra is the winner of an international competition for the opportunity to restructure the central area of the Cornavin Railway Station in Geneva. The purpose of the project is to improve the station’s

The Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava has inaugurated at Manhattan’s Ground Zero a work of extraordinary visibility and symbolic importance. Located at the World Trade Center, the Oculus station will connect ten New York City subway l

Las estaciones de ferrocarril en superficie rasgan dramáticamente las ciudades, de ahí que, en las últimas décadas, una de las prioridades en la gestión de las infraestructuras españolas haya sido recuperar la continuidad urbana perdida de tantas ciu

En el transcurso de un acto que ha reunido al ministro de Fomento, a la presidenta de la Comunidad de Madrid y al alcalde de la capital, se ha inaugurado la primera fase de la ampliación de la estación de Atocha, un proyecto desarrollado por el estud

Junto al nuevo estadio de fútbol Amsterdam Arena, al sureste de la ciudad, se encuentra la remodelada estación Bijlmer Arena, en un barrio conflictivo de vivienda social anteriormente dividido por las vías del tren. Lo que en un principio iba a ser u

Doce años después de haber ganado el concurso para su adjudicación (véase Arquitectura Viva 55) y con siete años de retraso sobre el plazo previsto, se ha inaugurado la estación de alta velocidad Lieja-Guillemins, última obra de Santiago Calatrava en

Entre 1985 y 1992, la ‘Operación Atocha’ sustituyó la obsoleta Estación del Mediodía —cuya marquesina se mantuvo como invernadero— por un gran complejo ferroviario integrado por una estación de Cercanías y una de largo recorrido, origen del primer AV

Michele Cannatà   Fatima Fernandes   El proyecto del metro ligero de Oporto ha establecido nuevos horizontes y nuevas posibilidades en los modos de intervención de la arquitectura contemporánea. Sin campañas publicitarias sensacionalistas, Eduardo Souto de Moura ha dado forma en pocos a

Keith Miller   It is axiomatic among critics that the sequel tends not to be as good as the original. But whereas the Jubilee Line started life as an inconspicuous sapling grafted on to the Bakerloo Line to ease congestion between existing stations in the West End

Marta García Carbonero   Faculty in La Coruña and Station in Córdoba  Two buildings – one in Galicia and the other in Andalusia – share the National Prize for Architecture, bestowed every two years by Spain’s Council of Architectural Institutes in conjunction with the M

Transformed into a global office, Foster Associates began to have a large proportion of its workload abroad. Hong Kong had opened up the Pacific Rim, and Nîmes would be the first significant commitment on the other side of the Channel, soon to be fol