New York Times, Sunday
January 13, 2002

A Train to a Plane to a Bus to a Subway

By STEPHEN KINZER
Arts & Leisure (Jan. 13, 2002)

CHICAGO -- PHOTOS, drawings and computer-generated images of some of the
world's most exciting urban design projects are on display along a twisting
corridor at the Art Institute here. For one project in the Belgian city of
Liège, the architect Santiago Calatrava has designed a huge glass building
with soaring canopies and a roof supported by monumental arched ribs.
Scheduled to be completed in 2006, it has a great central hall, as well as
offices, a shopping center, an 800-space parking garage and subway
connections. One of the towering glass walls will offer visitors a panoramic
view of a nearby mountainside.

Although the building is part civic center and part shopping mall, its main
purpose is something else altogether: to serve as a train station. High-speed
rail service is now reaching smaller European cities as well as big ones, and
existing stations are no longer able to handle the throngs of passengers or
the ultramodern trains. Across Europe and in East Asia, a boom in the
construction of train stations is changing the vernacular of their design and
producing new ideas about the role they can play in urban planning.
Designs for 20 stations, some completed, others under construction and a few
barely off the drawing board, are on display in the Art Institute exhibition,
"Modern Trains and Splendid Stations," which runs through July 28. They show
how the challenge of reinventing train stations has gripped the imaginations
of some of the world's leading architects.

The new stations are light, airy and colorful. Many are built as a series of
connected spaces, large by necessity but not as overwhelming as the Gothic
and Beaux-Arts stations of past eras. Almost all are conceived as
centerpieces in larger urban development projects. Most integrate parking
garages, bus depots, subway stations and connections to nearby airports.
Some, like one in Frankfurt that opened last year and another, designed by
Helmut Jahn, that is to open in Cologne in 2003, are actually part of airport
complexes.

In Lille, France, the train station is the center of Euralille, a new
business district that reflects the desire of both the French government and
the European Union to strengthen neglected regions. The station, part of an
urban master plan by the architect Rem Koolhaas, is built on several levels,
with slender tubular arches supporting its roof. Since it was completed in
1994, three office towers and a convention hall have been built nearby.

Some new stations have been built for special events and have then become
part of long-term development plans. Oriente Station in Lisbon, for example,
was a gateway to Expo '98. Built in a decaying industrial area, it has
glass-and-steel canopies that resemble palm groves in a desert oasis. As
planned, houses and apartment buildings are springing up in the surrounding
area, and 25,000 people are expected to move there by 2010.

Many Asian political leaders, like their European counterparts, have
concluded that demographic, environmental and economic pressures make the
development of modern rail networks vital to their countries' future, and are
anchoring them with dazzling new stations. The Hung Hom station in Hong Kong,
which was designed by Norman Foster and opened in 1998, can accommodate the
arrival and departure of 500 trains a day, some of them double-deckers. Known
for its wave- form roof, the station was built to accelerate Hong Kong's
integration into China.

In Hong Kong as well, the British architect Terry Farrell has built a new
station in West Kowloon that is the main stop on the 19-mile route connecting
the city center to a new airport. Also serving as an interchange for three
rail lines, it has a large bus station and offers airline check-in services.
This so-called transportation supercity is the core of a sprawling
development that is to include more than one million square feet of office
space, hotels and apartments.

Of course, railway stations require trains, and their new designs are almost
as radical as the stations'. The Chicago exhibition includes pictures of nine
that show the range of these innovations. In Germany, passengers can now ride
front cars that allow them to see ahead — new technology, eliminating the
engineer, allows an operator to be separated from passengers by nothing more
than a glass screen. In much of Europe, tilting train technology propels
trains up to 150 miles an hour. Some trains are consciously built for the
masses, like those in Sweden, where a commitment to social equality dictates
no first-class sections. Others are aimed at an elite clientele, like one in
Switzerland that provides luxury service to wealthy skiers.

The Chicago show is small, with the corridor it occupies designed to evoke
the sensation of train travel. For an American, it also evokes something
else: the realization that this country has not participated in the railway
revolution.

During the heyday of railroads in the United States, the country's most
celebrated architects devoted themselves to designing grand train stations.
Some still exist, including several, like Grand Central Terminal in New York,
that barely escaped demolition. The finest are urban palaces with vast,
cathedral-like spaces conveying a solid grandeur. Yet these survivors,
beautiful as they are, tell more about the past than about the future; they
seem like throwbacks to another era.

The stations in the Chicago show are just the opposite, boldly innovative
rather than reverential, and use glass and steel rather than heavy stone.
They are designed to be vital parts of 21st-century life.

This contrast in architectural style reflects America's forceful dissent from
the European and Asian consensus about the future of rail travel. The spread
of air travel in postwar America was accompanied by the construction of
interstate highways and the simultaneous rise of powerful automobile, highway
and airline lobbies.

Rail travel came to be viewed as an inefficient relic that was defended only
by nostalgic romantics and Luddite environmentalists. In the minds of some
Washington politicians, railroads still conjure up images of the
smoke-belching locomotive, the creaky wooden passenger car and the maverick
engineer.

The Chicago exhibition demonstrates that these images are as outdated as
those of the biplane and the Model-T. In much of the world, political leaders
have concluded that for trips of less than 350 miles, train travel is the
soundest choice, both economically and environmentally. There is broad
agreement across the political spectrum that taxpayers should pay to build
railways just as they pay to build highways. Yet in the United States,
railroads receive little support. Congress recently gave the airline industry
a $15 billion bailout, even as it threatened to cut Amtrak subsidies. But
despite this lack of financing and Amtrak's chronic service problems,
ridership has increased since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The most modern American train, the punctuality-challenged Acela Express,
which runs between Boston and Washington, shares antiquated track with
conventional passenger and freight trains. This anachronistic system is
almost unknown in Europe. As for station designs, only 4 of the 20 in the
Chicago show are American.

One is the new Pennsylvania Station in New York that is to be built on Eighth
Avenue in the iconic James A. Farley General Post Office designed by McKim,
Mead & White. The new station, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, makes use of
the old neo- classical building but also adds modern touches, most notably a
huge crescent- shaped skylight that will rise nearly 150 feet over the main
entrance on 33rd Street. The three other American stations in the show, one
in St. Louis and two in California, are more directly influenced by European
and Asian trends, with glass walls, undulating canopies and natural
ventilation.

The California projects, in San Francisco and Solana Beach, reflect the
desire of some mayors and governors to plan for greatly expanded rail
passenger service in the future. Highways in California are being choked by
ever increasing numbers of trucks and cars, and Gov. Gray Davis has unveiled
a plan to spend $4 billion on rail improvements by 2005.

The curator of the Chicago exhibition, Martha Thorne, writes in a catalog
essay that Europe and East Asia are heralding "a rebirth of the architecture
of train stations" that is also transforming broader ideas of urban design.
But the United States, she asserts, "still sorely lags behind."

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