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Revolutionary Railways
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18101 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
1,575 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
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If you want to see two of Europe's brightest and most colorful new buildings, simply fly to Holland's Schipol Airport and take a train. Two stops along you will arrive at Amsterdam Slotterdijik - a station that opens a new age in railway architecture as exciting as the advent of the iron and glass roofs of the great nineteenth-century termini.
Holland's revolutionary new stations are based on the simple recognition that there is no more dazzling color in architecture than the blue of the sky. Allow the sunlight to flood in the length and breadth of the building, and every surface will sparkle. And the passengers will be filled with a new a joie de vivre.
Walk into the glass-walled concourse at Slotterdijik and you will see one o the mist compelling images in the whole history of railway architecture - an express train rolling through the station above you in glass tunnel.
Here is what the French call architecture parlance - buildings, which proclaim their purpose.
A station, says Harry Reijnders, the architect, "should be open and welcoming, with maximum visibility. Then you don't need pitcuregrams to find your way around. If you see a lot you're seen a lot - people feel secure and there is much less vandalism." The waiting rooms on the platforms are all-glass boxes brightly lit at night with no frightening dark corners.
Market research showed that passengers were as concerned about cold, drafty platforms as they were about prices and finding seats on trains.
Slotterdijik is a station on two levels, with trains entering at the four points of the compass. The upper level is 40 members above the ground - where a storm-force 8 wind blows at over 110 kilometers per hour.
Wind-tunnel tests showed the best way to protect passengers was to cocoon them in a gently curving tunnel. As this runs north-south and at the prevailing wind in from the west, it is draft-free on all but a few days a year. And while a glass roof naturally heats up quickly in direct sunlight, the trains passing every ten minutes pull vast drafts of cooling air through the station.
Reijnders had observed how most stations quickly became a clutter of advertisements and determined to create a concourse without columns or solid walls. For anyone to pin things on. This he achieved by constructing a great external scaffold from which walls and ceiling area suspended.
The next task was to ensure that the station remained clean - however frequently trains are washed, deposits accumulate from steel brakes and copper electricity connections. His solution outside was to build moving gantries which glide along the glass tunnel - the horizontal version of the cleaning boxes suspended form the tops of skyscrapers.
All the steelwork and internal surfaces are painted in bright colors - cornflower blue and scarlet for the steel girders, set off by blacks, whites and grays.
For the last
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