Railway stations between infrastructural complexity and architectural form

Continuous evolutions and diffusion of transport systems – air, rail, road and water- have always affected the way of conceiving the contemporary, therefore the newest infrastructures represent important challenges for designers because they can be confined neither to a single geographical place nor to a building. In this framework, today, designers are really interested by great infrastructural nodes which assume a special meaning because they are considered as hybrid places where "resting" dimensions - more linked to city’s physical and spatial features - and "moving" rituals - concerning transport infrastructures' spaces - are overlapped. Among all the different infrastructural nodes, railway station is a perfect synthesis of rest and motion, which are some of the most emblematic actions of our contemporary metropolitan life. Railway station is also a rare example of public building born by the Industrial Revolution which impressively describes which have been all the changes of our western society, from 150 years. It’s got all the features of a urban centrality, maintaining continuity with the past but able to answer to contemporary demands. Railway station is therefore a fascinating place where architecture and technique, city and infrastructure meet each other to become meaningful elements for the whole urban context. Today we cannot consider a great railway station as a simple building anymore, instead it is to be seen as a complex infrastructural system, constantly interacting with the city, where efficient interconnections among the different means of transport converging on it are fulfilled. More than in the past, today railway stations are symbols of innovation and progress, thanks to the recent introduction of the new High Speed Train (HST) technologies, opening a new "railway season" where the ever-growing numbers of passengers moving around the world are presenting today’s engineers, architects and planners with greater challenges than ever before (Collins, 2003). At the same time, cities are discovering railway stations' neighbourhoods as key places in solving old urban problems and promoting new high quality urban frameworks. Therefore, great railway nodes have gained a multipurpose role, involving different spatial scales and disciplines, where global and local dimensions, transport and urban issues meet each others; finally they are able to boost local development policies and programmes but also criticalities at the same time. As a matter of fact, various infrastructural networks may converge on a rail station and can support different relations among functions with their own spatial rank and area of influence, from local to international ones. A railway station can also be considered as a clear synthesis between infrastructural and architectural designs; as a matter of fact operating on a station means operating on a building and a physical place but also on a complex system of relationships and functions - not exclusively dedicated to transports - supported by more and more performing technological and infrastructural devices. This stress the need to deepen study the role of architecture and engineering to build balanced models of railway stations, where both transport efficiency and place meanings are adequately enhanced. This can be done by using different ways of interpretation of the outcomes originated by some of the most important contemporary railway station projects.