Riegler Riewe

Description

In reaction to the sharply defined urban situation – further complicated by the long, narrow railway station forecourt – a relatively low and very long building with an extremely open and regular lattice-like façade was – like its predecessor – placed at the east side of the forecourt, thus moving out of the existing street line and – employing a classic way of shaping space – asserting itself as a liberated, freestanding building against the rest of the dense high-rise development on Südtiroler Platz. All the important functions, such as travel centre, waiting and retail areas are placed in the central, lowered part of the railway station concourse. This allows a direct approach from the underground car park to the concourse and thus to the trains, while it also permits an uninterrupted view of the platforms from the city and vice versa. This transparency functions on several different levels: the railway station is no longer perceived as a separating element but as a link and the individual transition to the state of travel or from this state is made spatially visible. The untangling of the individual processes, from arrival at Südtiroler Platz to departure or the other way around, together with the clarity of the routes, contained by the formal frame of the red-coloured surfaces of the square and building, produces a clearly legible and permeable structure with a high degree of functionality. The unambiguous quality of this concept is broken by the closed nature of the complex in the long direction as well as by the scale-less nature of the facades that is produced by the uninterrupted repetition of perforated façades that have no clear relationship to the internal spatial situation and which, as a sum, create a strongly sequential, almost dematerialised yet nevertheless homogeneous overall impression.