Linking thousands of people by high-speed train has long been a phenomenon in Europe,” says Santiago Calatrava. As the mastermind of several railway hubs throughout the continent, including showstoppers in France, Belgium, and Portugal, the Spanish-born architect should know. But with his latest project, the newly completed Mons train station, located near Belgium’s southwestern border with France, Calatrava also took aim to bridge neighborhoods within the city. “The station has no front or back, rather acting as a link between two areas that were never before connected,” Calatrava says of the project. “Both sides are equal. One side is no more important than the other.”
Identical canopies of steel and glass spread at either end of Gare de Mons, connecting the leafy residential district to its north and the historic city center to its south. Inside the roughly 65,000-square-foot terminal, nearly 20 years in the making, Calatrava harnessed the power of natural light, devising the Galerie de la Reine, a skylit sweep filled with shops and restaurants, for city dwellers and commuters alike. (He was inspired by the glazed arcades of Brussels’s Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert.) According to Calatrava, transportation projects like this have the ability to generate activity within a city. “Look at the skyline of New York and you will see much of it grows around its train stations.” To welcome that activity, the architect designed generous plazas outside of the station for pedestrians to experience as they come and go. Well-lit parking garages, heated walkways and accessible entries, noise barriers, and 28-foot-wide platforms are just some of the elements that go a long way, he says, in ensuring travelers feel “the quality of the space.”
Millions of people each year are expected to use the station, which connects Mons to Paris, Brussels, and beyond. For Calatrava, however, it’s the physical station, just as much as its tracks, that can be a conduit for connectivity. “It’s something that looks toward the future.”
The new Mons train station conceptualized by Santiago Calatrava is featured in AD’s May issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.