Jiaxing is a historic metropolis 60 miles southwest of Shanghai. There, MAD Architects—a world workplace with areas in Beijing, Rome, Jiaxing, and Los Angeles based by Ma Yansong—has accomplished a brand new prepare station, marking the studio’s first transportation infrastructure reconstruction and growth mission.
MAD Architects was tasked with changing a dysfunctional prepare station that operated in Jiaxing between 1995 and 2019. The defunct station was solely 43,000-square-feet, too small for a metropolis of 1.4 million folks, and counting. The brand new prepare station was designed to facilitate progress within the quickly increasing metropolis, and its design is emblematic of the avant-garde, experimental studio’s repertoire.
“We should always rethink and redefine the spatial patterns of such transportation infrastructure buildings in China,” mentioned Ma Yansong after finishing the station. “We are able to break free from the frequent pursuit of grandiose monumental buildings and make them city public areas with transport capabilities, pure ecology and cultural life, the place residents are completely satisfied to go, keep, meet, and revel in.”
The renovated railway station now has six traces and three platforms (the earlier iteration from 1995 had 5 traces and three platforms) with two arrival and departure traces on every of the upstream and downstream traces. This new capability will assist the station accommodate an anticipated 5 million folks a 12 months, with an hourly capability of two,500 folks at peak hours.
To innovate and riff on up to date prepare stations getting in-built China immediately, MAD Architects appeared to the previous. Designers opted to create a full-scale recreation of the unique 1907 prepare station that stood onsite earlier than its second counterpart from 1995. The reconstructed station was constructed utilizing 210,000 purple and inexperienced bricks made from mud from a close-by lake, and different regionally sourced supplies.
The interiors on the fully-reconstructed 1907 station keep a dialogue keep true to the unique design. The reconstructed station’s ready corridor, ceiling, and tunnel partitions are clad with anodized aluminum honeycomb panels. This, MAD mentioned, will take up extra noise. Above the reconstructed hub, MAD specified a “floating” metallic roof lofted above the expanded website geared up with photo voltaic panels that energy the station, the architects mentioned.
The brand new station’s main transport and industrial capabilities—i.e. its entry and exit platforms, and ready halls—had been tucked underground. This breaks with conventional station design pondering, MAD mentioned, and offers start to a brand new typology, or what the architects name a “prepare station within the forest” design. By inserting these vital capabilities beneath grade, MAD was in a position to plant over 1,500 bushes at road degree, together with beech, camphor, osmanthus, maple, sebifera, sequoia, and cherry blossoms.
“The religious axis, which incorporates the recreated 1907 constructing, is marked with beech bushes that, when totally shaped, will create a cover throughout the whole north sq. in entrance of the station,” MAD mentioned.
To the south, a sq. incorporates seven buildings with completely different tradition and industrial makes use of, in addition to a central garden. Going ahead, the garden will grow to be a venue for outside occasions like concert events and artwork festivals.
