connecting

When I was traveling in Europe after the Olympics last year, I was on a train from Brussels to Munich. Early into the trip, we pulled into a train station that I could tell had to be amazing, even just from what I could see from my seat in the train. I actually remember at the time not being sure whether we were in the station or not, which turns out to be somewhat intentional. I grabbed a few pics, but didn't even know what I was seeing at the time. It turns out we were in Liege, at the Liege-Guillemins station which is a hub for high speed rail networks. Though the station has been there since 1838, this new station opened in 2009. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava, whose work I know best from the Milwaukee Art Museum (apparently that trip was pre-blog!). Liege-Guillemins connects two different parts of the city, and is meant to symbolize transparency as an urban dialogue with those parts of the city. I think we actually sat for 10 minutes or so there - I wish I had known it was a planned stop for that long or I would have jumped off and tried to grab more shots and even just experience the space a little before the train moved on. (The bottom exterior shot here is by Andrew Russeth via flickr) There are more great shots in this article on arcspace here: