Orient Station
The Orient Station was commissioned in the short term to serve the needs of World Expo 98 and in the long term to provide a main transport terminal for the east side of Lisboa as a future development of the city is planned for this side of the
It also connects with the former Expo site, now the Parque das Nacoes housing important civic functions, reached via an adjacent light industrial and social housing neighborhood. Calatrava’s design is visually robust and suitably monumental. The architect proposed piercing the existing embankment to establish a link between the two separated areas of the Olivais District and placed the railway platforms on a bridge structure. The entire station is articulated along two perpendicular axes. Unlike some of Calatrava’s building project which is more object-like designs, this one is structured in an urban, axial context.
Trains arrive on the uppermost level, remain to be seen how effectively this will connect two disparate areas, or if the tracks and the grandeur of the architecture only affirms the Expo site’s insularity. On the main tracks sit seemingly countless square pyramidal steel and glass canopies on steel columns. Its proportions, lightness, and articulation of forces represent Gothic, though others might describe them more organically as glaringly white trees. The elevated railway tracks cross above the bus station, with its floating elliptical roofs which rest on the ground on delicate insect-like legs. Structural expressiveness is explored throughout the various levels, though the actual mode of expression changes from two-legged columns, leaning columns, columns brazenly illustrating static forces, and canopies stretching their vertical supports.
The cavernous space beneath the platforms, among concrete rib-like arches, provides a concourse, ticket booths and access to the underground. The coach station and car park are protected by two glass and steel awnings and are intersected by a gallery at 14 m above the ground that ends at the train station. There are two levels of underground parking. The sweeping laminated glass canopies of the station’s bus terminal rise up to cover the elevated gallery that provides covered access to the station. This gallery, with its translucent laminated glass block paving, is treated as an axial ordering element that runs through the entire complex from east to west.
Horizontal order is enhanced by the feeling of spaciousness, transparency and ease of orientation, thanks to the use of laminated glass. The gallery on an intermediary floor links all the uses and is lined with shops, exiting the complex into the larger commercial center under the station square. A giant cantilevered roof juts out like a tongue, acting as ceremonial gate and gesturing towards the Expo site, and enhances the isolated nature of this station within the surrounding idiosyncratic landscape of Lisboa.
