Says Tom Durning about this – a proposal for the Westbahnhoff train station in Vienna:
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Not to worry, it’s not exactly serious; it’s a student thesis by Shahira Hammad for, I love this: the “Excessive” Post-Graduate program at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Uh, huh. And it comes with a great example of architalk:
We could say that maybe this is an Epimethean work, as opposed to being Promethean, that is, a work in which thought comes afterwards… so the relationship between cause and effect is circular, not linear…
Mind you, the original station was no great shakes:
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Nor is its replacement:
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As Jeff Zimmerman notes in Grist about Hammad’s proposal:
“From ground level, it looks like a sort of mutant
pregnant insect. From a bird’s-eye view, it looks like that insect deposited its egg sacs in some leaf mold. … This certainly seems like the perfect approach if Vienna is tired of being known as a beautiful, cultured, historic city with a useful and efficient public transit system, and would like instead to be known as a beautiful, cultured, historic city with a useful and efficient public transit system that a giant insect is having babies on top of.”
The original station looks like it had a grand central hall – like Montreal’s Central Station. A modern version of the grand railway stations.
The new one (not the thesis one) looks like it is all subterranean.