The new building for the main railway station in Innsbruck is part of a campaign being conducted throughout Austria by ÖBB (Austrian Railways) that includes the modernisation of 43 railway stations. Innsbruck's elongated development is one of its most striking urban characteristics and is here clearly interrupted by the railway tracks that cross it at right angles. Although for the most part the trains travel on viaducts above street level, the station represents a real barrier across the main orientation of the valley. The reaction to this sharply defined urban situation that is further complicated by the long, narrow railway station forecourt was a relatively low and very long building with an extremely open and regular lattice-like façade that, like its predecessor, is placed at the east side of the forecourt but shifted six metres further back. This means that it moves out of the existing street line and – employing a classic way of shaping space – can assert itself as a liberated, freestanding building against the rest of the dense high-rise development on Südtiroler Platz. The building measures are grouped in detail around the theme of permeability.
All the important functions, such as travel centre, waiting and retail areas are placed in the central, lowered part of the railway station concourse. On the one hand this allows a direct approach from the underground car park to the concourse and thus to the trains, while on the other it also permits an uninterrupted view of the platforms from the city and vice versa. This transparency functions on several different levels: the railway station is no longer perceived as a separating element but as a link and the individual transition to the state of travel or from this state is made spatially visible. The untangling of the individual processes, from arrival at Südtiroler Platz to departure or the other way around, together with the clarity of the routes, contained by the formal frame of the red-coloured surfaces of the square and building, produces a clearly legible and permeable structure with a high degree of functionality. The unambiguous quality of this concept is broken by the closed nature of the complex in the long direction as well as by the scale-less nature of the facades that is produced by the uninterrupted repetition of perforated façades that have no clear relationship to the internal spatial situation and which, as a sum, create a strongly sequential, almost dematerialised yet nevertheless homogeneous overall impression.

Eva Guttmann