Grand central - design and construction of rail station in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Anne Vyne

The biggest station in Berlin will be the point at which the great routes from north to south and east to west cross. An appropriately dramatic gesture was needed to celebrate the focus of the European rail system.

The Lehrter Bahnhof is set to become Berlin's main railway station. Before the War, there was a station on the site, but it was destroyed, and now there is only a rather dingy S-Bahn (district railway) halt there, high up on the raised tracks. But work is already under way on the new complex, which will be the junction of two of the main ICE (high-speed train) lines of the Continent: north-south from Scandinavia to Sicily and eastwest from London to Moscow and on to Asia.

There will also be a new north-south underground (U-Bahn) track, and the east-west S-Bahn will be thoroughly renovated. The station is for the whole capital, but most of the other stations (for instance the Zoo Bahnhof) will remain in use, and the Lehrter will serve particularly the government quarter with its thousands of commuting civil servants and Moabit, the mixed area to the north. It is intended to act as catalyst for a part of the city that has been derelict for many years. The dereliction was incidentally started by Speer: the station was to be the northern termination of the grandiose Nazi north-south axis and demolition for it went on until 1942, assisted by British bombs.

Station organization is simple and bold: the east-west ICE track will be at the same level as the S-Bahn, 10 metres above the streets, The north-south line will be down with the U-Bahn some 15 metres below ground level in two of the many tunnels being driven through the sandy soil under the centre of the city (there has been no stinting on infrastructure in making Berlin the capital once more). Cars, buses, taxis and pedestrians will be catered for at street level. Over the upper level platforms will be a delicate glass roof 430m long. Roof and platforms will penetrate two parallel slabs of building, 50m wide and 170m long, to be set exactly on the line of the underground ICE track, and hence slightly skewed to the curved axis of the long train shed. Between the slabs (which will contain shops, service facilities and a hotel) will be the many levelled station hall, again covered with a glass roof. Voids cut through all levels of the hall will bring daylight right down to the lowest platforms for the north-south ICE trains and the U-Bahn.

Both slabs and glass roofs will have expressed steel structures, the slabs with gridded external frames: direct, Rationalist and Prussian (though the architects' main office is in Hamburg). The roofs will be ingenious lightweight shells built up on slightly rhomboidal 1.2m x 1.2m grids, each unit braced by diagonal cables, with the whole carried by trussed supports. It promises to be rather like a double-sided version of Grimshaw's train shed at Waterloo (AR September 1993). It will be interesting to see how the two kinds of structure work together, and whether, for all the austerity of the slabs, the station really will be as welcoming as the architects hope. They talk of the Lehrter as a gateway to the city, and with the right handling, the station hall could be a most impressive, dynamic and exciting place. Whatever else, the long glass roof over the upper platforms should provide the Chancellor with a magnificent view when he looks north from his offices: a double symbol of rebirth: of the city and of the European railway system.