Train Station Canopy

Today I went to the Architecture Ranch to work on my train station canopy. I was able to work on a design last night and felt pretty good about it. I still had to tweak it a bit while at the ranch, but I was glad i was able to cut out my canopy. The c.n.c. machine gave us a little trouble but from what I learned today, my final design will come out a lot easier than this canopy. I always enjoy going out to the ranch, and i hope we will be able to do this more often. Here's a video of the c.n.c. machine at work. I condensed about 30 minutes of film to about three. Its pretty funny listening to all of us talk.

Lecture Series Monday February 8, 2010

YES IS MORE

Andreas Pedersen, from the Copenhagen firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)
BIG is a Copenhagen based group of over 60 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Denmark, Scandinavia and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. They believe that in order to deal with today’s challenges architecture can profitably move into a field being to a large extent unexplored a pragmatic utopian architecture that steer clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. In their projects they test the effects of size and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the triple bottom line of the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy they create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, BIG architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our Planet, to better fit contemporary life forms. In all their actions they try to move the focus from the little details to the BIG picture.

Satolas TGV train station

I've been interested in this train station ever since i learned about it in my modern architectural history class. The train stations designer, Santiago Calatrava, was inspired by a sculpture he did a few years before. The piece was designed to represent the take-off, the momentum generated by shapes, which was meant to remind people what the Satolas train station will be like.


The train station is said to look like a bird spreading its wings. With most of the station concentrated towards the center and with its, what appears to be, wings, it really does look like a bird spreading its wings over the TGV train that passes under it.