Building the future – sustainably!

30
Reclaiming urban space
With their design for the new Stuttgart main train station, Christoph Ingenhoven and his team
put forward an impressive manifest for sustainable architecture. For this achievement they
received a global Holcim Award Gold.
Stuttgart, a main city in southern
Germany, is tucked into a constricted
basin with steep sides
at the end of a narrow valley.
Railroad tracks run from the open
north through the valley to a terminal
– and then northward again
out of the valley. The tracks sever
the valley and city, and press
Stuttgart against the valley walls.
An ingenious project has been
devised to free the city from
the disruptive railroad tracks –
“Stuttgart 21” proposes completely
new rail lines, underground,
serving the city from two sides.
The old terminal is to be replaced
by a new station for through
traffic.
In 1995 the organizers of
“Stuttgart 21” announced a design
competition for a new station.
The competition was won by the
Düsseldorf architect Christoph
Ingenhoven and his team of archi-
tects and engineers. Christoph
Ingenhoven: “At the outset we
asked ourselves, how can we avoid
having a subway atmosphere in
our station? We didn’t want a dark
cavern, but a space with aesthetic
value.”
Today, after uncounted revisions
and ten years of development, the
design by Ingenhoven Architects
virtually embodies the ideal of
aesthetic sustainability. The tracks
are covered by a minimalist, 420meter-long
concrete shell structure,
which is a mere 30 centimeters
thick at the thinnest point.