Rural HUB
The first high-speed railway in the Czech republic is being built right now. When completed it will connect the two largest cities as well as major cities in Germany and Austria. The track is using a completely new path with few new stations and transfer nodes. The first HUB is designed to be on the outskirts of Prague.
Nowadays the place is in poor condition, heavily damaged by the traffic and uncoordinated large scale developments of the logistic storage yards that surround many of the cities in past twenty years.
The rest of the place is occupied by large pieces of fields, one of the worst legacies of the communist era – when local farmers had to give their fields to a larger industrialized united agricultural cooperatives, the small field was joined and the country changed its face, but also lost its ability to contain the rainwater and is heavily damaged.
The design of the new transfer node Prague-East takes those opportunities for a change. It brings back the long-gone small scale to the countryside. The building itself is placed directly over the tracks, so the land occupation is reduced to the absolute minimum. This placement also allows designing the shortest transfer routes possible.
The station consists of two parts each in contrast to the other. Lower part where the platforms are is solid and made of concrete. This allows the bridge to span over the tracks without any additional columns and supports the check-in hall above.
The hall is the opposite, light wooden structure with plenty of light covering the so-called new village – the cluster of objects with all the amenities. In the middle of the station, there is a green courtyard, a quiet place to spend few minutes while waiting for the train.
