The city of Strasbourg has been developing a new tramline to encourage people to
leave their cars outside the city in specially designed car parks, and then take a tram
to the more inner parts of the city. Part of this initiative was the development Line,
‘B’, that will run north to south.
Zaha Hadid has been invited as part of the new artist’s interventions, to design
the tram-station and a car park for 800 cars at the northern apex of the line. The
overall concept is based on overlapping fields and lines that knit together to form
a constantly shifting whole. Those ‘fields’ are the patterns of movement engendered
by cars, trams, bicycles and pedestrians. Each has a trajectory and a trace, as well as a static fixture. It is as though the transition between transport types (car to tram, train to tram) is rendered as the material and spatial transitions of the station, the landscaping and the context.
The Station contains a basic program of waiting space, bicycle storage, toilets and
shop. This sense of three dimensional vectors is enhanced in the treatment of
space: the play of lines continues as light lines in the floor, or furniture pieces or striplights in the ceiling. The idea is to create an energetic and attractive space that is clearly defined in terms of function and circulation. The car park is divided into two parts to cater for 800 cars.
The notion of the cars as being ephemeral and constantly changing elements on the
site is manifested as a ‘magnetic field’ of white lines on the black tarmac. These
delineate each parking space and start off aligned north/south at the lowest part of
the site, then gently rotate according to the curvature of the site boundaries. Overall,
the ‘field’ of the light posts maintains a constant datum height that combines with
the gradient of the floor slope. Again, the intention is to reciprocate between static
and dynamic elements at all scales.
By articulating the moments of transition between open landscape space and public
interior space, it is hoped that a new notion of an ‘artificial nature’ is offered, one that
blurs the boundaries between natural and the artificial environments towards the
improving of civic life for Strasbourg.
Design
Zaha Hadid Architects
Local Firm
Albert Grandadam
(Strasbourg, France)
Project Architect
(Zaha Hadid)
Stephane Hof
Project Team
Silvia Forlati, Patrik Schumacher, Markus Dochantschi, David Salazar, Caroline Voet,
Eddie Can, Stanley Lau, David Gerber, Chris Dopheide, Edgar Gonzalez
General Engineering
Getas/Serue (Strasbourg, France)
Structure (Station)
GS Projeckt, Luigi Martino (Germany, Italy)
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