Jiaxing Train Station

Large-scale urban infrastructures like train stations often adopt grandiose, exaggerated architectural forms, their complex functions and intense passenger footfall encouraging the building of monumental, iconic structures that impose their presence on the surrounding area. Yet, most of them have failed to become genuinely welcoming places, remaining merely transit points for people on their way to somewhere else. In other words, train stations are not integrated into the city, but are more like outsiders in the urban space.

The Jiaxing Train Station is located in the main city of Zhejiang Province, next to the People’s Park, the South Square complex (currently under construction), and the famous South Lake, which is the core of the district of the same name, the old city center. Despite the train station’s advantageous location, the area around it is a cluttered web of intertwining roads of different scale and function that weave their way amid urban buildings. Only the lake in the vicinity stands apart from this tangled mass. As Jiaxing and South Lake have special historical significance in the history of modern China, the designers at MAD Architects realized from the start that this was not a design project for a brand-new building but rather an urban renewal undertaking involving a large-scale urban and transportation infrastructure that had to connect the past with the future.

With this in mind, architect Ma Yansong studied the whole area through the lens of history, researching documents and drawings and consulting relevant scholars. He especially made a detailed analysis of the old train station building, the platform canopies and footbridges, all erected in 1907 and destroyed by Japanese artillery in 1937. The station building was reconstructed, the shape and the details of the façade as near a replica of the original as possible. Two sections of platform canopies and a footbridge were also built according to the...

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