High-Speed Railway Station in Florence – Final Project

The new planivolumetric configuration adopted for the new station is in “scale” with the urban and landscape dimension. It envisages a large, unitary architectural space capable of blending the access to the underground High-Speed Station, the glazed volumes for ventilating and illuminating the underground spaces, the urban park with additional functions, and the restored buildings for a new documentation centre to be integrated and provide services for the Fortezza da Basso exhibition centre: a large glass covering – an artificial sky – supported by slender metal pillars, creating a sort of new urban gallery which realises and represents, in signic terms, the synthesis as an urban- architectural unitary system and without interruptions of the area between the Station of S. M. Novella and the High-Speed Railway Station in the ex-Macelli. The large slab covers both the new complex underground spatial articulations, stratified and inter-connected on several levels, organised on the value of the Station Service Plaza as a hub for urban exchange, an ideal analogical reference to the gallery of S. Maria Novella, and the large preexisting volume of the warehouse destined to become the documentation centre. The latter, together with the adjacent building on the corner, both by the Rationalist architect Angiolo Mazzoni and currently under the Superintendency, are reutilised through sophisticated interventions which range from their liberation from the heavy additions suffered over the years, to the restoration of their original parts and the reinstatement of the original solution, especially in the case of the building on the corner.

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