New Natures: Ábalos+Sentkiewicz’s Intermodal Station in Logroño

The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close.

Paul Virilio [1]

“Construction,” Walter Benjamin has written, “fulfills the role of the unconscious.” He was writing in the 1930s, describing the development of cast-iron construction in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In those years, cast-iron, coupled with glass, made possible the Parisian arcades and with them a transformative new space of social encounter was created. But, as Benjamin accurately observes, the integration of these new building technologies was not seamless. The arcades, with their hidden mid-block locations, entered by passing behind the limestone street walls of the Parisian boulevards, precisely mapped Benjamin’s divide between a collective conscious and unconscious of the city. In the nineteenth century railroad terminal these two worlds remained even more resolutely separated. Iron and glass were extensively used in the vast long-span sheds that housed the platforms and the rail lines, while the terminal building itself–the face to the city–took the form of an ornate palace, deploying all the apparatus of monumental classical architecture to mark entry into the city.

The representational logic of the beaux-arts architect and the functional logic of the engineer faced off without intermingling.