Call for Papers: Railway Stations and Infrastructure. Facility and Symbol in the City and the Territory, 19th-21st Century (Session 6.13 at AISU, Palermo, 10-13 Sep 25)
Railway Stations and Infrastructure. Facility and Symbol in the City and the Territory, 19th-21st Century
Coordinators: Federico Ferrari (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Aarchitecture Paris-Malaquais / Université Paris Sciences et Lettres); Alessandro Benetti (Alessandro Benetti, Politecnico di Torino); Emma Filipponi ( Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Val de Seine)
Description:From the 19th century to the present day, railway stations have always represented an interface between flows of different natures and scales: material and immaterial, of people, goods, energy and imaginary, at the local, regional and continental scale.
A finite architectural object, each station is at the same time necessarily part of a larger system. It exists at the crossroads between specific historical/local features, and shared models circulating at different scales in space and in time. Beyond the material boundaries of the building, within the city the station functions as a pivot and a driving force for large-scale urban projects and compositions. Finally, outside the city, the station is a highly visible, precisely located sign of a linear and reticular infrastructure on a territorial scale, as testified by the recent high-speed railway's extra-urban hubs.
The station and its architecture, as well as the infrastructural objects constituting its tangible offshoots on an urban and territorial scale, therefore embody messages and rhetoric that are often political/cultural in nature, depending on the geographical context and the historical moment. This session aims to reflect on the railway station and railway infrastructure from various perspectives, and to explore in particular its immaterial value as a rhetorical device, interface and point of coagulation between different imaginaries, from local to global: regionalist or classical-eclectic styles, architectural vocabularies with monumental or modernist accents (as in the case, one among many, of Italian stations from the Fascist era), high-tech languages (such as several landmark high-speed stations from the past few decades).
Proposals may focus on case studies, comparisons between case studies or overarching topics, regarding Italy or Europe, and cover a time span from the railway's first rise in the mid-19th century, to the golden age between the two World Wars, to the recent high-speed era. Proposals coming from different disciplinary sectors will be accepted.
Proposals may fall under one or more of the following three areas of reflection, to be considered by no means limiting or exhaustive:
1: stations and architectural languages, between facility and symbol.
2: the station as a multiscalar element and pivot of urban compositions.
3: the infrastructure and its relationship with the landscape and/or the extra-urban station as a landmark.
