Kyrill cont’d
In the first part, I talked about a preposterous hunch developing in my head. Could there be intent behind the building’s modernist stealthiness and its Byzantine circulation?
Down there in the pit on track one, at the brushed-steel base of one of the station’s shiny panorama elevators, I felt a longing growing in me to escape the suffocating grip of this building. I gazed up shiney glass shafts towards the clear autumn sky. I wished this station gone; wished it would disappear in a flash of blue-white light and the silent thump of an imploding light bulb. I wanted to find myself at the base of a conic void left by its implosion, surrounded by soft undulating dunes of Brandenburg’s Pleistocene sands.
I made it collapse into my cranium in millions of jittery, mechanical folds to metallic hisses and swooshes. Pheeacch, shwing, kssss. By pure thought, I had dematerialized this soulless mongrel in an act of pure desperation, into a single point of infinite mass. Unfortunately, it had lodged itself between the halves of my brain and made me feel not to so good. A prolonged stare into a halo of fluorescent light had bleached a patch of black on my retina, onto which an inner eye had cast these phantasmorgic projections. Fluerescent bulbs placed in recesses where the large concrete supports met slab, created the impression of daylight filtering down into the station’s lower levels. The architect had intended for this to be real daylight – capitals of daylight.
All around I felt cheated. Kyrill had exposed the station’s heroic tectonics as partial appliqué. My experience trying to get to trains after arsonist attacks had exposed the building’s dysfunctionality as a train station. The inefficiency of the circulation gelled the station’s free flowing spaces into a viscous space-time goo – the nectar of carnivorous plants – that I had to transcend in order to find my train. The building’s appearance and image denoted functionalism. It had lured me into an unsuspecting assumption of being in an efficient train station, when, in fact, I was trapped in an ingenious apparatus designed to maximize my exposure to its hideous merchandise and foods full of fillers.
This time, it had gone to far. I set off again on another day to test my hypothesis. I retraced my attempts to switch trains, timing how long it took to complete the journey from one mainline route to the other. I studied the departure tables. Mainline trains arrived on the lower level’s outermost tracks, at the largest possible distance from the east west mainline routes on the stations uppermost levels. These tracks were all served by a single elevator. The lower level’s central platforms are intended mostly for local trains, yet are served by four panorama elevators each. Travel time from track 7 (North-South route), section C, to track 12 (East-West), section D: 13.5 minutes. Changed elevators thrice.
By the sobre sans-serif of this elevator sign that connotes clarity, you might think that this elevator serves tracks 11-16, or the exit, but it doesn’t. It’s saying “change on UG1 to catch another elevator to the EG where the exit is, or, alternatively, change on UG1 to catch an elevator to OG1 to find a Panorama elevator to track 16″, for example. If you’re French or English-speaking you might wonder what the exclamations OG!, UG!, EG! mean.
I hope you’ve memorized the shorthand as this is what the buttons look like in the elevators:
It does get weirder. On the stations uppermost level on track 15, an elevator sign points upward into the sky to airborne tracks 5 and 6, which is perhaps where the Maglev was intended to depart:
The station conspicuously lacks a focal point. Let’s meet under the ”¦ Hm. Where? There are no large clocks, no arrivals or departure boards, nothing that could help structure space by giving it hierarchy, or that could facilitate navigation in the station’s particular space-time. This absence turns our attention on the tubular panorama elevators, the station’s crown jewels. Carriages rise and descend like vertical pendulums in strange chronological units. Their flashiness connotes efficient circulation to us, leaving you at a loss as to why the heck they seem so slow. It must be your subjective perception of time or your nervousness. Wait a minute? No clocks? (There are clocks, but they seems strangely subdued and few are illuminated.)
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In many ways, train travel played a pivotal role in the rise of unified time. Trains were the first devices spanning various local time zones, each zone with their own approximation of time, initially based on sundials. This first unified time, necessitated by train schedules, was in fact called “railway time”.
“For example, Oxford Time was 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time, Leeds Time 6 minutes behind, Carnforth, 11 minutes behind, and Barrow almost 13 minutes behind. In India and North America these differences could be sixty minutes or more.”
The British film classic Brief Encounter tells the story of two people falling in love after meeting at a train station. The station’s clock calls time on their last meeting in the station’s cafe before he emigrates to South Africa with his family. Image-Google Brief Encounter and chances are you will see an abundance of images displaying the clock of Carnforth railway station.
So it may be said that the fundamental structuring agent of the train station is time, and time’s architectural expression is the clock. More than just a purely functional device, the clock was a perfect way to create a sense of place by denoting time and schedule and train station. And it’s so atmospheric. The clock is to the train station what the tower is to the church, or to the airport. Yet, at Berlin’s central station, you have to look hard to find one. Clocks along the shopping concourses are, we suspect, deliberately not illuminated, in order to not distract from the shopping signage and also to aid in the general sense of disorientation, both in time and in space.
The architecture of the mall and its bastard cousin, the terminal, is the architecture of disorientation and hence no clocks, or clocks without illumination, or disproportionately small clocks. Clocks, or any other orientation devices, would only dispel the sort of manifold junk space in which the consumer gets lost and where she falls back onto a fundamental comfort strategy of practicing something that feels familiar: in light of the alienation and disorientation, of hoarding, of shopping. This is a shopping center and the two mainline routes are its anchor shops. The north-south route’s the Macy’s and the east-west is the Sears.
The glassy physiognomy of modernist architecture – its transparency, its reflective, and refractive qualities – does not serve modernist ideals, e.g. transparent democratic processes, reason, legibility, etc. Instead, it seems to serve its opposites. The modernist materiality scatters commercial signage and lighting and space, throwing it all back at us in myriad, kaleidoscopic reflections that add to the sense of drowning in a flood of commercial semiotics.
The building’s other pièce de résistance is its vaulted glass and steel roof. It is strangely underlit at night, much to the benefit and legibility of the revenue-generating light displays by “Datev” and “Bombardier”. Along the concourses, lighting is carefully controlled to highlight shops and restaurants. Circulation signage is mute, while commercial signage is loud.
nice point on the chaos-wielding nature of glass. the true identity of this so-called “modernist” material is exposed. another fig leaf falls…sheeefp, iiiirkkk, pfloooosh.
Your utter disdain for the Hauptbahnhof is duly noted. If you hate the architecture and layout that’s fine, but you’re projecting your own failings on the building.
For the normal person with a normal sense of direction the building is just fine to navigate. Signage is ample. Additionally, if you don’t use elevators the entire station is navigable in much less than 13.5 minutes (I’m guessing you deliberately walked as slowly as possible).
Most tellingly is the fact that you claim there is “no arrivals and departure board”. There is one and it’s quite evident if you actually stop to think about it. And there are plenty of landmarks to choose from and they’re not just limited to your hated symbols of capitalism.
But look, I get it, you’re angry, a train was cancelled and you have a bunch of architectural psychobabble to express. Rage against the machine, man.
I have to defend Dan on the lack-of-landmarks debate. Which landmarks are you referring to, Robert? I’d genuinely like to know. For years I’ve regularly arrived at the station’s subterranean mainline platforms, either from the north (Hamburg), or from the south (Leipzig). On disembarking the train, there follows a now ritualistic exchange with my colleague: “which way is the right exit?â€. It’s a clear 50:50 bet.
Geographically, the north/south route is defined by a “riverside†exit and the “bus station†exit. But these are unsuggested, almost unlearnable: or is the location of Washingtonplatz already commited to general memory? The supermarket Kaiser’s helps down here (it glows red), as too the diametrically opposite Europcar (it glows green), but only if you’re lucky enough to ascend adjascent to one. A clear view of the north-east corner from the south-west corner is blocked by a forest of hamster-tube elevators and Ritter-Sport ads, and even then, you’re still not on the ground floor, but in UG1, or something.
And, as I understand it, Dan’s record 13.5 minutes was an attempt to re-stage his previous unwilling disorientation, not to define an in-situ standard.
Thanks for the opportunity to expand a little. Phew, I’m glad you got the overemphasis of anger, some of which was intended as caricature. I am interested in the expression of the emotional effects bad, or any, architecture can have on us. My observations are completely subjective and may be also marginal and I have a terrible track record of missing planes and trains.
Some of the subtleties I was trying to address were lost on you. Yes, there are clocks and displays of departures and arrivals, but they are deemphasized in a way that they appear as an afterthought and token gestures to the conventions of train stations, when they could be pivotal to the benefit of the architecture, symbolism included. My point was: give me a clock, a single iconic mother of a clock that connotes train station, give me a a large physical departures board, under which people assemble with anticipation, rather than these little haphazard token gestures that don’t work well in their poor legibility (lack of illumination, size, positioning) and look self-conscious and lost.
The fleeting moments of collectivity these things enable are an important part of urban life. Size and materiality gives them an undeniable materiality. With an increasing reliance on smart handhelds, the general question arises if we should just do away with all physical signage now that its loosing its informative purpose, traffic signs included, disregard their physicality and fold them as media into an increasingly augmented representation of reality. If you accurately represent the norm in not missing anything, that might explain why they are increasingly rare.
But, when Arsenal FC added a large 3m clock, completely useless in terms of function, to their somewhat sterile HOK stadium everyone and their “normal” friends welcomed that as an improvement. These things sometimes instill stronger identity to an otherwise slightly over-functionalist, hence a bit bland structure. Structure and expression together support the event very well. And since Arsenal FC is a capitalist organization, the clock is also capitalist symbol as it is intended to help sell tickets and merchandise. I don’t harbor a hatred for the symbols of capitalism, just these ones.
The 13 min I clocked to get from North-South to East-West mainlines was by elevator only, but it was accurate. The DB rep of part I concurred. I was traveling with a baby stroller and luggage, so couldn’t take the escalators, as many other, elderly people, or mainline rail passengers with luggage. I witness people struggling with the station’s circulation all the time.
I will admit that using the elevators and having a lot of stuff will take you longer. But upon reading this post I timed my travel from platform 6 (tief) to platform 11 – three minutes, forty-nine seconds. And this was with the stairs, not even escalators. This is not that different from other massive train stations across Europe.
Hbf is difficult to navigate only if you do not think about it logically. As a crossing station it is easy figure out which direction you enter the station from. Thus the direction your train enters provides the easiest clue to your navigation. The S-Bahn is the most northern of the East-West lines, which is another navigational aid. Yes it requires you to play slightly more attention than a single level station, but it is hardly impossible. Especially when it comes to regular users of the station, it is not difficult to figure out. For a first timer, OK, but otherwise the excuses just signal an unwillingness to think slightly differently.
Landmarks include the aforementioned squares out front: Washington Platz – South. Europa Platz – North and their associated entrances. Additionally there is the fairly large arrival and departure board, which does in fact exist. (People may not assemble under it in large numbers for a simple reason: they are a symbol of the pre-internet era). You could choose any of the DB information points or the Gepäck Center. You could choose the food court area. Or, heaven forbid, you could actually meet on a platform, all of which are marked very clearly.
Failing that, I would suggest going to Ostbahnhof, Südkreuz, Gesundbrunnen or Spandau. Those should provide a less stressful experience.
Robert, with a shifting age pyramid, I wonder if those that can sprint up stairs with luggage are in the minority among people arriving on mainline routes. The design’s competition winning one-liner is that it’s the built expression of the confluence of the two national train axes, so I was focusing on those.
A majority of north-south mainline routes arrive on the lower level’s marginal tracks served by single elevators, whereas tracks with more local routes have four elevators, where they are perhaps less useful as local commuters would indeed just take the stairs.
I do now start most journeys at Gesundbrunnen and it’s much more pleasant. Not only do you often get to board an empty train that’s easy to get to, there’s fake marble piers as well.