The new Metropolitan Station in Lublin, Poland, is the key element of the Integrated Transportation Center’s multi-phase, complex project because it is built in the region’s capital city. It will be a transit hub combining urban, regional, and national transportation, located in the city centre, along with the necessary infrastructure. In addition, it will be one of Poland’s most environmentally friendly facilities. Tremend Studio, a Polish architecture practice, designed this modern, sustainable Metropolitan Station.
The project intends to revitalise the areas of the railway station, develop a new urban tissue, and overcome the dilemma of how to revitalise the regions of the station itself so that they become hospitable to travelers and residents.
Revitalization and Urban Integration
The design team’s vision for the Metropolitan Station is a contemporary pavilion, distinct from the Central Railway Station’s historical form. The station’s most striking feature is its canopy, supported by mushroom-shaped pillars of latticed steel. These unique pillars, part of the station’s steel construction and platform canopies, also serve as decorative elements, adding to the building’s architectural expression. Their linear, organic lines evoke a sense of vines, a symbol of Lublin, and contribute to the building’s overall lightness.
The design predominantly made use of materials like stainless steel and glass. The station and its infrastructure act as a significant transportation hub and feature canopied platforms with terminals for urban and regional road transportation, an underground parking area for vehicles, taxi bays, and cycle stands and racks. In addition, the idea envisions a public roof garden. The city square and surrounding green spaces have been modernised, and a new road system to improve traffic flow has been constructed.
The building also contains energy-efficient LED lighting, significantly reducing electricity consumption. Motion detection will limit the amount of energy used, considering the intensity of outside lighting and tying the system’s functioning to the time of day, year, and other environmental parameters or signals from other systems in the structure. Depending on the type of institution, such active systems may reduce a lighting installation’s energy use by half.
Installing a greywater system allowed captured rainfall to be used for irrigation, landscaping, and toilet flushing. Solutions such as ventilation systems with up to 80% heat recovery and a naturally ventilated underground car park in the shape of an open atrium that promotes air circulation are just a few of the project’s environmental features. In the passenger sections, cascade heat pumps are used to provide radiant heating and cooling via 42 boreholes. The architects at Tremend Studio prioritise minimising the carbon imprint, which is why the Metropolitan Station in Lublin was built to be one of the most environmentally friendly structures in Poland. The project meets the highest levels of sustainability. It also includes a number of environmentally friendly options, such as “box in box” technology with glass facade specifications that reduce energy usage.
Project Info
Architects: Tremend Architecture Studio
Year: 2023
Photographs: Rafal Chojnacki, Alek Malachowski, Bartek Barczyk
City: Lublin
Country: Poland
