The particular context of urban decay that characterizes Bologna Central Railway Station and the division that it causes within the city itself, request for a radical response that absolutely cannot be based on the simple concept of 'occupation' of an unbuilt area through the construction of new buildings. The requested intervention must be intended as structure of the territory, a kind of new morphology that can redeem the current formal and spatial inadequacy of the whole area.
This new complex, set on a three-dimensional grid, outlines a physical quite flexible framework able to meet expectations and cultural and social needs of our time. The structure and its organization of spaces also allow a practical adaptation to the multiple and changing functions of contemporary. Therefore, the new station is no longer seen as a single artefact, though magnificent and extraordinary, but as a combination of places and ways able to meet the needs of people today.
The main purpose of the project is to take the existing "vacuum" context, that’s to say the "open spaces" characterizing the railway tracks, as the primary element of the area and its conformation as the theme from which to start re-designing the entire area of the city adjacent to the station.