Location Utrecht Central Station

The Utrecht Central Station public transport terminal is now the largest station in the Netherlands. Every day 250 to 300 thousand people pass through. The enormous structure is light and open. The architect, together with the technical engineers, designed a roof construction with a surface of ​​almost 4 football fields that rests almost nowhere on walls, but is supported by relatively narrow steel pillars. Instead of these walls, the station has huge, chained glass panels hanging around the eaves like a shower curtain. Long vertical steel ribs stabilize these. If you look at where the ribs touch the floor, you will see that they are attached to the floor with hinges. That way the glass shower curtain can sway a little. But that movement is so little, the human eyes cannot see it.

The large, spacious construction of the station is always in motion because of the varying airflows and pressure around the building, and because of the wind under the floor of the station where all those trains slow down and accelerate. That is why there are also automatically moving skylights at the top of the roof, which help to regulate the pressure in the hall. Just like a hot air balloon!