With this week’s opening of the Elizabeth Tube line in London, authoritative architectural magazine De Zeen has created its own selection of futuristic metro stations. Making the cut, along with line 9 in Chengdu and Doha metro in Qatar, is Budapest’s own line 4, opened in 2014.
Controversial when it opened, and running for all of 14 minutes between each terminus, Budapest’s metro line 4 is also a striking example of contemporary architecture. Created by the city’s own sporaarchitects, two of the ten stations, Fővám tér and Szent Gellért tér, soon picked up awards from international experts such as ArchDaily and architizer.
Now leading architectural
magazine De Zeen has selected its ten favourite metro stations of the 21st
century, and Budapest’s
line 4 stations sit alongside stunning examples from Doha to Seattle.
The London-based
publication with more than a million Facebook followers was particularly
impressed by certain architectural solutions employed by the Spora team: “Daylight
from street level was introduced into the stations through a construction
method in which the spaces were excavated from top-to-bottom, rather than mined,
allowing the architects to introduce daylight from the surface into the deepest
levels”.
