Gare do Oriente

Gare do Oriente rises in Lisbon, designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava beginning with his 1995 concept and completed for the city's Expo 98 world's fair, opening to the public on May 19, 1998. The station's modernist structure draws visibly on Gothic architectural forms, its platforms covered by a lattice canopy of glass and metal carried on branching reinforced concrete supports that critics have frequently compared to a forest or a cathedral nave. Calatrava raised the station's platform level some 19 meters above the surrounding roadway, a design choice intended to remove the physical barrier a conventional at-grade station would have placed between the city and the Tagus riverfront, and the complex combines train, metro and bus services with an integrated shopping center, the Vasco da Gama Commercial Centre, and a police station within the same structure. At its opening Gare do Oriente was considered the largest intermodal transport station in Portugal, and the project won the Brunel Award for large new construction in October 1998, recognizing its architectural ambition as a piece of infrastructure built to represent Portugal on the international stage during the Expo.