Project Description
From ARCHITECT, November 2013
J. Mayer H. Architects in Georgia, by Ian Volner:
It may seem strange that the train station at Akhalkalaki is as big as it is, since the southern Georgian town has a population of only about 60,000. It may seem stranger still given that the station is not, in fact, in the town at all, but a good 10-minute drive south, surrounded by nothing but high desert. But that’s because the station will be a key transfer spot where trains coming from Istanbul will switch to the Russian-built tracks headed east to Baku, Azerbaijan—those trains operate on a different gauge from European ones, and so passengers will have to alight here and go through a passport check. “It’s an extrusion project,” Mayer says, one whose low cantilevers and emphasis on the horizontal intimate the motion of the passengers being processed from one end to the next. The feeling it imparts, as Mayer suggests, is one of “endlessness.”
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