Still Standing

A Century of Urban Train Station Design

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Architecture

by Christopher Brown

Indiana University Press

Due/Published October 2005, 152 pages, cloth

ISBN 0253346347

This photographic survey of urban train station design covers a one hundred-year period from roughly 1850 to 1950. Original photographs chronicle forty large passenger station buildings still in existence in cities around the world. From the great terminals of London, across the world to Auckland, New Zealand; from Toronto's Union Station to the grand and crumbling Retiro Station in Buenos Aires - vastly different architectural forms are displayed and presented chronologically. One-third of the stations included are among the best America has to offer." Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design outlines the history and development of large urban stations throughout the Western world. The basic physical forms and their evolution are reviewed in the context of the rapid growth of train travel. Chirstopher Brown discusses the arrival and impact of Beaux-Arts architecture in the 1890s and its profound effect on the American terminal.