June 12, 2009
Architect: Santiago Calatrava
Date: 1998
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
We arrived in the Estacao de Oriente from Merida and this was the first visit to the building. The building definitely has an interesting look but once you start to use the building you realize that it does not work.
Estacao de Oriente
We arrived in the bus terminal.
Estacao de Oriente Bus Terminal
We walked down the elevated walkway over the bus terminal. I will get back to the problems with this later.
Estacao de Oriente Bus Walkway
The walkway connects to the underside of the train platform. This in one of the more interesting parts of the building because of how the weight of the platform is brought down to to the underground supports.
Underside of Estacao de Oriente Train Platform
That was the end of our first visit to the Estacao de Oriente. The next time we headed to this station to buy some bus tickets. This is where the building really shined as being horrible. The location of the ticket counters are along the walkway above the buses and are not organized in a manner that allows for ease of finding the window you want. They are in pods of two that are spaced along the platform. The shading makes standing up there like standing in a greenhouse. The worst part is that below-ground there was a similar walkway space.
Walkway under Estacao de Oriente Bus Station
This walkway could have had the same booths in it and was around 20-30 degrees cooler than the walkway above. Lots of other things in this building were similar and it was just why did Calatrava do that? I was extremely disappointed because this was the first time I had been in a Calatrava building and I had been expecting more and it turned out to be pretty bad.
Tags: bus, Lisbon, Santiago Calatrava