Orient express.

Santiago Calatrava's dramatic, Gothically-inspired Oriente Station will act as a major transport interchange for both the Expo site and future urban developments.

A huge, multi-level transport interchange, Oriente Station connects the Expo site with Lisbon, Portugal, Europe, and beyond. It is a nexus for long distance and commuter trains, the metro, coaches, cars, and the nearby airport.

Santiago Calatrava has resolved a hugely complicated brief with a design that is both vigorous and self-assured. The undercroft visible from the exterior is designed with overlapping, in-situ concrete arches which feel almost Romanesque, and through which you pass on the way up to the train platforms. On the main tracks sit seemingly countless square pyramidal steel and glass canopies on steel columns. Their proportions, lightness, and articulation of forces seem Gothic, though others might describe them more organically as trees. They are glaringly white. Structural expressiveness is explored throughout the various levels, though the actual mode of expression changes from two-legged columns, leaning columns, columns brazenly illustrating static forces, and canopies stretching their vertical supports.

Unlike some of Calatrava's recent, more object-like designs, this one is structured in an urban, axial context. Trains arrive on the uppermost level, passing over two roads which physically connect the area of Expo Urbe to the existing light industrial and working-class neighbourhood to the west. It remains to be seen how effectively this will connect two disparate areas, or if the tracks and the grandeur of the architecture only affirms the Expo site's insularity. The link between the trains and the coach station passes underneath the platform, which then connects underground to the metro and the car parking lots. Nearby are buildings with complementary programmes such as hotels. Towards the water this cross axis passes through a commercial centre before bisecting the Utopia and Portuguese pavilions.

The coach station and car park are protected by two glass and steel awnings and are intersected by a gallery at level + 14m that ends at the train station. There are two levels of underground parking. A longitudinal gallery on an intermediary floor links all the uses and is lined with shops, exiting the complex into the larger commercial centre under the station square.