…is stunning. The Barlow train-shed is breathtaking, with the brick cleaned and bright red, the metalwork in a sky blue, and the glass letting in huge amounts of light on a clear winter day. Even better, the conversion of the undercroft has worked well, creating lots of usable space without losing the character of the building – you can look across the train-shed without being bombarded by Starbucks / WH Smiths logos. It should even age pretty well, unlike many modern structures.
The statue (‘The meeting place’) that stands at the end of the train-shed works well, and avoids getting lost in the height of the train-shed by dint of being absolutely enormous. Like, it’s really, really big. Probably a double-decker bus analogy is needed at this point.
It’s wonderful to have such a functional project produce such aesthetic results – especially given all the recent counter examples. Now I have another place besides Tate Modern to visit when I want to be cheered up.
It is rather nice 🙂 I get be within / underneath / overwhelmed by it whenever I go back to my parents’ house…