Liège-Guillemins railway station

Liège-Guillemins is a station without walls. Santiago Calatrava's design, opened on 18 September 2009 after about a decade of work, throws a single enormous vault of steel, glass and white concrete over the tracks: a great arch some 160 metres long and 32 metres high, ribbed like the skeleton of a whale, with no enclosing façade in the usual sense. From the city side the building reads less as an entrance than as a canopy lifted off the ground, with the wooded hill of Cointe rising directly behind it, and the space underneath is open to the wind, so that the concourse feels more like a covered square than a hall.

The effect is best from inside. The ribs throw long parallel shadows that move across the platforms through the day, and the concourse is threaded by lifts in glass cages that rise and fall through the open structure. Everything is white and grey, so the colour comes from the sky and the trains. For a year and a half from October 2022 the French artist Daniel Buren turned the glass roof into an artwork, filtering daylight through coloured panels onto the platforms, and the station has regularly featured in international lists of the world's most beautiful. For Liège, an old industrial city on the Meuse, the building quickly became its most photographed landmark and something of an emblem.

The site itself is old. The first station here, a wooden structure, opened in 1842 on the grounds of a former convent of the Guillemite friars, which is where the name comes from; the Belgian state chose it, slightly outside the centre, against the city's wishes. It was replaced in 1863 by a stone station in the Parisian manner by A.P.J. Lambeau, enlarged for the World's Fair of 1905, and then by an unloved modern block in 1958. Calatrava's station was built for high-speed trains: its three longest platforms, 450 metres each, were laid out for double sets of international trains, and the new lines towards Brussels and the German border let them run through at up to 300 km/h.

Liège-Guillemins is still very much a working hub. Eurostar and ICE services link it with Brussels, Paris, Aachen, Cologne and Frankfurt, and regional trains run to Maastricht, Luxembourg and across Wallonia and Flanders. It is also one of the few stations in Europe with its own direct connection from a motorway, the E25/E40, which feeds a car park behind the building.

Getting there

The station lies at the foot of the Cointe hill, about 1 km from central Liège, which the city's tram line reaches from the stop on Place des Guillemins. Liège Airport (LGG) is about 9 km away, and Brussels is about 40 minutes away by high-speed train.