Like a giant cocoon, the new glass shell of Strasbourg Railway Station wraps around the historic station building. In collaboration with the engineering firm RFR, Jean-Marie Duthilleul, the architect for the French company (SNCF), designed a glass hall, which runs above the landmarked building for a length of 120m, while seeming never to make contact with it. An oversized, 25m high “winter garden” serves as the entrance building and as the link between train tracks and trains, trams, buses, taxis as well as the underground.

The new station hall will also make history – as a pioneering project in the building of glass structures. Cold-formed LSG panes were used for the first time on this project, which involved a surface area of nearly 6,000sqm. The primary steel supporting frame is made up of 16 main arches spaced at nine-metre intervals and horizontal secondary supports suspended in between (lattice ‘Fink’ beam elements), spaced at a 4.5m radial interval. Resting on this frame are vertically positioned steel T-profiles with aluminium supports on which the glass panes are fixed with compression moulding in the vertical lines. The horizontal fittings are only wet jointed, giving the glass hall a vertical structure.