It never stops collecting awards, quotations, honorable mentions; and it never stops seducing rivers of passers-by and travellers. The Toledo station of the Naples Metro, designed by the Catalan architect Oscar Tusquets and inaugurated in 2012 on line 1, is one of the most beautiful in the world. The most beautiful in Europe, according to the British newspaper Daily Telegraph and also according to an authoritative ranking of CNN.
And if in 2013 it was awarded the Emirates Leaf International Award as "Public building of the year", today it has received a new important award: in Hagerbach, a town near Zurich, it was awarded the ITA – International Tunnelling Association award, or the Oscar for underground works, in the category "Innovative use of spaces". Beating the cities of Jerusalem and Sydney.
The acknowledged merits concern the innovative technologies used in the excavation phases, but above all the idea behind the architectural project: "The Toledo station is a unique example of a decentralized museum", writes the ITA association, "which offers a dynamic fruition of the artists’ creations, giving citizens the opportunity to travel along an open artistic itinerary". The spectacular scenography conceived in shades of blue, black and ochre – the sea, the earth and the tuff – reveals references to the local landscape and architecture, proceeding through different levels of immersion and playing with light refractivity thanks to the various mosaic interventions: from the large blue surfaces, entrusted to the micro tesserae of the Bisazza company, to the mosaics of William Kentridge, with references to Mediterranean myths, to Vesuvius, to Neapolitan iconography. Bob Wilson’s light boxes with lenticular panels, in which the waves of the sea are relived, are perfectly integrated.
