Underground culture: Toledo station in Naples, Italy

Abstract

The multi-award-winning Toledo station on Metro line 1 in the Spanish quarter of Naples, Italy, has been described as one of the most impressive and beautiful in the world. Designed by architect Oscar Tusquets Blanca and completed in 2012, the station also uniquely serves as an underground museum, blending iconic architecture, contemporary artworks and 500-year-old archaeological remains. In the 5 years since its opening the station has won many awards and helped Naples win the 2019 World Tunnelling Congress. This paper first describes the excavation of the station’s unusually large platform access tunnel in unstable water-bearing soft rock and loose sand, which required a complex combination of cement–chemical grouting, ground freezing and extensive monitoring. It then explains how archaeology, architecture and art were successfully integrated into the resulting underground spaces.

A closed form shape function describing 3D settlement field around a deep excavation in sand

“…Settlement troughs obtained via numerical parametric analyses allow to look for 3D trends and to effectively separate the contribution of several different factors. In the present study the basic FEM model is inspired by several case histories of stations of the underground network in the urban area of Napoli 11 , 16 , 30 – 34 . It is worth recalling that the case history and the monitored behaviour were already successfully back-analysed by 35 with a similar FEM model and also mentioning the fact that several station boxes have been constructed in recent years with similar geometry and procedure and many others will be in the close future.…”

Underground space utilisation for urban renewal

“…The development of the Toledo underground railway station in Naples, Italy, provided the opportunity to regenerate spaces above ground (e.g. the public squares above the two station entrances), including space above the main entrance that was developed into a busy pedestrian area with street market stalls (Russo et al, 2017). The contribution of underground pedestrian networks to urban economic renewal of declining city centres (see Cui et al, 2013) has been seen in North American cities such as Charlotte, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Portland and Dallas.…”