From Node to Cultural Interface: A Node–Place–Narrative Framework for Contemporary Railway Station Buildings

Railway station buildings increasingly operate as civic landmarks, public interiors, and cultural interfaces as well as mobility infrastructure. This study asks how architectural design integrates transport performance, public-space formation, and cultural meaning. A qualitative multiple-case study examines St Pancras International (London, United Kingdom), Rotterdam Centraal (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Liège-Guillemins Station (Liège, Belgium), and Hong Kong West Kowloon Station (Hong Kong, China). Cases were selected for maximum variation in design logic and documented evidence. Official, heritage, practice, and scholarly sources were triangulated; documented features were deductively coded through a Node–Place–Narrative protocol and then compared across cases. Node captures movement and connectivity, Place captures public use and urban integration, and Narrative captures the meanings attributed to heritage, structure, materiality, landscape, and arrival. The analysis identifies four mechanisms: heritage reactivation, urban legibility, structural symbolism, and landscape-civic integration. Across the cases, transport performance is a necessary enabling condition, whereas cultural distinctiveness emerges when public-space and narrative strategies are spatially integrated. The study extends the node-place model at the building scale, clarifies the boundary between place performance and narrative interpretation, and offers transferable—but context-dependent—principles for culturally responsive transport architecture. Because the evidence is documentary rather than user-based, the framework supports analytical comparison rather than performance scoring.