Compared to 20th-century infrastructure, the new high-speed rail network will allow people to travel far greater distances in a greatly reduced amount of time. This phenomenon can be described as an expansion of the realm of daily life, or rather, a shrinkage of the perceived scale of the entire Midwest region. In effect, through the new rail networks urban nodes will be pulled closer together, and industries, commerce, and most importantly, people will be connected more intimately than ever before. The Beacon, a proposal for a renovation of Chicago’s Union Station will be at the center of this new age, and our design proposal symbolically represents this new paradigm.

The main component of the proposal will be a highly illuminated mixed-use volume called The Beacon, which houses a hotel, railway offices, and a conference center. The Beacon will be positioned above the existing Grand Hall, which will provide a venue for the new Midwest regional market. However, the Beacon will not take on the form of a typical vertical structural addition. The Beacon’s simple, spiritual form, resonating as a familiar yet iconic component of the existing Chicago skyline, will be raised up far above the Grand Hall with its complex structural, service, and circulatory system exposed beneath. This complex infrastructural web is a reminder of the extensive transportation network that exists directly beneath the surface of the streets of the city. The Beacon will be noticed from miles away, clearly declaring the role of Union Station as the symbolic heart of the new Midwest high speed transportation network, which will help revitalize Chicago and the neighboring regions through enhanced social and commercial exchange.

TEAM MEMBERS: Jeeyong An, AIA, Sang Hwa Lee, LEED AP, Hosung Chun, LEED AP

Life at the speed of rail redefines boundaries.

Distant cities are closer together, creating a new hybrid geography.

Employing a fold-in page technique popularized by Mad Magazine, the illustrative poster expresses the altered perception of distance and geography made possible by high speed rail. Chicago and Cleveland, two cities currently separated by six hours of highway driving, will be within two hours of each other for high speed rail passengers. This urban conjunction experience, ChilLand, opens possibilities for increased economic, social and cultural ties between the two cities. Football fans can tailgate (or “railgate”) on the train before a game at a rival’s stadium and return home safely, without the need to drive. As cities in the United States continue to face unprecedented challenges and uncertainty, high speed rail redefines the context for a more cooperative and shared future.

PROJECT TEAM: David Jurca, Gauri Torgalkar, Sagree Sharma, Terry Schwarz, Steve Rugare

The proposed high-speed rail line linking Tampa and Orlando Florida was poised to become the first great experiment of American high-speed rail. Although abandoned in early 2011, the generic urban conditions along the rail line proved to be an excellent ground for testing how architecture operates within the city at the amplified speed of the high speed rail, through a new regional organization coupled with three architectural proposals.

The territory between Tampa and Orlando is an extreme example of what American city is quickly becoming today: two cities merging into a single linear city, defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and surrounding suburban growth. The introduction of the high speed rail line into the freeway city will demand a reconfiguring of architecture’s intersections between speed and city, where the city’s dependence on the freeway will be challenged not only socially, but spatially as well. As a new architectural typology within the high-speed rail territory, a linear and expanded civic center breaks apart the centralized superblocks of the 20th century and distributes them along the line of the high-speed rail.

Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new linear civic center will explore how monumental civic spaces will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city, integrated with and running adjacent to the infrastructure of the high speed rail through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections: the mega-forms of Objects, Frame, and Field. This expansion, distribution, sequencing, and curation of multiple smaller civic forums will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, occupied as active platforms and spaces for event, as well as when viewed from the train window at amplified speeds.

Switch Space envisions new forms of rail infrastructure that consider the Midwest’s disparate landscapes and economic geographies.

Most of the 2050 high-speed rail proposals focus on connecting dense urban corridors developed along regions bound by oceans, mountains or rivers. These long, skinny corridors are effective landscapes for density and development, ideal for high speed rail travel. The Midwest faces unique conditions. It is neither encumbered by these geomorphologies, nor do they benefit from their control. Rather than an infrastructure that responds to the corridor, the Midwest requires transit connections that work as a wide net, rather than a series of point-to-point connections.

Although it is vast and flat, the Midwest is deceptively urban. While 85 percent of Ohio’s landscape is census defined as “rural,” over 80 percent of its population reside within 10 miles of an urban core. The rural / urban connections extend to its economy as well. Ohio exports many agricultural products, but its economy is shifting to export wind energy and polymers, biotechnology, health care and education.

The new infrastructure of Switch Space addresses these changing landscapes, bridging rural spaces with urban centers, connecting agricultural economies with health care and education, and considering how high-speed rail and its supporting infrastructures can work together to connect and preserve the Midwestern landscape.

The Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta located east of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, has long been an important resource providing agricultural and recreational uses, wildlife habitat, infrastructure pathways, and water supply services throughout the state. This delta region is currently in crisis, with weakening levee structures and a deteriorating ecosystem due to rapidly increasing pollution levels.

Our proposal for a high-speed rail network in the region will rethink how architecture can become better integrated with large-scale infrastructure to improve the environment and people’s lives.

Our design produces an active permeable boundary whose function is three-fold: to transport pedestrian and cargo rail traffic between the San Francisco and Sacramento megaregion; support phyto-remediation and constructed wetlands where the bridge meets the water; and provide facilities for environmental research, pollutant testing and education.

The trains are elevated by a structural system that provides flexible spaces for program in the form of hanging research labs and infill educational facilities. These public facilities are accessible from the transportation terminals. In order to meet the water as lightly as possible, the supporting trusses are designed using steel instead of bulkier concrete columns.

Constructed wetlands grown at the base of this new high-speed rail bridge respond to varying pollution levels, becoming a living barometer of water health. The reeds serve to filter the water, help stabilize the land, and encourage native species to return. Our project is designed to grow over time while responding to, and engaging with, the dynamic Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta waterscape.

To build President Barack Obama’s vision of high-speed rail corridors around the country, we will need the support of many Americans. One way to gain that support is to inform and inspire. This set of six profiles describes real situations embodied by synthesized people to help readers understand that high-speed rail is about having options in travel. Options that help people travel faster, safer, more conveniently, with less pollution, and great amenities. These profiles were created to connect with viewers, to help them become aware of values they may hold that will lead them to support and demand high-speed rail.

The profiles’ design is modular: Each profile has several elements that can be mixed and matched and organized into different media or layouts, to serve different advertising, marketing, or sharing purposes. These elements are the photo, the railroad crossing with a mini biography, a full biography, the answer to “How would this person’s life change with high-speed rail?”, and a quote that attempts to summarize that answer. We envision these elements being remixed and arranged into postcard-sized flyers, billboards, advertisements on buses, brochures or as the basis for short documentaries.

LA to San Francisco in 160 minutes—GREAT! But ironically, as the size of cities and the speed in which we are able to travel great distances increases, we are increasingly more sedentary. In fact, we are sitting down more than ever before—9.3 hours per day, which is more time than we spend sleeping. And the amount of time we spend sitting today increases the risks of death up to 40 percent. Instead of sitting for 160 minutes, why not create a high-speed rail that allows us to choreograph a set of experiences that make us productive, healthy and social individuals. Exercise, dance, shop, tan, eat, do laundry, play, take art classes and even sleep (ok, sometimes we need a break too!).

As we push into the 21th century, let us not fall into the traps and preconceptions of the 20th century that generated technology that supplanted our active minds and bodies. Today, obesity and diabetes are among the nation’s most pressing health issues, and they are directly related to our sedentary lifestyles. We also have no time to make selective choices about food, or even have time to do laundry because average Americans are chained to a computer working for 46 hours per week and spend more than 100 hours a year behind the wheel of a car sitting in traffic. We propose that advanced transportation infrastructure and a spirited engagement of our senses can be one. As we travel up to speeds of 220 mph, we do not need to be in park. 160 minutes—what will you do?

PROJECT TEAM: Virginia San Fratello, Ronald Rael, Emily Licht, Kent Wilson

VPL is the product of unexpected economies and partnerships resulting from hybridizing rail and air travel in a triangle of the Southwest that contains eight of America’s ten fastest growing cities and three of the nation’s most congested airports. Like other beloved American acronyms, the airport code VPL will be become the name for a vast development zone in the Mojave desert equidistant from Las Vegas McCarren (LAS), Phoenix International (PHX) and Los Angeles International (LAX). What makes VPL different from other rail schemes is that its funding will come from an unlikely ally: the air travel industry. Airlines facing a shortage of airspace and no opportunity for runway expansion will “keep their enemies closer” by using high speed rail to link airports via a central hub in the desert. In addition to freeing up runway space for more lucrative long haul flights, VPL is a massive property development scheme that recalls the invention of Las Vegas. At the center of the new rail lines will be an ultra-dense, flat,sun-lit station-city that is within commuting distance of Vegas, Phoenix and LA. This “smart sprawl” will mix the profit formulas of the airport city, casino, convention center and suburb, and thanks to its density and abundant supply of sun for lighting and electricity, it will also be paradoxically sustainable.

HOU(S)TATION confronts the negative impact of 20th-century suburbia issues driven by automobile, such as heavy highway interchanges, traffic, parking spaces and sharply increasing CO2 emission.

This project looks for a new housing or town type driven by high-speed rail as an alternative which addresses these issues as well as combines benefits from city life and suburbia. HOU(S)TATION is located in the middle of two major cities within one-hour distance by high-speed rail. Thus residences have opportunities to commute and experience both cities.

The length of high-speed rail and the number of its cars define one side of parallelogrammic HOU(S)TATION. Each car works as an automobile, and each platform becomes a lobby. This continuous platform leads passengers to their houses and public programs in center, and all of those are in walkable distance. In addition each car number designates the name of street and address system. Which car passengers should take depends on which street they live.

HOU(S)TATION enclosed by railway creates efficient land-use and energy consumption with compact infrastructures. It not only reduces air pollution and damage on environment, but also maximizes nature around it.

As a human/machine/animal hybrid, the “iron horse” locomotive captured the imagination of Americans during the middle of the 19th century by subjugating the pastoral landscape to the ingenuity of human invention. In addition to “conquering space and time,” the train was a new viewing mechanism that transformed the environment into a moving picture show through isolation, speed and framing. Today we have come full circle. Threading high-speed rail through the fabric of the American Midwest stands to recover the demand for mixing humans, commerce, technology and the rural landscape in new spectacular combinations. Which poses the question: what are the techno-natural hybrids that will capture the imagination of today’s rail riders?

Animal Farmatures are dual natured farm implements that simultaneously cultivate farmland and entertain high-speed rail customers. The animatronic appliances explore the world’s largest free-range zoological garden while digitally connected riders rush along rails through the heartland of America. Attentive audiences watch in captivity while the Farmatures complete traditional farm tasks in combination with grand rural-techno spectacles. The robotic performers extend the tradition of machines using and mimicking animals for moving, operating, branding and processing food crops while creating a majestic (re)constructed terrain of roaming beasts. They return to their docking stable for the night after a long day of foraging, weary from their performance. Stationed alongside the organic based cows, sheep and horses, the proud ringmaster farmers tend their flock and prepare them for the next crop.

TEAM MEMBERS: Stewart Hicks, Allison Newmeyer with Hugh Swiatek

Press Release. Newark, New Jersey. October 12, 2025.

New Jersey Transit Authority officials today released plans to construct the first of several Tower Stations along the newly completed Atlantic Speed Rail Conduit, which runs parallel to the Northeast Corridor in the garden state. The new stations will allow the 380km/h train to collect and disperse passengers, without stopping, or even slowing down, along its path from Washington to Boston. New Jerseyans have long critiqued the speed rail system making use of state land between destination cities without allowing local access to commuters. The ASRC has justifiably argued that if the train were to stop frequently at smaller towns between destination points, it would add time to the overall commute and ultimately undermine the goals of the speed rail project. The deployment of Tower Stations along the route will finally resolve this conflict, and keep the travel time between Washington and Boston at 2hr and 10min. Governor Lewis is quoted as saying “New Jersey will lead the world into the future of high speed transit.”

How does it work? As the train approaches the tower it ejects the specially designed pods that, with the help of gravity, will quickly decelerate as it travels to the tower’s summit. At the peak, the departure pod transfers to a parallel track leading to a town center where passengers will disembark. In reverse action, arrival pods reach a calibrated velocity from tower descension and are absorbed into the speeding train. The tower’s electronic control and monitoring center is housed at the apex, as well as a tourist destination that offsets operating costs while providing unprecedented panoramic views. Construction is scheduled to be completed by early 2027.

PROJECT TEAM: Lauren Crahan, Peter Dorsey, John Hartmann

High speed trains currently travel at speeds nearing 350mph, a ground velocity unimaginable to most Americans. At this speed the cross-country journey, whose image has been romanticized in literature and film for nearly a century, would be transformed from an expedition comprising days, weeks or months, to one traversed between sunrise and sunset. The accompanying transformation of riders’ perception and comprehension of the territory must be reconsidered as the locus of aesthetic study and production that it will inevitably become.

The automobile journey, associated most strongly with the novel, is experienced in the first-person. The oncoming landscape is digested in continuous motion with a single-point perspective reinforced by the lines on the road ahead. The journey by air is closer to the slow panning of a map across the screen in a television documentary. It affords an overview of the territory, while sacrificing both space and motion.

The experience of high speed rail would be entirely different from these familiar precedents. It would both compress and expand the vast and varied landscapes of the continent into a peripatetic and panoramic journey. The foreground would dissolve while landmarks in the distance shift slowly past each other in a parallactic dance. The territory would be consumed peripherally in fits and starts, and recomposed in the traveler’s mind as a montage – a blur between image and motion more closely tied to our multimedia experience of the world today than either of its forebears.

This film is a representation of what that experience would be. It is composed of still images captured from either side at every mile from New York to San Francisco and reassembled sequentially into an 18fps sequence, collectively comprising a filmic cross-section of the continent.

The promise of high-speed rail is the promise of the continuous urban landscape. Hyper-connected. Hyper-compact. Hyper-efficient. What then is the potential of perceptually — if not physically — compressing a vast collection of cities into a single, relentless, uninterrupted conurbation?

The Great Lakes Mega-Region is home to nearly 60 million residents and the most active international trade boundary in the world. The mega-region includes 205,000 square miles of terrestrial territory and 95,000 square miles of fresh water. It is the area of the North American continent best positioned to absorb a significant portion of the projected 110 million new residents of the United States and Canada over the next 40 years. In such a scenario, this massive influx of population would create what will in effect be a thickened, continuous urban landscape punctuated by a constellation of vibrant, legible, connected city cores. High-speed rail will be one among many innovations in urban infrastructure necessary to accommodate such a considerable expansion of urbanization both within the Great Lakes and throughout the U.S.

PROJECT TEAM: Christopher Marcinkoski, Andrew Moddrell

There exists a growing pressure on the Chicago airports of O’Hare and Midway to expand into neighboring communities destroying local houses and businesses. In order to alleviate this pressure there is a need for an interconnecting route that manages to condense the extraneous functions of the airport in an exterior infrastructural connection. By establishing a building that can compress the growing programmatic stresses of the Chicago airports, an infrastructural node can be established that connects the Airports by modifying and expanding the preexisting Chicago CTA blue and orange lines into an optimized high speed rail system. By extending the orange line from midway to Halsted and building an above ground blue line rail from the UIC- Halsted stop comes an unbroken high-speed rail in-between both airports which provides 7 minute airport transfers. By establishing the only stop at the famous circle interchange of I-90 and 290 a plinth can be built atop the preexisting highway infrastructure that creates an interconnected system of roads and rail that allow the inhabitant to reach any location of the city at ease. “Node” integrates the idea of the “kiss and drop” that exists within airports which allows car riders to drive into the building from the existing highways and drop off or pick up their love ones from a mobious line that connects with the rail station as well as convenience or overnight parking meaning you will never have to drive your friend to the airport at 5am ever again.

The environment where one receives medical care is not limited to the hospital room– transportation spaces also contribute to a patient’s health. The Health Corridor links medical care with transportation, providing space for diagnosis, treatment, recovery and health management both inside and outside the hospital walls.

Ohio’s vast agricultural landscape provides space for natural and transportation systems to coexist. By intertwining the rail system with the water system, a new region of health, wellness and education is developed.

Earlier high-speed rail schemes sited Ohio’s high-speed rail hub within Columbus’s fledgling downtown. By moving the center of rail activity from downtown to the University district, the rail project focuses on Ohio’s burgeoning service economy. The focus shifts to hospitals and education, one of Ohio’s main exports. Through the high-speed rail corridor, Ohio State University’s main campus and medical centers are linked to health and education centers in Cleveland and Cincinnati. Health care is extended throughout the corridor, linking expertise and medical care through the high speed rail.

The project proposes a realignment of transportation systems, looking at Columbus’s health, medical and education district, focusing on providing links between emerging bio tech centers, Ohio State’s Main Campus, the James Cancer Center and OSU Medical Centers, bringing health and wellness to the newly exposed Olentangy River District. Water health and transit health are co-developed to expand the environment of patient wellness.

PROJECT TEAM: Karen Lewis, Emma Cuciurean-Zapan, Christine Yankel

Dazzle camouflage was a painting scheme used on World War I warships. The intent was to break down the visual scale of the ship and make it harder to identify. Our Dazzle Trains use a similar graphic technique to appropriate the visual affect of the landscapes through which the trains will pass. The bold graphic style will lend a unified aesthetic to the system while allowing for regional variation. The Razzle Dazzle motif would extend beyond the skin of the train to create a comprehensive identity for the HSR network. Existing rail stations could be fitted with new waiting areas whose partitions would incorporate the Dazzle theme. Even the cocktail napkins in the bar car would be dazzled.

The “white space” of America has been used as a blanket term that encapsulates 75 percent of America’s land area and 25 percent of the population that does not reside within one of the 11 megaregions. The term “white space” hints at the common attitude toward this vast region as lacking identity, deprived, and empty. Part of this attitude emerges from the fact that several counties in this “white space” are deemed as underperforming with declining populations, employment and wages. Yet simultaneously, this area is at the central core of the country and filled with rich and productive potential. While America has tended to grow from the coast towards the interior, these regions have never been adequately connected by infrastructure to allow for developed and transforming economies. This proposal promotes balanced economic development in America, which extends the high-speed rail (HSR) into the edges of this white space, and by doing so, reveals the richness and diversity of such areas. A series of new HSR terminals interface with existing infrastructures — highways, roads and airports to “unlock” the identities, productive surfaces and vast economic potential of these communities which are newly linked to various megaregions and their associated global markets. Further, as these communities develop their economies, they will also have a ripple effect and stimulate new forms of economic growth in surrounding areas — from new technologies and manufacturing processes to developing knowledge and skill resources — further eroding the “white space.” The terminus, which operates as an activator, formally indexes and provides legibility to the productive aspects of the land and creates a new identity for these communities. The constellation of these end points provides a territorial legibility and a sense of place that eradicates the notion of “white space.”

PROJECT TEAM
Design Team: Neeraj Bhatia, Maya Przybylski & Mason White, Assistant: Ceara Allen

At the current moment there is neither the political will, nor funding available, for a major, nation-wide, high-speed rail project. This proposal tries to address these issues and situates a solution in the city of Detroit. This project addresses the need to create rail infrastructure within a context of a shrinking city and other transportation needs.

This project first creates a new road and rail connection to Canada (a project already planned) moving the border checkpoint inland to meet pre-existing transportation systems. Moving the border opens up a new territory and allows for a unique political and economic situation where taxes, Stimulus funding, and laws can be adjusted for the purpose of stimulating investment and business interest with the aim of creating high-speed rail infrastructure.

Using the spaces opened up by the new connection to Canada, the proposal creates a system to recycle the thousands of abandoned buildings throughout Detroit into new, pre-cast rail infrastructure. The project is a factory suspended from the highway and linked to the national rail network. It allows for material to be processed from old building stock to new rail infrastructure (concrete rail ties, tunnels, platforms, etc.) and distributed nationally in an efficient manner.

This proposal attempts to focus on some of the more straightforward logistical problems of creating a new rail network, while attempting to address some of the very real political and economic barriers to actually achieving it. It also attempts to have a positive effect on one of the countries most troubled cities.

After decades of auto-centric propaganda, corporate lobbying, massive federal interstate spending, sprawl, congestion, and global warming, America, in its reawakened consciousness of environmental responsibility, is realizing that building solely for automobiles is a misguided endeavor. The current interest in developing new mobility alternatives such as high speed rail and commuter rail systems in these primarily auto-centric regions provide an opportunity to rethink not only the way we move about but also the way in which we live and work in relation to these fundamental infrastructural systems.

In Houston, the ubiquitous scale of automotive transportation and laissez faire planning have propagated the sprawling, disconnected, low-density patterns of development that characterize the contemporary suburban landscape. As Houston expects a 3.5 million person population growth in the next twenty five years, the fourth largest metropolis in the nation must reconsider alternative forms of transportation to prepare for such a large influx of potential commuters. With proposals and construction underway, these new modes of transit will bring new scales to the region. Capitalizing on the link between these scales becomes the critical site of intervention for the continued evolution of our metropolitan environments.

High Speed Suburbanism examines the impact of new modalities within this auto-dominated region and investigates a new typology of development which mediates the shift in scale that new rail transit infrastructures will bring. Through re-envisioning our relationship to transportation infrastructures, new potentials of inhabitation can emerge to redefine the environmental, social, and cultural structures that typify contemporary suburbanism.

High-speed rail will fundamentally transform North American timespace and its emerging megaregions will be shaped by Conduit Urbanism. The largest and most populous of the emerging North American megaregions is the Great Lakes Megaregion (GLM). Its geographic, ecological, and resource-related territory tactically bounds the watershed of the five Great Lakes. What if the space of this vast territory was collapsed along an elevated line of electrified high speed rail grid connected to the region’s vast wealth of renewable energy, producing zero-energy mobility?

Existing highly distributed formats of highway-enabled urbanity would be highly pressurized to re-assemble in proximity to the line. Not only would the conduit move people more efficiently than existing mobility systems, but it would also conduct resource distribution – power, information, water resources and waste streams – supporting development along the line.

Critical sites of exchange with the conduit will locate unique forms of nodal concentrations that benefit from the concentration of cultural resources. New formats of research centers, collaboratoria and medical facilities will be spawned generating hyper-concentrations of activity and intelligence as a driver for urban form. In an information economy, the strategic sites of physical information exchange and incubation will become a form of urban desire machines: nodal condensers.

Nodal condensers will reinforce existing urban centers while gathering the location of logistics-based field conditions into their orbits. Once the potential for zero-energy near instantaneous mobility exists, across borders and across cultures, our desires for non-virtual contact with maximum opportunity will be enabled.

PROJECT TEAM: Geoffrey Thun, Kathy Velikov, Colin Ripley, Zain AbuSeir, Mary O’Malley, Dan McTavish, Maya Przybilski, Mike Vortruba, Matt Peddie, Matt Storus, Songja Storey-Fleming, Jeffrey Cheng