7 great examples of Inspiring architecture in Europe

The station’s recently renovated main hall is home to the Fanta Café (a tribute to its architect). Under the dome passengers are reminded in golden letters of their arrival to ‘the Mother of Cities’. Numerous heraldry refers to Czech towns connected to Prague by rail in the old days.

Architects will be interested to know that the extension of the historic cemetery of Venice was designed by the British architect David Chipperfield. Everybody else might find it fascinating that personalities such as Emilio Vedova, Stravinsky, and Christian Doppler, are buried here. In either case, it’s worth a visit.

The gracefully undulating curves of this building contrast beautifully with the small horizontally slatted windows. It was commissioned by the socialist housing corporation ‘De dageraad’ (The dawn), designed by Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer and built in 1920. It had 294 apartments and several ground floor stores. In one of the old shops you’ll find a visitor’s centre that’s open from Thursday till Sunday.

The ‘Church of the Most Holy Trinity’ is its official name, but it’s called Wotruba Kirche after its creator Fritz Wotruba, one of Austria’s most famous sculptors. The church building is so experimental that there were some protests when it was built.

Pritzker Prize winner Siza Vieira designed this iconic pavilion for the 1998 World Fair – for this occasion a new city was created in the shabby-industrial eastern part of Lisbon. The most impressive feature of the pavilion is the immense concrete roof, which seems as light as a feather, challenging gravity in the eye of the beholder.

The façade of Media TIC is subdivided in dozens of triangles, faintly resembling an insect’s facet eye. It’s located in a brand new neighbourhood within Poblenou called 22@Barcelona, “an innovative district offering modern spaces for the strategic concentration of intensive knowledge-based activities”. This is the newest bit of Barcelona.

This daringly modern, sleek and white-painted concrete apartment building was designed by Wells Coates and completed in 1934. It was a significant experiment in new ways of urban living and became the epicentre of the London avant-garde, with early residents including Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Now a gallery has opened there to tell the history of the building and the Modern movement.