This little station in Barcelona's suburbs combines a spare, finely honed minimalism with formal allusions to the seductive power of trains and the romance of rail travel.

This railway station in a Barcelona suburb is a sleek linear presence at the end of the Rambla St Vincent dels Horts. At once it disengages and links the two sides of the town divided since the arrival of the railway. These sides of the inherited site present different faces to the tracks and at different levels: in the upper part to the west is a relatively dense ordered street pattern which is completed by the railway, while below, to the east, is a more fragmented urban edge and the rambla running towards the main street.

The context is complicated by the marked change in level and by the requirement for a connection between the two sides which implies the effective continuation of the rambla in a reduced form. The difficulties of this transition from train to terrain, and vice versa, are overcome and rendered comprehensible by the skilful use of a number of architectural devices. The building is realised as a bridge in two parallel spans with the tracks above and an underpass below. Concrete panels on the side of the bridge reflect the formal axis and the large scale of the rambla announces the significance of the station to the town.

But there is no easy symmetry here: the architects diffuse the linearity by dishing the entrance and making a four-bay, recessed geometrical composition with a series of equal planes which move through degrees of visual permeability from opaque tile, to glass, to open space. These planes introduce an axial shift across the plan past the waiting room, platform stairs and ticket booth to the duck-egg blue concrete of the outside ramp and stairs, which lie perpendicular and off-centre to the rambla. Their smaller scale serves to introduce the more intimate and compressed nature of the upper part of the town.