Union Station
Chicago Union Station is both a working transportation hub and one of the city’s great architectural interiors. Opened in 1925, its monumental spaces were designed to lend rail travel a sense of importance and ceremony, a feeling still evident today in the soaring columns, grand staircases, ornate lighting, carved details, and the Great Hall’s vast proportions.
This series of black-and-white photographs moves between those formal public spaces and the more utilitarian areas below, where shiny steel Metra trains arrive and depart, revealing a very different side of the station. Above, the architecture feels almost civic or cathedral-like. Below, the visual language grows darker, more industrial, and is entirely devoted to movement and purpose.
