Invisible train to hit Japan tracks
perhaps this is how Wonder Woman’s invisible jet would have been designed.
Award-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima has been commissioned by Japan’s Seibu group to design an “invisible” train, one that is meant to seamlessly blend in with its surroundings.
This is to celebrate Seibu Railway’s 100th anniversary.
Traveling into Tokyo at 200 miles per hour, the Red Arrow train is designed with mirrored surfaces that reflect its environment but looks “soft,” so it can blend into the landscape. While this project is still in the concept stage, around seven of these trains may already be running by 2018.
This is Sejima’s first train design project, but what got her recruited into it was her proficiency and vision in designing similar reflective buildings, whose style has been described as fluid, transparent, and intertwined with nature. Her unique designs have also been touted as “architecture that is simultaneously delicate and powerful, precise and fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly clever,” which earned her the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2010, regarded as the Nobel Prize of the Architecture World.
Inside, the train cars will resemble a living room where passengers can relax. “I would like it to be a limited express where large numbers of people can all relax in comfort, in their own way, like a living room, so that they think to themselves ‘I look forward to riding that train again,’” Sejima said in Seibu Group’s official press release.
She added, “The limited express travels in a variety of different sceneries, from the mountains of Chichibu to the middle of Tokyo, and I thought it would be good if the train could gently co-exist with this variety of scenery.”
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