Artist has been working on the scheme since 2003
New images have been unveiled of a completed subway station in Naples designed by Anish Kapoor.
The Monte Saint’Angelo station will be formally opened by Vincenzo de Luca, the president of Campania, on Thursday.
Kapoor has been working on the scheme for more than two decades, having been first invited to create a station for what would become the new metro system in 2003.
It is understood that the design has been largely the same since his original appointment with a few tweaks added in intervening years.
The work comprises two entrances, one cast out of weathering steel and the other rendered in smooth, tubular steel.
The design is described by Kapoor’s team as “swelling from the ground, archetypal, raw and labial, appearing to offer a descent into the underworld as much as an entrance to a train-station to take you on your daily journey”.
As in much of Kapoor’s work, interior space is turned inside out and cast in new shapes which aim to blend the object into its landscape.
Kapoor said: “In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground.”
Naples Metro first opened in 1925 and has undergone a series of expansions in recent years with architects working on stations including RSHP and Zaha Hadid Architects.
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