China’s Railway Transformation

Junjie Xi is a lecturer in architectural design and humanities at the University of Liverpool. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher for the China Railway Group Limited and School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. Her project, ""The Use of Flexible Architecture and Structures in the Design of Public Buildings"", was funded by China Railway and the research outputs will be used by this state-owned enterprise in their construction work in the future. She is also keen on reactivating Liverpool’s railway heritage through research by design and filming. Her two favourite railway-related films are Brief Encounter (1945) and Last Train Home (2009). Paco Mejias Villatoro is a chartered architect in Spain and the UK, with a PhD in Architectural Theory and Design from the Madrid Polytechnic University School of Architecture. He has been teaching architectural design since 1997, in Spain, Canada, the United States and China. As a practitioner, he worked for Zaha Hadid Office in London, before opening his own firm in Spain. He has been awarded prizes in several competitions and nominated for the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Architecture Award. He is co-director of Estudio Abierto/Open Studio, a collaborative think-and-do tank operating at the intersection between architecture and urbanism (www.thisstudioisopen.org). He leads Year 2 Architecture at the University of Liverpool, and his favourite railway journey was from Kolkata to Mumbai in a steam engine in the late 1980s.