U-Bahn München: 57/100 Messestadt West

Munich underground: 57/100 Messestadt West

Messestadt West underground station is the western twin brother of Messestadt Ost (who ever would have guessed?!), which were both opened together in 1999. However, they are obviously fraternal twins, as they have rather different phenotypes.

The austere design was criticised by the public, because the station - being the gateway to the new trade fair grounds - is supposed to be somewhat of a flagship of the city and its public transportation. The planners had a different angle in mind, though: this time they did not want to focus on the artistic part of the building, but emphasise the technical side of the construction of an underground station. The exposed concrete of the walls only got a layer of red paint (the signature colour of the U2 line), so you can still see the framing, whereas the ceiling was kept completely bare. Given that Bauma, the world's largest trade fair for construction machinery and equipment (and with 555,000 m² the largest trade fair in general), is held here, the idea was not the worst.

The station is rather bright inside, because the nine spherical skylights allow a lot of natural light to shine on the platform.

Today I used one of my new ND filters for the first time for my underground shots, to keep the excessive (and unwanted) lens flare of my wide angle lens under control. I used a ND0.9, and I think that worked quite well: lens flare is not an issue this time (in contrast to e.g. this shot of Königsplatz underground station).