From the Main Line
by Michael Froio
portfolio winners call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
The Pennsylvania Railroad connected the eastern United States to the midwestern interior. Chartered in 1846 to secure Philadelphia’s route to western trade, the PRR was a network of 28,000 miles of track, with 279,000 employees moving 6700 trains daily. At its peak, the railroad carried ten percent of America’s freight and twenty percent of the traveling public. The self-proclaimed ”Standard Railroad of the World” built infrastructure and traffic-control systems still critical to rail transportation. Following its 1968 collapse, the once unified system was carved into separate but interdependent corridors across the Mid-Atlantic, leaving conjunctions and disjunctions that mark an American way of life.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024