Today, the city of Vinge, Denmark, is nothing more than a grassy field with two railroad tracks running through it. By 2033, it’ll be a full-fledged town. The 350 hectares of land will be home to an estimate 20,000 residents, many of whom will likely use Vinge’s train station to commute to and from Denmark's larger cities.

This train station is the centerpiece of the small town’s urban plan, and with good reason. Designed by Danish architecture firm Henning Larsen in collaboration with landscape architecture firm Tredje Natur, the station smartly and subtly blurs the line between the built and natural environments. Unlike jagged glass buildings that are supposed to echo the nearby mountains or integrating a living wall as an afterthought, Vinge’s station blends seamlessly into Denmark’s hilly topography without looking out of place among the buildings that surround it.

Henning Larsen Architects

As passengers step out onto the platform they’ll see an opening framed by an elliptical-shaped concrete structure. This piece of concrete functions as a pathway, bridging the two opposite sides of the platform and preventing the “wrong side of the tracks” mentality that’s often the result of separating neighborhoods with infrastructure. The concrete bowl, 90 meters in diameter, dips down to the platform’s level before rising again to around 12 meters at its highest point. This gives passengers an easy pathway through the city center, but by matching the natural topography of Vinge, it also allows green space to creep into the plan as easily as possible. A nice added touch: The lines you see on the concrete renderings are tracks that gather rainwater and direct it into a pool on the platform to be used as a splashing pool.

When the station opens in 2017, there will be a few surrounding buildings that house offices, a grocery store and some residential spaces that open with it. It’ll still be an oasis, but over the next decade, as more and more people move to Vinge, the station will become a proper city center where residents can lounge on the platform, use it as an amphitheater or have a picnic with goods purchased at the market.

Nina la Cour Sell, an architect at Henning Larsen, says that ultimately, she envisions the station as a welcoming post for Vinge. The platform should draw people out of the train and prod them to explore the new town. The big hope here is that Vinge will be a demonstrator of a new kind of urban space, one that uncompromisingly couples nature with the city and draws a progressive crowd to stay there. “It’s always been you either you want to live in the city and be close to everything, or you really want to go out and have a big garden and be close to nature,” she says. “This is a city that should be able to embody both of those desires.”