Japan Is Getting an 'Invisible' Train

Shaunacy Ferro
SANAA via Seibu Group
SANAA via Seibu Group / SANAA via Seibu Group
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Japan’s latest high-tech train will be so shiny you won’t even see it coming. Seibu Railway Company has plans to build a near-invisible train, designed by award-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA (she and her partner in the firm won architecture’s biggest prize, the Pritzker, in 2010).

Sejima is known for her glassy, reflective designs, and when the train debuts in 2018, it will blend into the countryside with a reflective skin that mirrors the landscape as it travels.

“This will be an express train for everyone, like an intimate living room where people can spend their free time in their own way,” as Seibu Group proclaimed in a press statement (per Architectural Digest). The express trains have been commissioned to celebrate the railway company’s centennial anniversary, and Seibu hopes “to provide a new public space, almost parklike, where people will come together.”

[h/t Mashable]

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