Transport Hub Hyperloop: Three Vacuum Tubes and an Airport Edge Recast Moscow's Periphery

Most transport terminals are built around a single dominant mode, with everything else bolted on as an afterthought. This proposal starts from the opposite premise: a station that exists to make modes meet. Three long Hyperloop tubes cross a central terminal on the edge of Moscow, and around them gather metro lines, railway, buses and private vehicles. The architecture is less a destination than a switching point, a building whose job is to hand passengers from one speed to another without friction.

Designed by Daria Sergeeva and shortlisted in UnIATA '18, the project sits near Vnukovo Airport on Moscow's periphery. The site choice matters. Placing the hub outside the dense urban core lets it extend the city's infrastructural reach while avoiding disruption at the centre, and its proximity to the airport turns it into a hinge between air and ground travel. Hyperloop, the vacuum-based system in which capsules move through low-pressure tubes to cut air resistance, is the headline technology, but the real ambition lies in how it plugs into the networks that already exist.

Three Ribbed Tubes Converging on One Node

The site traffic diagram distills the whole argument into one graphic. Three long, spiral-ribbed tubes cut across the plan and converge on the central terminal, while a yellow rail line and an icon legend map the slower networks threading in from around them. Set against a black ground, the drawing reads almost like a circuit board, and that is the right analogy: the terminal behaves as a junction where currents of movement are redirected rather than stopped.

What the diagram makes clear is hierarchy. The Hyperloop lines are the long-distance spine, and every other mode is organised to feed them. By showing the airport edge, rail and road links in the same field, Sergeeva frames the building as a critical node in both regional and international mobility rather than an isolated piece of speculative infrastructure.

Floor Plans That Read as Flow Charts

The fourth and fifth floor plans show the three vacuum train lines running through the building, flanked by circular garages and overlaid with coloured arrows tracing passenger movement. The arrows do a lot of work here. They turn the plan into an operational diagram, making it possible to follow a traveller from arrival to platform and check where streams cross, merge or separate.

This is where the project's two-zone logic becomes legible. The eastern part of the building is given over to passengers, organised for clarity, accessibility and high throughput. The western part houses the technical infrastructure that Hyperloop operation demands. Splitting the building along this east-west line means passengers rarely need to encounter the machinery, and the engineering never has to compromise to accommodate public circulation.

A Rounded Terminal Crowned by Cylindrical Drums

The east and west elevations reveal the building's formal identity. A rounded terminal body wears a glazed grid facade, while three cylindrical drums rise above the roofline, each one registering a Hyperloop tube passing below. The massing follows the programme directly: large cylindrical volumes house the tubes and connect to a central hub volume, so the silhouette tells you how the building works before you step inside.

The facade treatment shifts with function, and reading the two elevations side by side underlines the difference between the passenger-facing east and the technical west. The result sits between infrastructural machine and architectural object. In the western zone, architecture deliberately steps back and lets engineering performance set the terms, a systems-driven stance that gives the building its candour.

Space Frames, Daylight and a Suspended Atrium

Inside, the concourse sits beneath a steel space-frame roof, with commuters crossing toward a red train parked beside a large display screen. The space frame is a sensible choice for a hall that must stay open and column-light, and the view captures the intended experience: wide, uncluttered, oriented toward the platforms, with information delivered at the scale of the room.

The atrium pushes in a different direction. A glass globe, suspended white spiral sculptures and mural walls fill a tall volume lit by shafts of daylight falling through the roof. The spirals echo the ribbing of the Hyperloop tubes seen in the site diagram, carrying the building's technological motif into a space of pause. In a project so driven by throughput, this is the one room designed for lingering, and it gives the hub a civic quality that pure transit halls often lack.

A Glazed Tube Hall Beneath the Flight Path

The final view gathers every layer of the project into one frame. An orange train speeds beneath a long glazed hall shaped like a tube, a worker in a hard hat stands in the foreground, and a plane passes overhead. Air, rail and the people who keep the system running all share the picture, which is exactly the point of locating the hub near Vnukovo.

The tubular glazed hall also shows how the cylindrical language carries through from exterior massing to interior experience. Passengers do not simply board a capsule in a hidden shed; they occupy a space that takes the shape of the technology itself, with the sky visible through the glass. It is a confident way to make an unfamiliar mode of travel feel tangible.

Why This Project Matters

Hyperloop proposals often fixate on the capsule and the tube, leaving the station as a vague endpoint. Sergeeva treats the station as the real design problem. By tying vacuum transit to metro, railway, buses, private vehicles and an international airport, and by separating public and technical zones along a clear east-west axis, the project addresses the question that will decide whether any high-speed system succeeds: how people actually get on and off it.

The scheme also shows how infrastructure can carry identity without hiding its function. The cylindrical drums, ribbed tubes and space-frame halls are direct expressions of what happens inside, and the daylit atrium offers a reminder that transit buildings are public rooms as much as machines. For a thesis-level proposal shortlisted at UnIATA '18, it is a clear-headed argument that the future of mobility depends as much on the quality of the interchange as on the speed of the line.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Daria Sergeeva

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Project credits: Transport Hub by Daria Sergeeva UnIATA '18 (uni.xyz).