with demands for a modern, rational style. The debate went so far that even cartoons mocking the new railway station appeared in magazines. These cartoons showed the entire station having changed to look more like a medieval stone church than a popular railway station. The bear sculptures had grown, and one of them had jumped down onto the street to chase people. As was typical for Saarinen, he did not participate in the public debate at any point. Saarinen later made a complete change to the architecture of the railway station. He moved his attention from American or British examples towards German ones and travelled by train all over Europe with his recently wed wife. After coming back home to Finland in 1904 he abandoned romanticism altogether and re-designed the station completely, with a more rational design. The former saddle roof was replaced with a gambrel roof, the semicircular window on the main facade had grown and the entrance hall with the bear statues was removed. The new design was finished in 1909 and the new station building was opened in 1919. Later the floor plan of the station building was freed from the model specified by the railway administration and was made more clear for the purpose of use by large masses of people. This allowed the central hall of the station to be widened. Saarinen developed his design for many years and made numerous drawings of the facade of the railway station building. The final solutions for making the station building more rational were born gradually. The station's facade bears a close resemblance to that of the 1913 Vyborg railway station, designed by the architecture bureau of Saarinen and Herman Gesellius. The structures and material strength calculations of the building were handled by graduate engineer Jalmari Castrén. The central heating and air conditioning in the building were designed by the Danish engineer A. C. Karsten. The electrical plans were made in the electricity technical office of the machine department of the railway administration, with machine engineers Karl Strömberg and Karl Karsten serving as their designers. Construction The administrative building of the railway administration was accepted in June 1905, and construction started in December 1905. A total of 20 thousand cubic metres of floors for the building were cast from iron-reinforced concrete, which is thought to have been a new record in Finland at the time. The four-floor administrative