In the past decade, China’s train stations have become a symbol of the country’s technocratic renaissance—and with president Xi Jinping’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure package, announced this past April, it’s likely that we’ll see even more of these palaces built all over the country. They are typically imposing, vast structures, with thousands of travelers rushing around. But Ma Yansong, the founder of Beijing-based MAD Architects, aimed to create a more relatable, human-scaled architecture with his firm’s design for a new station for Jiaxing, a city of 5.4 million people—one with a significant place in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history—about 60 miles southwest of Shanghai. On the run from the police in 1921, early CCP members in Shanghai hightailed it to Jiaxing and wound up having the first party conference there, on a rented tourist boat in a lake.