Massive problem

For some time it's seemed to me that the designs used for new railway architecture tend towards the massive. This is the new station at Southend Airport:

There's something rather lumpen about both the conception and the execution here.

It's not that I disapprove of massiveness on principle: structures like the Forth Bridge, possibly the single most massive bridge ever built, have an elegance and pleasure to them which, for me, is irresistible.

But bridges seen from a distance are self-evidently different to stations which are, supposedly, designed for human interaction. The detailed parts of stations need to be of a scale that is in some sense proportional to the mass of the whole, but we seem to be building new stations which are lumpen in their detail and overblown for their function.

It's not just stations, either: every new footbridge I've encountered recently has been ludicrously massive, dwarfing its surroundings and making me, the user, feel as if I'm too insignificant to be using such a monstrously industrial structure -- like this one, at Smitham:

The problem is compounded by the designers' insistence on covering up any window spaces with industrial-strength wire mesh, as if I need to be caged-in like some sort of mad sociopath (they haven't (yet) done this at Smitham, but here's one from Fratton):

It's a very dispiriting experience to use modern (and expensive) infrastructure which feels so brutal.