How to Future-Proof a Transit Hub - CityLab

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The main hall of the new Arnhem Station in the Netherlands

Looks good now, but what about in a few decades? The main hall of the new Arnhem Station in the Netherlands. // ©Hufton+Crow

Planning the Transit Hubs of the

Future
FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN JUL 10, 2017

How do you future-proof railway sations, metro hubs, and bus

terminals? Urban planner Caroline Bos has a few pointers.

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What does the train station of the future look like? It’s a question that
architects and urban planners must at least try to answer whenever
they design new transit networks or terminals. Railway stations of the
past are often beautiful (and occasionally loathed), but in a world
where transit paterns and technology change rapidly, time is not
typically kind to these expensive and infexible pieces of
infrastructure. The United States is litered with discarded rail and
bus stations as architecturally charming as they are useless; even
relatively recent cases such as that of Tel Aviv’s massive and
famously
SHARE misbegoten bus station, which
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1990s, show
we still haven’t learned our lesson.

In seeking an answer, Caroline Bos, urban planner and co-founder of

Dutch architecture and urban planning practice UNStudio, is beter
placed than most of her colleagues to tackle the question’s
complexities.

UNStudio recently created a visually striking vision of what a

contemporary station might look like in the form of the new rail
station in the Dutch city of Arnhem, completed in 2015. Bos’
UNStudio architect colleagues have also designed stations for the
new metro system due to start operation in Greater Doha, Qatar, in
2019—one so radically diferent in appearance to Arnhem that it’s
hard to believe the designs come from the same source. CityLab
caught up with Bos after a talk at the reSITE 2017 conference in
Prague last month, where she ofered a few pointers as to how transit
station designers should think about preparing for the future.

Design for the future, now

As Bos notes, an uncertain future means that infrastructure designers

face a contradiction. On the one hand, they must create something
that satisfes contemporary project commissioners and the public they
cater to. On the other, they must also try to predict the needs of a time
that in substantial ways will no longer resemble the present, where
the bodies that initially commissioned the project may not even hold
sway in the same form. “As architects and urban designers, we are
familiar with the future to some extent,” she days. “But what about
the disruptive efect of tech changes? Can we adapt our processes to
adapt to unanticipated changes, fnd models of fexibility and

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resilience?”

Atempts to be entirely concrete about predicting changes that will be

partly unforeseen are, of course, doomed to failure. Building a vast
subterranean sea of parking at Paris’ Gare Montparnasse, for
example, must have seemed prescient when it opened in 1969, but it’s
now quite counter to the direction of the city’s anti-car policies and
the way its leaders envision Paris functioning in the future. As Bos
highlights, there are some key points architects and planners can take
on board to ensure their designs remain fairly fexible.

A rendering of one of the Qatar Integrated Railway Project’s elevated sations. © Qatar Railways
Company, designed by UNStudio

Create no hierarchy of passengers

Too often, bus or streetcar terminals are treated as embarrassing

afterthoughts in transit hub design, shunted into second-rate,
relatively remote quarters so as not to cramp the style of the big
trains. This serves to perpetuate the idea that buses are a grubby,
second-tier way of geting around and ignores the fact that most
people who pass through major railway stations aren’t in fact there to
take the train. This isn’t just poor planning, but disregards a trend
that suggests city-level public transit will prove ever more dominant
in the coming years. Bos and her colleagues kept this in mind when
planning the new station at Arnhem, where plans had repeatedly
stalled to replace a temporary station built after World War II. “At
Arnhem, we thought not in terms of function—whether it was a
railway station, a bus station or whatever—but in terms of people.
Who used the building? At what time of day? And what for? By
analyzing the site, we found that only 40 percent of people on site
were actually taking trains.”

This realization changed the way the space was mapped out. The
architects placed the bus depot at the front of the station, granting its
passengers equal billing and seamless access to rail platforms.
Meanwhile the station hall, a dramatic, light-flled space arranged
around a central spiral-like twist, becomes a place that is more public
meeting place than a mere preamble to the actual platforms.

Don’t be pinned down by a single stakeholder

This retooling of the relationship between diferent station users leads

towards another point that could help secure enduring use for a

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How to Future-Proof a Transit Hub - CityLab

station. If you consider the needs of a single client in isolation, you

run an even greater risk of creating something that will easily become
obsolete. This is certainly what happened with the international
station created at Stratford in East London in time for the 2012
Olympics. Now that the Games have passed and the Eurostar service
to continental Europe has decided not to stop there, it’s lost any
justifcation for its size and sits grandly underused.

Balance the needs of a specifc client or developer against other

potentially conficting forces and you’re more likely to create
something future-proof. Arnhem Station is a good example of how
this approach can change an outcome. It needed to be larger and
more suited to contemporary use, but because the Netherlands has
larger, busier cities than Arnhem, reconstruction of the existing
station was relatively low on the list of priorities for Nederlandse
Spoorwegen (NS), the national rail carrier. UNStudio’s study, which
revealed that less than half of the station’s users took the train, helped
usher in a more dominant role for the city in the redesign, ultimately
creating a station that was as much a public agora and pivot for its
host city as a point of departure for elsewhere in the Netherlands.

Transit hubs are also social centers and expressions of

civic identity that can boost or damage local pride.

Bos sees this as a premonition of the way future developments should

be considered: Architects must balance the needs of future users
against those of the current owners, given that the building may need
to outlast the brief the later sets. “Ownership can be a business
transaction,” she says. “It doesn't mean that you have the complete
say in everything. Maybe that's a beneft of our time. Increasingly.
younger people are less and less interested in owning things. People
are more aware that use is what really counts.”

Shifting the emphasis somewhat away from the site’s immediate

owners isn’t in itself utopian or idealistic. It simply encourages a
longer-term view that could ultimately secure a longer life for the site
than if quick returns for the main investor are considered in isolation.

Build in commercial units more carefully.

It must be tempting for architects to envisage a station concourse as a

pristine hall where arched ceilings or acres of sparkling glass catch
the eye, rather than stores and kiosks. Creating a terminus with this
kind of atitude, however, is to disregard reality in favor of an
unsustainable purism. Usually such blank-slate spaces have
commercial facilities inserted into them anyway, because they
provide revenue and fulfll a need. If they are not factored in from the
beginning they end up geting tacked on at the end of the
construction process, in a way that is often visually and practically
disruptive. “We've seen beautifully conceived airports and stations
end up clutered by kiosks, snack bars and litle stores that have been
put in later,” says Bos. “It’s often in an obstructive way that makes

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wayfnding more difcult for people whose sight lines are now
disrupted.”

Bearing this in mind, UNStudio built them integrally into the Arnhem
Station design from the very beginning. Shops are either recessed or,
at platform level, designed in a style that is harmonious with the
station’s new roofs and supports. This leaves the main transfer hall,
whose central twist avoids the need for sight-obstructing columns, as
a singularly open space that is not only aesthetically distinctive but
extremely easy to see across and fnd your way through. This reduces
the need for signage that, while well-intentioned, can itself lead to
further confusing visual cluter.

A rendering of a sation interior for the Qatar Integrated Rail Sysem. © Qatar Railways Company,
designed by UNStudio

Develop a sense of local identity, but avoid cliché

Stations are nonetheless more than pragmatic transit hubs to be

designed solely with fuid movement in mind. They are social centers
and expressions of civic identity that can boost or damage local pride
(witness the agita that New Yorkers feel when they contemplate the
demolition of the original Penn Station in 1963). As such, they work
best when they balance efciency with an aesthetic style that in some
way distinctively refects locality—something many existing stations
actually fail to do.

Quoting geographer Doreen Massey, Bos highlights this need to

bolster a sense of place as a key issue: “How in the face of all the
movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of local place
and its particularity?”

It’s easy enough to see what Massey is referring to. There’s something
demoralizing about traveling the world and fnding the same
structures greet you at every port of call. At the same time eforts be
international architects to respond to local tradition can often be
superfcial and resort to stereotypes. Bos acknowledges that this
dilemma is not one to which there is an easy answer. “The issue of
refecting local character is such a sensitive one that I can feel my toes
curling when I talk about it,” she says. “We risk entering cliché the
moment we start talking about these things—here in Holland, we are
forever stereotyped with tulips and windmills, for example.”

The answer, Bos suggests, is to reference local culture without

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specifcally quoting it. In Holland, she uses the example of one on

UNStudio’s older structures, the Erasmus Bridge in Roterdam
Harbor, as one that is inspired by the city’s quayside cranes without
explicitly mirroring them.

Subterranean bike garage at Arnhem Station. ©Hufton+Crow

Arnhem Station, meanwhile, demonstrates a quality that Bos sees as

distinctively Dutch which came out more in the design process than
in the fnished product—the integration of design and technology. It
is perhaps not for nothing that the ultimate cliché emblem of the
Netherlands, the windmill, is both a beautiful structure and an early
example of sophisticated, sustainable technology. “For us, it's almost
impossible to see design and technology as separate from each other,”
Bos says. “Parametric design and computer are something we use as a
medium of integration between building technology and design.”

In Qatar, the task of expressing a local identity as outsiders is more

problematic. Qatar’s ancient culture is, Bos suggests, more deeply
rooted in people and the way they are organized in society than in the
built environment, as Doha’s dramatic transformation from fshing
village to metropolis has occurred in less than a century. UNStudio’s
principal architect on the project, Ben Van Berkel, nonetheless found
ways of refecting this local context without looking too much like a
Cecil B. De Mille production of The 1,001 Nights. One source of
inspiration for Doha’s new station was the Caravanserai—roadside
inns for travelers once built across the Middle East and Central Asia
that often had a low-slung structure of stacked arcades. Vaulted
ceilings with ogee curves also feature, as do sparkling interior
surfaces that resemble mother-of-pearl. These reference Qatar’s past
as a pearl fshing center and, more subtly, the local tradition of
nesting more lavish interiors within relatively plain, austere facades.

Despite the stark diference in appearance between stations in Doha

and Arnhem, some distinctly subterranean infuences from the past
nonetheless shine through. Bos and her colleagues have long been
admirers of New York’s Grand Central Station, whose infuence can

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be seen in such details as the placement of direct light at the top of

staircases to help people fnd their way. “We are inspired by the way
you move through layers at Grand Central, the staircases, the
topological landscape, and the strong slanting light.”

The station of the future might thus end up looking a lot like some
stations of the past. Indeed, as a current commuter hub whose
appearance has come to be a repository of New York’s identity.
Grand Central is an example of a locally distinctive station that has
managed to stand the test of time and remain singularly adaptable. It
seems that this adaptability, rather than any particular stylistic device
or quick fx, may be the clearest marker of a station’s continuing
usefulness as we lumber forth into an only partly illuminated future.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of “Planning the Transit Hubs of the

Future” implied that Caroline Bos was the architect of UNStudio’s designs
for the Qatar Integrated Rail System. She in fact led on the studio’s
masterplan, while the principal architect was her colleague Ben Van Berkel.
The article has been updated.

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