Buildable
Our commitment to RTG was easily the simplest to understand. We needed to find a solution that could affordably meet the City's specifications. To be affordable, we knew it would need to be standardized for scale of purchase, and based on a module for optimized fabrication and constructability.
Strident
The other side of the coin was our obligation to the City of Ottawa, which, we felt, was to design a significant civic building that would embody the City's brand and core values. Given the project's scope and city-building stature, we knew it would need to have a signature profile, be strident yet familiar and friendly. As a civic building, we felt it should also act as an ambassador for Ottawa informing the ridership with stories about our city, both literally and symbolically. From the outset, we conceived the project not as a series of stations, but a continuous civic building with entrance and forecourts in the various communities it served.
Business Driven
Our obligation to OC Transpo, we felt, was to provide a design that was business driven. The stations would need to be marketable, manageable and maintainable. By marketable, we meant that the stations would need to engage the public and foster safe and affordable transit use. Manageable meant that the stations would need to be efficient and logically organized. Finally, we realized that, even though RTG would be maintaining the stations, to have longevity they would need to be taut and resilient.
Cool
The last stakeholder was the existing transit user and the prospective one. The latter posed the overarching challenge for the project in that appealing to the non-user required us to help brand public transit to make the idea of taking a train a desirable thing (i.e. cool).
In the industry, there all sorts of adjectives used to define what public transit should be, and most are predictable: humane, comfortable, safe and accessible, etc. However, in our experience, success in the design of transit is more holistic and it revolves around creating an experience that is equal and consistent with people's lifestyle choices. To be truly successful, taking the train needs to be the desirable option, not the only option. We felt that an enabling transit experience could be found in the combinations of safe with cool, of convenient with engaging, and of efficient with stress-free. If the system had these attributes, then we were sure its users would take ownership of the system and bragging rights for it.
The emphasis here is of course on "enabling" experience. Steve Jobs once said that the iPod's success had less to do with its aesthetic then it does its intuitive controls. It was the intuitive attributes of the device and its software, which allowed people for the first time to take control of a large number of their own files, organize, and play them according to their own preferences. In other words, it provided them with an enabling experience.
We knew that the Alstom train's aesthetic combined with computer-controlled arrival and departures would provide the convenience and efficiency. What we had to provide was the cool, engaging and stress-free.
We felt the latter, stress-free, could be achieved by ensuring the stations were intuitive to navigate, which meant that on approach a traveller would have line-of-sight orientation from the entrance plaza to ticketing fare control and on to the platform and train. If you intuitively understood how to get to the train or from the platform to the street, then stress would be minimized if not eliminated. To enhance the line-of-sight orientation, each station presents itself in the same configuration. Each has a large lantern element, displaying the station name, which is always located to the right of the entrance plaza. The lantern, which lights at night, also displays the system map, contains the electronic ticket vending machines and, more importantly, each provides a view to the platform.
The engaging and cool factors are of course more subjective; however, we gave it our best try. As we mentioned earlier, we wanted the stations to "explain" themselves. To do this we turned to origami, the Japanese art of folding paper. In the right hands, an origami enthusiast can make paper represent almost anything. Our challenge was considerably smaller and less literal. We explored folding the station roofs in a manner that would suggest to the user the direction in which they should be travelling. The roofs lift to advise where the entrances are and they fall in the direction leading to the platform. It is a simple device, yet one that generated unique and engaging (we think) forms at each station. To accent this design approach, the soffits of the station roofs were designed and detailed in wood to provide a warm and inviting environment, even on the coldest of days.
Hopefully, on opening day, the sum of these parts will equal an "enabling" experience!
On the subject of light rail transit, we were thinking what everyone else was thinking: that inserting a 13-station, 12.5 km long, light rail system (with 2.5 km below ground) into a city of one million people sounds staggeringly complex. In truth, the totality of the endeavor is difficult to comprehend, especially when so much of the work is invisible to the public. The logistics of the enabling work, the below-grade tunneling and engineering feats, the systems and controls to operate the trains all take place out of public sight.
What does capture the public's attention is, of course, the look of the trains and the station designs. Fortunately, our consortium brought in Alstom for the design and fabrication of the rolling stock (trains) and they are simply the best in the world at customizing the design of trains to suit the overall brand of a city's transit system.
