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A new video posted to the City of Calgary's YouTube channel highlights the architectural vision behind the future Green Line LRT stations, which will each feature "transit plazas" that can become conduits for community identity. Jeremy Sturgess and Lesley Beale from Sturgess Architecture share their concepts for the approved 46-kilometre, 28-station alignment, taking cues from the natural and manmade geography of the region.
"We looked historically into the city to be inspired by something that would move across the city and the first image we looked at was the historic railroad," said Jeremy Sturgess. "Calgary was built because of the railroad and the image of the railroad engine coming across the prairie inspired me to think of not only the connection to Calgary's origins but also to the plume of the engine itself and the energy that it represents and what that means to people as something that is memorable."
Calgary's chinooks also partially formed the basis for the design of the stations. "The chinook coming across as a flat plane of cloud compresses the sunlight and forces it into very dramatic shadows on the landscape. So that affects our architecture and how we make buildings but it also affects your sense of place because of the way the sun works with the light," said Sturgess.
The final inspirational image was a 1976 art installation titled "Running Fence," created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and erected across the hilly landscape of Northern California's Sonoma County. The billowing fabric stretched several kilometres, and to Sturgess, represents "how to take something either natural like the chinook cloud or arguably manmade like the steam plume and manifest that into something that we build."
The majority of the stations will be positioned at grade with side-loaded platforms. Only a couple of the stations will be elevated, while four will be located underground in the downtown core. Each station will devote space to a transit plaza, which Sturgess says serves as the threshold or the porch between the station and the community.
The plazas are envisaged as customized landscape elements, giving each community the opportunity to "shape their own expression within the context of the larger expression of this consistent architecture," he said. "Some neighbourhoods will be more historic, some neighbourhoods will be more contemporary, and everything in between, but the transit plaza will be the device that the communities can embrace to make the station their own."
Sturgess says his goal is to create a "consistent pattern of building that starts from one end of Calgary in the southeast and moves all the way up ultimately to the very north end of the city." The Green Line LRT will stretch from 160 Avenue N in the future community of Keystone Hills to, south through downtown, and to the fringe communities of Seton and Cranston. The $4.65 billion first stage of construction will extend from 16 Avenue N to 126 Avenue SE and is expected to begin in 2020 and take six years to complete.
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