Civilizing The Bus

Architectural Review, The, June, 2000 by Layla Dawson

Too often, bus stations are dreadful, offering inefficient dark, dank and stinking shelters to travellers, who are automatically marked down as second class citizens. Here is a design which promises to make bus travel decent, and contribute to the texture of the city.

Bus stations in literature are urban romantic reflections of raw metropolitan life. In reality. they often look like cattle pens for fourth class travellers, those too poor for private cars, fast trains or planes. The necessary promotion of environment friendly travel requires this shabby image to be drastically overhauled.

In 1998 Hamburg held a competition to replace their ZOB (Central Bus Station) which lies a stone's throw from the central train station and beside Hamburg's Applied Arts Museum. Flanked by a hamburger chain operating out of an ex-water tower, a row of shabby travel agents specializing in East European tours, and a social services container where drug addicts obtain clean needles, the present ZOB is a marginalized inner-city facility.

Architects Silcher. Werner + Redante, who won against several national and eight international firms, saw the need to raise ZOB's public profile by creating a city landmark structure. The crescent-shaped translucent roof, sheltering kiosks and travellers, is likely to be as distinctive and unique to Hamburg as the glazed barrel vaults of the city's nineteenth-century railway station. Supported 1 2m above the ground by a colonnade of slender steel columns, this glass wing structure will be 89m across, and stiffened, using the spoked wheel principle, by a skeleton of steel plates 20-35mm thick between the two curved steel collar edges. When illuminated at night, it will glow like a fluorescent cloud.

Steel framed service modules below the roof are to be structurally independent. Manufactured in a Hamburg shipyard, they will be assembled and bolted on site with opaque walls constructed like car body shells for ticket offices, sanitary services, electrical and mechanical rooms, bus inspectors and drivers canteen and rest rooms.

In contrast public areas (foyer and restaurants) will be seen through transparent spaces with glass walls held in a tennis net steel framework. Metallic silver grey finishes and minimal but bright colour accents are hoping to give ponderous bus transport a dynamic, space port docking, image. Another aim was to reduce the impact of the bus station and increase surrounding greenery and traffic free zones. With transport logistics developed by Lego the Danish toy manufacturer, the asphalt wasteland generally associated with traffic nodes has been halved. Buses will reverse out of terminus lanes instead of driving through as they did in the former S-lane pattern. This space saving allows the road between the former island bus station and museum to be deleted and replaced with a safe and direct pedestrian plaza link to the museum's nineteenth-century grand entrance. A swathe of soft landscaping, trees, ground covering bushes and seating along paths, extending from the plaza and skirting the ZOB facilities should also help filter carbon dioxide and fumes.

Starting on site in October 2000 the ZOB will continue to run services during construction. The building, at a cost of 25 million Deutschmarks, is programmed for completion by the end of 2001.

BUS STOP

Well designed small transport structures, like this country bus stop can help to structure environment and life. Set commandingly at a junction of forest roads in rural Idaho near Moscow, there is a strange little structure which from a distance shines like a small temple against the dark green trees. Closer up, it resembles a large silver sentry box with a bulging front, suitable for a portly preposterous yet amiable part keeper out of a Hans Andersen tale.

In fact, it is a school bus stop by Michael Culpepper and Greg Tew, made to protect the children of a group of families. They wanted to make it as cheap and easy to erect as possible while giving it presence. Each side is cut from a standard 8 x 12 ft (2.4 x 3.5m) sheet of three quarter inch (19mm) ply - the curves of the envelope give the structure stiffness. The whole was prefabricated and delivered complete to the steep site where it rests on beams supported on concrete piles.

Inside, the warm plywood is exposed and seats are arranged step like so large and small children alike can look out over the forest. It is a decent little contribution to the notion of public realm for a country community.

ENEIL WILLIAMS