Southern skies; Doing what they do best: Grimshaw re-create Melbourne's Spencer Street station

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2007 by Rebecca Roke

Until recently, Melbourne's Docklands were characterised as grubby, dangerous territory to the west of Robert Hoddle's civilised nineteenth-century city grid. Scruffy, industrial and weathered this was Melbourne's badlands: off the grid, off the radar and neglected even by industry as modernised shipping methods pushed dock action further south. Similar to the redevelopment of other docklands such as Canary Wharf, the rich pickings of a brownfield site adjacent to the CBD didn't lie fallow for long. In the early 2000s, several large-scale infrastructure works including the extension of Collins Street and Bourke Street began to reach into what were the bowels of the docks and provoke numerous commercial and residential projects and several notable new public facilities, the Telstra Dome stadium--hallowed ground for footy fans--among them.

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In popular memory, however, despite government and private investment, the poor reputation of Docklands extended to the accompanying Spencer Street railway station, which acted as a wall to civility, shielding the less gentrified western city edge from the wasteland beyond with a down-at-heel International Style facade and sodden network of underground tunnels. The punters might have had a football oval to accompany their pies and chips, but getting to and from the venue was problematic and confusing.

Now, the newly coined Southern Cross Station by Grimshaw architects, in association with Jackson Architecture, sits on the cusp of this intersection between old and new. Sweeping across a city block it simultaneously envelops and exposes the workings of a station beneath its undulating roof and as a gleaming civic beacon it also serves to restructure the city edge. Unlike its awkward predecessor, the civic responsibility of this primary transport hub, which accommodates all Melbourne's public transport--airport shuttle, local and interstate trains, trams, buses and cars--is proudly addressed and clearly delineated, much like its astral namesake.

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Though aerial images of the roof make for eye-catching tourist postcards, it is the careful reorganisation of platform and concourse arrangements that underpin the structure of its shiny landscape and allow commuters easy and connected navigation. An initial, crucial move was to shift the existing terminating platforms north to create space for a shared concourse, prioritising the main entry at Collins and Spencer Streets and providing a seamless transition from street to station. Unlike the heroic architectural and pedestrian sequences experienced in termini such as Grand Central or London's Paddington Stations, here, circulation is appropriate to the informal nature of much of Australia's public domain. The primary Spencer Street edge allows for the casual yet efficient ferrying of its 55 000 daily passengers from train to city and back again, through breezy openings in the glazed facade. A similar strategy is used for the upper concourses that disperse crowd flows to and from the raised Collins and Bourke Street levels through a series of retail and entertainment venues.

The introduction of mixed-use development draws on Grimshaw's extensive experience--Waterloo International Station (AR September 1993), for example--in analysing how hubs of activity may be generated by loading a site with heavily themed experiences secondary to the business of getting from A to B.

What Southern Cross Station shares with the grand railway experience is an almost Gothic awe conjured by the audacious roof fabric, which meshes concerns for an environmentally responsive answer to removing polluted diesel fumes with the pragmatic constraints of rebuilding over a functioning station. The passive ventilation system allows each of the aluminium domes to collect hot, foul air through gaps between the ceiling panels and extract the heated mass out through louvred Venturi caps that respond to Melbourne's prevailing north-west and south-west winds. In response to the air currents and platform orientation, the sinuous structure weaves in slight misalignment to Hoddle's grid. From above, the ETFE seams between domes clearly delineate this while below, the slices of daylight further propel the eye along and through the overarching canopy out to distant vistas. It seems Grimshaw's professed admiration for structures such as Brunel's Paddington Station, has here used environmental logic to improve the workings of a barrel vault system and simultaneously draw analogies to natural forms such as sand dunes, which seem apposite for a country that is greedily lapped up by deserts.

Within the main skin, road-sign yellow coloured service pods hover on tapered steel legs and read strongly against the restrained palette of aluminium, steel and concrete, accentuating operations areas and forming a secondary landscape. Also obvious to the visitor beneath the branched steel canopy are the weighty spine trusses that march like great tree trunks along the platforms and perimeter, carrying the distinctive arched roof. They are rather imposing against the relative delicacy of the tessellated ceiling panels and glazed facades, yet their solidity gives the requisite strength for each ceiling span to be individually inserted. Impressively, corresponding to a tight schedule attuned to the station's minimal hours of slumber and the relative inaccessibility of rail tracks, each 20x8m span fitted precisely, with an 8mm tolerance achievable only through close and enthusiastic collaboration with the fabricators. This nods to the respect for craftspeople that characterises Grimshaw's remit and with it, its fascination in expressed tectonics. Unlike earlier projects that heavily draw the structure together with obvious bolts and welds, Southern Cross Station explores Grimshaw's tectonic capacity with the dexterity of computer-generated programs to create a complex, fluid connection of swooping forms that were worked on collaboratively by engineers and contractors for elegant final effect.