Suburban surrealism: a moribund town square in a Rouen suburb has been transformed by a series of idiosyncratically inventive structures housing a new bus station and tram stop

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1997

Sotteville-les-Rouen is a sprawling and generally undistinguished southern suburb of Rouen. The main square with the town hall occupies a wedge of land between modest suburban villas and an array of austere post-war housing blocks. When Rouen city council decided to construct a tramway linking the city's main railway station with the outlying suburbs, the Sotteville municipality seized the chance to invigorate its moribund main square with a development competition for a new transport interchange. The brief also called for shops, an underground car park and a marketplace.

The competition was won by the Italian architect Alessandro Anselmi, who has transformed the square with a series of exuberant, zoomorphic insertions. The largest of these is a vast curved roof that envelops the bus station, its steel cladding punctured by rows of angular spines, like some giant antediluvian carapace, or partially balding porcupine. An inclined lighting tower with an angular beaked head is skewered into the roof beside the entrance, giving the complex increased visibility from a distance. Huddled beneath the eye-catching vault are a row of bus stances and small shop kiosks, clad in diamond-shaped metal panels redolent of shimmering fish scales.

The bus station is located on the north-west edge of the square, parallel with the main tram route. Behind it, a curved ramp leads down to subterranean parking for 140 cars. Directly in front of the bus station vault is a drop-off point and taxi rank, and beyond that a dramatically cantilevered canopy that houses the tram terminus. Extemporising further on the biomorphic theme, the ribcage canopy structure resembles the skeletal vestige of a long-extinct behemoth. Both bus station and tram canopy are painted a soothing municipal pistachio.

In Anselmi's restless imagination, quotidian objects are elevated to pieces of sculpture, betraying influences from Calder to the Constructivists. Yet his capacity for apparently wilful inventiveness serves to elevate and enliven the essentially mundane act of catching a bus and even the smallest detail is subject to imaginative attention. For example, the shelters where passengers wait for their trams are conceived as fluid, wave-like canopies with elegantly undulating bench seating. The accumulation of these effects transforms space and function into a coherent, animated and civilised whole. Here, the inherent dreariness associated with bus travel is replaced by constant surprises and delights. Moreover, the main square has been instilled with a degree of order and civic focus, evolving from featureless prairie to bustling landmark filled with visual incident. Anselmi has also designed hard landscaping for the proposed marketplace in the centre of the square, which will be built in a second phase of work. Meanwhile, Sotteville appears to relish its fantastical new identity.