Why Grand Central Works

Grand Central Terminal. Why does it work so well? Listen to Vishaan tell it like it is. First, he reflects on some design details of the spectacular Main Concourse. Next, he wanders down Park Avenue and shares some of the history of how private sector competition led to a major public amenity and transformed the entire metropolitan region. Then he explores the terminal’s tentacular North-end Access and reflects further on how the terminal has transformed urban and regional economies. Finally, as he delves into the food court, he ponders lessons to be learned from Grand Central that could be applied to Moynihan Station.

Main Concourse

Lesson #1: Design matters. Beyond the obvious grandeur of its public spaces, Grand Central relies on a sophisticated layering of uses that has influenced the design of airports and train stations around the world.

Park Avenue and Midtown East

Lesson #2: The building is only part of a larger exercise in citymaking. Grand Central catalyzed the development of some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
“It’s more than just the building. It’s about how hundreds of thousands of people move around a region.”

North-end Access

Lesson #3: Plan for phases. Grand Central wasn’t built in a day, and part of what makes it work can be found in the less than glamorous network of pedestrian access passageways.
"All great train stations… have tentacles that reach out into the city. There’s not just a front door."

Lessons for Moynihan Station

Lesson #4: Think big. If we could make a commuter terminal this nice – and one that’s had such wide-ranging urban and metropolitan ramifications – imagine what we could do with a major inter-city regional rail hub?
"Train stations still have an openness about them. … as hubs [they] speak to the nature of the city that’s around them."

Click UrbanOmnibus to listen to 3 audio uploads of insightful reflections on a successful train station.

References for the Benchmark Projects

There are comprehensive introductions, some analysis and limited amount of illustrations in the following 2 books for these 5 stations:

• Hauptbahnhof - Lehrter Bahnhof , Berlin
• Santa Justa Train Station, Seville
• Arnhem Central Station, Arnhem
• Oslo Central Station, Oslo
• Amsterdam Bijlmer ArenA, Bijlmermeer

2 Books:

• Alessia Ferrarini (2004): Railway Staions, from the gare de l'est to penn station.
• Chris van Uffelen (2010): Stations.

Kelly Shannon + Marcel Smets's: The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010) is a good source to not only look at stations (very limited illustrations though) but to generate useful "frames" for analysis.

You can find Tschumi's station project in 2 phases from his Event Cities, vol-2 and Vol-4. Ingenhoven's Stuttgart Main Station is well published and make sure you focus on the main design features and its attitude toward urbanism and ecological concerns. Calatrava is an architect popular among general public so you want to make sure that the materials you've selected for benchmark study are not mere the repetition of fashionable "sound bites". There is a short essay by Kenneth Frampton assessing this early transportation work of Calatrava's under rather positive light. It is a must for exercise 1: "Calatrava at Stadelhofen", A+U, No.8 (251), August 1991. Project introduction with a few good context dwgs is includede in the same issue.

Be sure to look for monographs and collected works of each architects too. You want your analysis to be rich, thorough and carried by rigorous scrutinization: quality analysis + essential dwgs + essential dwgs!!

For example, Antonio Cruz and Antonio Oritz have their works published in quite a few beautifully produced books with inspiring essays written by other Spanish architects. You want to get that special quality of Spanish urbanism.

Do look into architect's office website as well as research for reputable sources via Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals database (you can access it via our main library's Sirius).

As to the 4 architectural movements:

1) Archigram (England) + The Situationist International and Constant’s New Babylon: plenty of books out there with lots of dwgs and research findings.
2) Drosscape (Alan Berger) + Periphery as Project (Manuel de Solà-Morales): I have given you one article by Berger and you can find a copy of Drosscape in our main library. The latter article is from Manuel de Solà-Morales's recent book: A Matter of Things (2008). Our library has a copy and it is available so you better be fast...
3) Megastructure of the 60s & 70s: you need to check out Reyner Banham’s Megastructure:Urban Futures of the Recent Past (1976). Go over it and organize the key ideas + works. Is this notion of a megastructure in architecture still relevant in nowaday? How does it compare with the large scale urban project fueled by infrastructural desing?
4) Japanese Metabolism Group: lots of research out there. make sure you get your hands on the A+U & JA special issues around that period, early 60s. They are just amazing, hand drawn futuristic stuffs.. Pay attention to Kenzo Tange's Tokyo Plan and later on, Fumihiko Maki's idea of "Master Form" in his Toward Group Form (1960), co-author with Masato Ohitaka. By the way, Maki will be the keynote speaker for next week's RAIA Conference in Melbourne!

Let's have the group list posted here:

Group 1
Amahl
Chenxi
Jimmy



Group 2
Linda
Scott
Matthew

Group 3
Kevin
Sherwin
Zhengyang


Group 4
Josh
Joyce
Simon

Please consult Course Outline for your assigned benchmark projects + architectural movements.

What is a Park - Landscape or Infrastructure?

These images are from archinet.com. Read it for an interesting discussion between Nam Henderson and Gerdo Aquino on infrastructure as a theoretical "tool" for the practice of landscape architecture. Please read between the lines and consider how can some of the ideas help you re-conceptualize a train station.

3 Videos

1 - Maarten van Acker: Re-tracing the Ringscape - Infrastructure as a Mode of Urban Design (2009)  via Vimeo

2 - Stan Allen: Pavilions and Fields: Beyond Landscape Urbanism (2009)

3 - Marcel Smets + Kelly Shannon: The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010) - 

Click on: Video

The design of infrastructure is a formative element of the contemporary landscape. It inevitably produces a physical presence that affects its environs and constitutes a layer of a new totality. Infrastructure is not just an isolated entity for organizing transport or generating motion. It acts as the cornerstone for generating an inclusive new environment.

In this lecture, Marcel Smets will analyze the basic attitudes that dominate the design of transport infrastructure in the world today. He characterizes five basic approaches:
- Hiding
- Camouflage
- Assimilation
- Detachment
- Fusion

Each of these design approaches will be clearly identified and amply illustrated by archetypical examples of different programmatic nature (roads, bridges, parking, rail, and airport infrastructures). Indirectly, the lecture pleads for a more integrated design effort that addresses a new public space typology. Such conception of infrastructure as an inclusive landscape design is presented as a major requirement for enhancing the quality of today's built environment.

Preparing For The Start - Before WK7

If you are determined to join this studio, please check back regularly. We will post "materials" to get you start.

These are two videos of one talk by Alan Berger who coined the term drosscape in his book Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, 2006. An earlier essay by Lars Lerup has called to attention the rising reality of "Stim & Dross" in the metropolis (Assemblage, No. 25, Dec., 1994.).

Our aim is to first introduce the idea and observation presented by Alan Berger then make a conceptual shift to consider the Centre | Periphery dichotomy as inflicted by transit network in Sydney.

We will introduce a set of questions to get you start in next posting.

CUSP* Conference 2009

Part 1 0f 2


Part 2 of 2


* - CUSP is a conference about 'the design of everything,' bringing together thinkers, innovators, performers, skeptics, believers, visionaries and explorers from the arts, sciences, technology, business and design. Cusp Conference is for anyone who believes that the best way to predict the future is to design it.

Studio Synopsis

          Graphic Design by Leo Wang, 2009.

“Basically, along with construction techniques, there’s always the construction of techniques, that collection of spatial and temporal mutations that is constantly reorganizing both the world of everyday experience and the esthetic representations of contemporary life. Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonics of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special effects which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment.”

Paul Virilio, Lost Dimension, p.21


“One may object that the megaform approach gives sufficient attention to the transport infrastructure or, conversely, that the physical form of the city is of little consequence in a telematic age. Alternatively, one may claim that urban culture in a classical sense can only be reconstituted typologically, or, conversely, that the traditional context of the historical city is no longer pertinent. Each of these polarized positions seem to be somewhat evasive to the extent that they fail to confront the responsibility of giving an identifiable shape or inflection to the late modern megalopolis.”

Kenneth Frampton, Megaform as Urban Landscape, p.39


The contemporary transport hub although originated from C-19’s conquest and mastery of space and time, is no longer just a node of circulatory system. From a mere “improvised shambles” in its 1830’s inauguration, railway station has been integrated into a web of motion, communication, organization, exchange and public works that is the lifeline of a modern city. This ‘infrastructure’ creates a living condition of experiencing endless spatial continuity and localized discontinuity simultaneously. The constant flux in-between the public and private realms accelerated by the network of transportation has, in the meantime, inflicted the continuous order of urban fabric and its social form. A kind of residual/empty spaces where there are no continuity, repetition or system, the so-called ‘drosscape’, become more dominating than the constructed urban fabric in the recent landscape of infrastructure.


For the third instalment of this studio, following Placing Motions (2009) and Staging the Public (2010), the Re-conception of a Train Station will focus on the architectural proposition for the spaces lying on the boundary between Centre | Periphery brought forth by a new train station and its transit networks. Students are encouraged to research on this edge condition and develop architectural + urban strategies that will either bridge, further isolate, or insert a new urban system into the vertiginous terrain accentuated by the juxtaposition of train station, railway, public domain + landmarks, existing urban fabric + circulatory system, and topography in Sydney.


2 exercises in 3 parts will be commenced after WK6. They will lead students to the final design proposal to be presented on the 3rd of June and submitted in bound booklet on the 10th of June.


Students start by working in groups for the Mapping Exercise and Typological Analysis. Sydney as a city of infrastructure and the train station as a building type will be the focus. A list of benchmark projects will be provided in WK6. Followed by Siting a Typology Exercise in WK9, three stations in metropolitan Sydney are introduced as the project sites with each presenting a different site condition + urban context: Milsons Point – Lavender Bay Station, Redfern Station and Artarmon Station. Each student is encouraged to define and identify the Centre | Periphery conditions + their architectural elements based on the research of one chosen or assigned station. The idea is to have all 3 stations designated so the studio as a whole can benefit from working on the same building type embedded in three different urban contexts along one rail line.


Other than in-scale site models, conceptual models and drawings representing the particular characteristics, mechanisms, organizations and qualities of a city infrastructure; writings, 3D animation and/or film are all encouraged. Students will be asked to employ architectural knowledge, skills and discipline to carry on the research of one particular station. Informed by the critical study of the benchmark projects and with the Sydney infrastructure in mind, each student will propose a re-conceptualized train station from the given 3 sites. At the end of the cycle, a programme for a train station design positioned by a set of architectural + site planning strategies for Centre | Periphery dichotomy will be the main focus of the final presentation.


In session II, all efforts are to be focused on the design of a re-conceptualized train station. This part of the studio will run as an atelier. Weekly attendance is crucial unless otherwise noted. Since this is a project-oriented studio, diverse approaches in design and the tools to evaluate the competing forces in larger scale + public buildings will lead the weekly discussion and informal pin-ups. Guest critic of particular focus will join the atelier as often as possible. A structured timetable and weekly task will be provided before the beginning of session II.

Week 1

Ramin + Shaowen welcome you all. Please bring in your materials for the assigned presentation as stipulated by Professor Ruan.

We will start at 2 PM sharp. Since this is our first studio, please do come in earlier to set up the screen + laptop. It is not compulsive, however, it is highly plausible if you can bring in one set of conceptual diagrams + models for each of the projects you are analyzing on top of the powerpoint slides.

See you all in the studio.