By Cara Waters
Beneath the city streets, the Melbourne Metro is getting closer to completion. Escalators have been installed, light fittings are in place and paving stones are being laid.
The lead architect for the $12 billion project, Ivan Harbour, is confident Melburnians will be blown away by the city’s five new underground stations: Arden, Parkville, Town Hall, State Library and Anzac.
Daylight streams into the Melbourne Metro station under construction at Parkville.Credit: Joe Armao
“The scale is phenomenal,” Harbour says. “They are cathedrals under the ground. I think the scale will be something that will certainly make you stop and look.”
The stations are not due to open until 2025, with a year set aside for testing trains once they are completed. But The Age undertook a tour of the construction sites known collectively as the Metro Tunnel.
The Parkville station sits 25 metres blow Grattan Street and will provide access to the University of Melbourne and the hospitals precinct.
At the platform level, automatic glass doors synchronised to open at the same time as the train doors create an air and safety lock for commuters, who will then walk out onto the broad platform.
Harbour wants to “hero the engineering” and “hero the concrete” which is left exposed alongside bright pops of orange and yellow in fittings, representing Melbourne’s sunrise.
“It’s a celebration of movement,” Harbour says. “It’s about shifting Melburnians through the city as rapidly as possible and just to be able to celebrate that and make it a really uplifting experience.”
The platforms are 19 metres wide and run to 220 metres in length. Melbourne Metro claims that make them some of the longest train platforms in the world.
“We are designing for the future,” Harbour says. “It’s 2050 onwards and so the scale of the stations is predicting an uptake as Melbourne grows, to take on numbers that the experts believe will be met at that point in the future. So they will feel extremely spacious on day one.”
The “MM” symbol for “Melbourne Metro” is used throughout the stations including on these “cockatoo” light fittings at Arden station. Credit: Joe Armao
Up the 32-metre-long escalators, commuters will emerge onto the main concourse where light spills in from skylights.
“We’re trying to get the daylight as far into these stations as we can so that you don’t feel that you come out into the bright Melbourne sun and squint as you exit,” Harbour says.
“It’s more of a subtle transition. We get daylight right down to platforms in a couple of the stations and that’s pretty amazing actually, it really feels uplifting.”
While the architecture of each station is different, there are unifying design features such as small metal “MM” symbols for Melbourne Metro on ducts and bright yellow drum lights.
Ivan Harbour, the lead architect of the Melbourne Metro stations, at the Arden station.
“All of those light fittings are being done with that amount of flair and a level of enjoyment and fun,” Harbour says. “It’s not overly mannered, they’re just beautiful spaces formed by the engineering and there is a level of sophistication in the bits and pieces that bring a human scale to those huge spaces.”
Harbour says compared to the Tube in his home town of London – which is “sort of a nightmare” – the Melbourne Metro will deliver efficiency, but in a way that feels more pleasant.
“In a world of social media and trillions of images flying around at any point in time, I suspect there’ll be a lot of so-called Instagram moments,” he says. “I think that’s a delightful thing.”
The cost of the Melbourne Metro has blown out by $2.7 billion since work first commenced with taxpayers set to fork out more than $1 billion extra, but Harbour says there is value in having more than just basic, utilitarian stations.
“Producing a Metro is a big civic move for a city,” he says. “Pride in your city is something that something like the Metro can represent and of course you can do it in a minimal way, but I think the perceived savings in making something as minimal as possible are massively offset by the advantages in making something more generous.”
Harbour says the Melbourne Metro is designed to make the daily commute more enjoyable and uplifting and encourage more people to use public transport.
If the Metro can’t make riding public transport a pleasant experience, “you’re more likely to go back to your car, sit in the traffic jam and make the traffic jam worse,” he says.
1. Arden
The entrance to Arden station in North Melbourne is a large building made from 100,000 bricks and features huge arches.
A construction worker inside the entrance to Arden station. Credit: Joe Armao
“It has one entrance and that entrance is celebrated,” Harbour says. “It connects with Arden’s recent history of having an industrial past, so we played on that. The building feels slightly industrial, very matter of fact, actually quite extraordinary in its form.”
2. Parkville
“It has a very modest expression on the surface, just a very simple glass canopy, very low key,” Harbour says of Parkville station.
Installation of the interiors of the Parkville station for the Metro Tunnel.Credit: Joe Armao
“This was about trying to have a minimal impact on the street and to celebrate the trees that will be replanted in it. So in the future it becomes a real avenue and that avenue you’ll be able to see from the station.”
3. State Library
The entrance to the station is a “big vertical space” opposite the State Library. “It’s not trying to compete with the library, but it’s got a robustness about it and a big opening that you can see right away down into the concourse from the street and then obviously vice versa,” Harbour says.
An artist’s render of the platform at the State Library station.
The design is “trinocular” with a central cavern and a rail tunnel on either side. This creates a wide open space with the concourse and platforms on a single level.
“There’s three vaults, the central vault that you move through and two side vaults with the platforms rather like the Moscow Metro,” Harbour says. “They are real cathedrals underground.”
4. Town Hall
Harbour says Town Hall station stands out through its connection to City Square. The station creates “a square under a square”.
An artist’s render of the entrance to the Melbourne Metro Town Hall station.
“You exit facing the Town Hall,” he says. “So there’ll be a really interesting relationship with the Town Hall and there’s a very modest canopy that floats above the square.”
Below the square there is another huge space that Harbour says has the working title “the crypt”. “It’s a vast, great space full of activity and the thoughts are that it can take on all sorts of extracurricular activities and really become a real city space.”
5. Anzac
Anzac station, opposite the Shrine of Remembrance, is closer to the surface than many of the other stations.
An artist’s render of the concourse of the Anzac station opposite the Shrine of Remembrance.
“It’s really the first one to become very visible with this rather beautiful toroidal form, which is sort of inside a bicycle inner tube,” Harbour says.
“It creates almost a portal that celebrates the view up towards the shrine itself, but also protects people as they exit in and out of the station below.”
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