Montgomery BART Station Redesign
This transit redesign project was a hypothetical project designed in the spring of 2012 for a California College of the Arts studio course. Taking the Montgomery BART station as its site of intervention, it sought to give users of the station a more immersive, responsive experience while simultaneously opening up the station to light and air. By routing all traffic to a subterranean level, the street becomes a pedestrian haven in a bustling part of the city. This project won the Donghia Foundation award in the summer of 2012.
Basic diagram of the station and its functionality
longitudinal section of the new transit station
transverse section of the new station
3D model depicting the subterranean traffic flow deck and tunnel infrastructure
exploding axonometric drawing of the station and its basic components
plan view of the deck level
Market street-level plan view of the new station with sun deck cut away at the cutting plane
BART-level plan view of the station. (note: brown is infill/dirt/foundations)
rendering of the station as encountered on Market Street, facing west
rendering depicting an east-facing view of the sun deck, and escalators heading down to the platforms
rendering depicting the experience of descending down into the station's platforms
rendering depicting a street-level view underneath the sun deck, looking down into the large, open pit of the station
rendering depicting the mezzanine level ticketing area
rendering depicting BART platform. Noe that you can see the sky, and that the screens between passengers and trains are responsive to devices that are within proximity to them. The screen walls open when a train arrives.
The station is designed to facilitate projection and interaction among users. Responding to the proximity of the user's device, the station displays aesthetic preferences preselected by that user. In this way, specific sounds, colors and patterns selected by the user follow them around the station like an informatic cloud.
This (in hindsight mis)reading of Deleuze informed the project. The basic concept was that by generating a space that was both integrated and disintegrated within the logic of the city, the users might themselves become aware of their contingent uses of the city, and consider the city itself as having a plurality of functions, not all of which were to automatically accumulate to economic production and consumption. The station would function as a hinge between the utilitarian requirements of transit (as an elemental economic task to be performed), and a variety of undefined modes of urban existence that would ideally proliferate throughout the city, multiplying these hinges (or switches). As such, it was designed as a contagion--a virulent form of urbanism that exposes the inherent contingency of urban space by appearing and behaving differently from other transit centers, while simultaneously servicing the city dutifully.