The inspiration for us was having seen the site it being a rather difficult site with the DLR and the
ExCeL Centre and the high voltage cables around, was to think of a way of making a station that
was easy. The air around here is very disparate, different kind of architecture, very open and we
wanted to establish the station as a building, and so the idea was to produce a very gridded
plan with a series of standard bays and really produce a structure that was legible as a built
form. We had inspiration sort of from a Greek temple with the long row of columns and beams
so the public concourse at the upper level is very simply that nature, and then on the roadside on
the Victoria Dock Road side you have a series of standard six-meter bays, twelve of them producing
quite a long elevation on the street. It's a two level station, the concourse is at the upper level
the platforms at the lower level and it's attached at one end to a public bridge which runs from the
ExCeL Centre through to the VDR Victoria Dock Road and then connections to the DLR station
at Custom House as well so that the access is through a bridge connection from the south or
from a lift and staircase connection from the north from the street level,
and so the passengers come on the concourse at the upper level it's about 18 meters long very clear
open, open-sided deliberately give a sense of safety and security being an open feeling,
and then there are within one side of the plan on the upper level there are areas to drop down,
escalators, stairs, lifts to take you down to the platform level so very simple legible plan really.
The engineering challenges were quite large not least because of the proximity of the high voltage
cables, the working DLR train line, so an active railway line next door to you so in the end when
we started looking at the detailed design it was working out a way of making the parts that could
be built off site, made of site and brought on site with cranes and in fact the contractor
produced an A-Frame and rails in the track beds on either side of the platform and worked its way
from one end to the other so the components of the station, the columns and beams and floor sections
were made in a factory driven here in a big truck and then loaded up onto the crane and dropped on
site, very very simple straightforward exercise starting from one end and finishing the other.
The pre-cast pre-made prefabricated systems that were used were key to making the station
a smooth operation in terms of build and also in the end we could control the quality of materials
by making them in a factory rather than on-site so the amount of wet trades was kept to a limit
and progress was very very good through the build. Concrete is the main component for the
structure for the beams, columns and floors and then on the upper level we've used ETFE which
is a plastic material as a roof covering which is very robust and durable has been used a lot
in different locations like down in Cornwall of the wonderful biodomes
but basically it's a pillow with two layers of ETFE with a very slight pressurization so it's
slightly pumped up and that produces a translucent light onto the concourse
and then the floor is granite a simple hard-wearing material that will last forever.
This station is above ground and it's the only station which is outward facing outward looking
naturally lit and so there's very little requirement to have some of the components
that were designed for the tunnel sections we do have roundels obviously we do have some seating
we do have elements of signage and wayfinding and lighting which are
common but I'd say it was a fairly low percentage in relation to the underground stations.
You'd think the building would be set up to run orthogonal to the railway lines everything's at
90 degrees to each other and we could have built the building in that way but actually we reacted
to the existing topography and the road network which arrives on the railway line the slight
angle of 18 degrees and so we thought wouldn't it be nice if we just took that that original
historical line and rotated all the elements of the building around to produce this 18 degree
angle so though the setting out is very logical on six meter bays everything is then twisted to
produce this 18 degree angle a bit like a fish spine so everything is slightly rotated to the to
the axis and so we put that in the floor finishes so that every piece of paving is a parallelogram,
every column is a parallelogram, all the lines instead of being orthogonal at 90 degrees are
18 degrees off that and this produces a rather strange effect on perspective because your eyes
kind of use lines to dictate distance and because this is a slightly rotated line
it puts everything in perspective as opposed to in parallel it's kind of an interesting effect,
I like it, it kind of makes the station a little more interesting to look at.
Well the challenges are really the site context has been the most challenging element safety is
paramount in relation to live railway lines and DLR in particular and so the way the crane worked
and the timings of lifting and putting materials on site was carefully managed and orchestrated.
What we're really looking forward to is having people use it and for me to witness that, that
way they do because I think I know how they'll do it but until they do I won't know that
and I think for architects quite a lot of our design is done in a vacuum in the sense
the end user is part of the client briefing but in the end, in a transportation scenario
anybody will use the station and there's no brief for them. They want to get to
work or they want to get home so I think it'll be interesting how they circulate
I think with the Elizabeth line in particular because people know where the exits are at
various stations, because the platforms are so long you'll probably get congregations of people
where the exits are where they get out so it might be a station where you have clusters of people and
no one there because it's the middle of the train or the end of the train so be quite interested
to just see how humans start using the station so that's what I'm looking forward to