The Station
Site: Providence, RI
Fall 2021 Studio
Instructor: Malcolm McCullough
The Station aims to organize the necessary programmatic elements of a train station in a rational way to provide optimal movement through space, while also discovering what else it can bring to its community. Interested in the pedestrian experience, I looked at the different directions people would approach the site and wanted to understand how that movement towards the site could transition into movement through the building. After studying many existing train stations, I looked to Torino’s Porta Nuova, for two architectural elements that would inspire the form of my design in Providence. Those are the grand arrival hall and the walkway created around the building by the arcade. The perimeter walkway wraps around the building and provides the first layer of entrance into the station from all three sides someone can approach. From this first layer of the building, people are directed into the arrival hall that spans the entire height of the building, connects both major roads, and acts as the divider of the building into two parts. The whole form of the building follows the same organizational logic that the layout of the columns present and the grid it begins to form.