Art & Architecture

A pleasant period piece by a renowned Quebec modernist architect, this station is mostly made up of curved lines. In particular, the transept volume tends to an oval shape, rather than the usual rectangle-with-curved-top plan typical to stations built in tunnel.

Where the platform caverns intersect with the transept, the shape is emphasized as an elliptical tunnel clad with flat false walls. However, even within the flat-walled sections, the stainless-steel bench enclosures take up the curvature of the central volume again.

The central portion of the station is mainly in concrete painted white; the curved transept ceiling is emphasized with rounded square coffers. The walls in the cavern sections and the ends of the transept vault are clad in grey granite, and the station’s floors are done in attractive, irregularly-shaped stone. On either side of the crossover, screen walls concealing the side staircases are accented with grey-brown ceramic tiling with a brown and orange dart pattern, created by ceramicist Claude Vermette.

One striking feature at the crossover level are the stairwell mouths descending to the platforms from the middle of the path, supplementing the open stairwells on either side of the crossover. The central stairwell leading to the Côte-Vertu platform takes the shape of a shallow, bandshell-shaped bay.

The one to the Montmorency platform is surrounded by a free-standing trapezoid-shaped balustrade, and opens onto the middle of the corridor between the trainroom and the stairwell to street level. Its shape echoes and forms an axis with the impressive pyramid-shaped dome that tops this space, admitting sunlight through a light shaft, and ultimately with the inverted-pyramid-shaped lantern that caps the skylight at surface level.

The central stairwell up to the single headhouse is lit by a clerestory skylight overhead, set in the headhouse’s sloped roof. The ticket hall is located at street level.

The headhouse is an elongated concrete structure, separated from Rue Beaubien behind a tall apartment building, and running alongside a bus loop. Its footprint is a plain rectangle, but its roof rises in a towering wing containing the clerestory windows that light the stairwell. Beside the headhouse, a sheltering concrete colonnade runs along the length of the bus loop, while another wraps around to the front of the apartment block, providing a covered path to the main street.

Behind the headhouse stands the station’s most extravagant element: a huge, twisted inverted pyramid, capping off a light shaft that illuminates the landing between the stairwell and transept. The playful but monumental structure, breaking with the symmetry elsewhere in the station, is a final Modernist tour de force in the architect’s unique style.