Canada Water

Signals are neccessary to orient pedestrians as they move through the urban fabric. The Canada Water Station successfully demonstrates the effectiveness of architectural form as a signal. The notion of a beacon exemplified here, is justified in any vast landscape that lacks meaningful qualitative differentiation of spaces.The drum-like form of the ticketing pavilion suggests a point at which the energy of the horizontal flow is transformed into the vertical vortex that leads to the underworld. From within, the volume created by this form can inform the travelers of the activity in which they are emersed. There is a heightened awareness of a directional shift in movement.

Program

The Jubilee Line Station at Canada Water had to act as a beacon, calling itself out amid an amorphous landscape of crumbling industrial sheds and low- and high-rise housing projects. Above grade a canopy for connecting bus lines was required. Inside, the station had to offer a clear means of conveying passengers from street level to the existing East London line, then down another level to the Jubilee Line tunnels.

Engineering

Most of the below-ground areas were created using conventional cut-and-cover, reinforced-concrete construction. One area was built top down, beneath a site-cast slab, to minimize disturbance to neighbours.

Glass-roofed canopies, supported by tubular trusses branching from a single row of columns protect passengers as they enter the drumlike entrance pavillion (image to left).

The metal-clad canopies for the bus station cantilever from a square "beam" built up from rods and cables, tipped on its edge, and wrapped in glass.

Expression

The lanternlike glazed drum of the ticketing pavilion signaling the presence of the Underground line "has created status almost overnight," says JLE Architects' Roland Paoletti. The glassed-in truss supporting the bus canopy refracts daylight into the usually dim recesses of the bus loading area.

Elevators and stairs are massed under the entrance pavilion in an abstract sculptural composition (image to left). A curving wedge of space unites the two below-grade lines. An oval opening divided by columns leads travelers to the existing East London line. Another similar stair drops one level more to the new Jubilee Line. Daylight from the ticketing hall penetrates to the new platfroms (1st image).