Union Station Bus Terminal
Who would have imagined ten years ago that inter-city bus travel would be as popular as it is today? This document touches upon how the cache of American bus services is changing and with this change comes new demands on historical bus stations. The consolidation of bus service in Washington DC fostered new program needs at historically prominent Union Station. Studio Twenty Seven Architecture’s solution responds to the constraints of the site and fulfills the requirements of the project brief, addressing the needs of the passenger population. But it also takes the project to a higher level. We used the project to raise questions about the nature of travel in the 21st Century. In the process we also developed an innovative method to build a geometrically challenging structure on a limited budget. The result achieves Union Station’s desire for design excellence and it adds a new, small, but important icon within its walls.
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Built in 1908, Washington DC’s Union Station is an icon of the turn of the 19th century and the golden age of rail transport. Today, with a new turn-of-the-century not far behind us, Union Station is as vital as ever, even as the city and its transportation infrastructure continue to evolve. Maintaining Union Station’s position as Washington DC’s preeminent transport hub requires that we welcome change. Maintaining its importance as an urban icon requires that we embrace architectural evolution, while respecting history. The Union Station intercity bus transit pavilions, opening this summer of 2013, met both these challenges.
Under the visionary leadership of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation (USRC), invited the nation’s intercity bus carriers to make Union Station their single point of embarkment in Washington. Previously, most carriers were disbursed around the city, dropping off and picking up from designated curbside spots that provided no shelter, amenities, or clear wayfinding for passengers. Bringing these operators into the Union Station fold would mean a better travelling experience for passengers, and clearer city streets for all.
Beverley Swaim-Staley
President & CEO
Union Station Redevelopment Corporation
Additionally, the new location within the Union Station garage complex would allow for easy connection with national, regional and metropolitan rail systems, as well as easier access to sightseeing buses, and shuttles servicing the capital’s universities. Union Station had already had remarkable success providing space for new urban transport models such as Zipcar and Car2Go car sharing, the Bikestation storage and repair facility, and Capital Bikeshare programs. It seemed a natural fit to embrace the increasingly popular intercity bus carriers as well.
The only problem with bringing the buses to Union Station was the parking garage where the passengers would embark. The structure, an imposing concrete mass spanning a large portion of the rail yard, was purely utilitarian on the interior. There was no facility where passengers could buy tickets, grab a snack, and wait where they could see the buses coming and going. This facility was built for machines, not people; it would need an injection of humanity.
A shortlist of qualified architects was invited to submit their ideas. The problem had no easy solution. The site was neither interior nor exterior. Open to the air and the elements, the proposed solution had to provide a welcoming, comfortable, enclosed yet fully visible, environment within an aging structure that was neither warm nor inviting. The project could only occupy a small portion of the second floor of the parking deck, at a location dominated by escalators and limited by the movement of trains passing below.
This document explains the successful design by Studio Twenty Seven Architecture. Their solution responded to the constraints of the site and fulfilled the requirements of the project brief, addressing the needs of the passenger population. But it also took the project to a higher level. Studio Twenty Seven used the project to raise questions about the nature of travel in the 21st Century. In the process they also developed an innovative method to build a geometrically challenging structure on a limited budget. The result achieves Union Station’s desire for design excellence, and it adds a new, small, but important icon within its walls.
Concept I: Coffers and Columns
Method: Prefabrication
The coffer is an ubiquitous architectural element in Washington DC. Union Station’s iconic coffered ceilings are a classic example, a perfect application of this detail by the station’s architect Daniel Burnham. Our design approach abstracts the coffer to its essence and builds a new, whimsical space using the resulting extruded forms. These minimal coffers become columns, supporting and framing the proposed activities and programs of the redeveloped bus deck. The result is a new iconic element that playfully references the Beaux-Arts architecture of Union Station.
Concept II: Customized Universality
Method: Repurpose industrial modules
Using the modularity of the buses themselves as inspiration, the design team investigated ways to employ recycled shipping containers as program spaces. Each unit would be customized in a manner that made it unique while fulfilling its designated function. The models created for Union Station could then serve as templates to create others that could be deployed at intercity bus embarkments nationwide.
Concept III: Viewers and Views
Method: Site built light construction
This design approach proposes a new division of space that is both interior and exterior, using a grade change at the periphery of the plaza to open up new vistas. An observation deck winds around a new suspended volume that delineates the ticketing lobby, bathrooms, and offices. The deck gives views over the drama of the Amtrak platforms below, but also of the bus deck, creating a waiting area that is about more than just waiting for a bus, it is about the theatricality and excitement of travel.
“Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here”
Death Cab for Cutie, Body Meets Soul
Who would have imagined ten years ago that inter-city bus travel would be as popular as it is today? Since its heyday in the immediate post-war years, traveling by bus had steadily gone out of fashion as air travel became more convenient and less costly. Long-distance bus travel became the mode of last resort, and once-grand art deco and mid-century-modern bus stations became synonymous with urban decay and empty downtowns. But since September 11, 2001, with the imposition of new security regimes at airports, and increasing fuel costs globally, bus travel has had resurgence. Small, agile bus companies plying routes between specific cities tapped into a new market: the young, carless urbanite too busy to arrive at the airport two hours ahead of a flight, and too frugal to pay two hundred dollars to fly from New York to Boston. Competition spawned innovation and soon numerous carriers were offering wifi, movies and bike transport, all for a fraction of the cost of flying. The long-established legacy carriers soon got on board with the new generation, and by the beginning of this decade bus travel was back.
Todd Ray, AIA, Principal
Studio Twenty Seven Architecture
For cities, this presented a problem. The business model of the new, smaller carriers worked in part because they lacked the overhead of dedicated bus stations. Passengers were picked up and dropped off right on the street at specific locations. As more carriers popped up and their popularity surged, the number of buses idling for passengers became a new cause of congestion. Many cities have been unable to solve this problem. New York, for example, already has two large, overflowing bus terminals and the smaller inter-city carriers continue to embark from curbside. Washington DC, however, has been saved by Union Station.
Beginning in the summer of 2012, Union Station became the new central location for intercity bus travel in the nation’s capital. The transit center is located in an existing parking garage, suspended above the rail yard, and removed from the facilities and amenities of the majestic Beaux Arts masterpiece next door. Studio Twenty Seven Architecture was asked to design a solution that would provide amenities to the bus traveler without requiring them to leave the bus deck.
The design process began with research. Why this sudden need to aggregate intercity bus service into one facility? Why has bus travel become increasingly popular? What is the nature of travel, and what makes bus travel different?
While there are obvious economic reasons why bus travel makes sense, its recent success is based on factors other than cost. The return to popularity of bus travel is, in many respects, part of a larger phenomenon that can be roughly categorized as a collective search for tangibility, authenticity, solidarity, and a sense of place. This phenomenon also includes recent cultural shifts such as the return to high density living, shared asset models (Bikeshare, Zipcar), local food movements, and collective boot camp workouts. This shift coexists with technology that seems to offer the inverse – isolation under headphones and behind hand-held screens that endlessly distract. Somehow, in this mediated yet questing space, bus travel fits in. Bus travel is acceptable again because it has been reframed. Bus travel now has a new set of semiotics, and a new cultural ethos has embraced it.
Travel is, by nature, placeless. And placelessness has a two-fold meaning as it relates to travel: the placelessness of motion and the placelessness of points of departure and arrival. The first relates to the mental state we enter when we travel. It is a state that seems almost genetically programmed, as if we are channeling our nomadic, hunting and gathering ancestors. We search for signs and codes in our environment that help us understand where we are, even as that environment sweeps past. The unique codes become landmarks in our minds, the common ones merge into the background. This activity is both exciting and meditative. But the faster the mode of travel the more difficult it becomes to place oneself. This placelessness exists on a continuum. Travelling by bus is somewhere in the middle of that continuum as we now know it. Bus travel is more tangible, and more properly scaled to our inherent understanding of the world, than faster modes.
The second form of placelessness is a byproduct of modernity, as some cultural critics and geographers have claimed. 1 It is the placelessness of dross scape, the highway median and contemporary commercial environments. This placelessness exists because of the speed of development and the needs of market economies. The design prerogatives that brought us the shopping mall, the highway strip, fast-food and fast-fashion interiors, have also spawned placeless homogeneity in the places where travel happens. The experience of one airport merges with another. Our innate impulse to find codes and signs in our environment goes unused because all the codes and signs are the same as the last placeless place we were in. We end up stimulated yet bored, and the experience of travel is cheapened.
Studio Twenty Seven wished to respond to these two forms of placelessness in designing the bus deck pavilions. We wanted to appeal to the placeless mental state that is excited and challenged by travel, but subvert the placelessness of transition spaces common to airports, train stations, and parking garages. And we wanted to speak to the cultural shift that has made bus travel popular again.
1. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (1973); Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), Anne Buttimer (1976), and others.
We started by searching for a metaphor that signals these intentions, and we settled on that of a Zen rock garden. The most obvious connection was to the pure physicality of the site: a grey parking deck striated by travel lanes and dividing strips, in which we wished to strategically place small, iconic pavilions.
Secondarily, the meditative nature of the Zen garden, its implied field of movement sweeping around static formations, plays on the idea of travelers moving through the space, and alluded to the simultaneously exciting and meditative nature of travel.
Finally, our rock garden would not be a precious space, viewed but not touched; rather it would be a gritty, bustling space. A space where the theatricality common to the street would be in constant play in the garden, as trains and buses provide a continuous stream of new travelers and new interactions.
In this garden there are three pavilions. One of the pavilions serves as “rocks” in the field. This is formed from two natural, ovoid shapes, merged together to create a complex geometry. This pavilion contains the ticketing and shopping kiosks, two programs that would fit easily into a non-orthogonal form.
Another pavilion is the rock garden’s “pochi,” or meditation porch, over-looking the neighboring arrangement. This pavilion serves as a waiting space, with a wood and glass enclosure for hot and cold days and a bamboo-encircled open air deck for mild days.
The last pavilion contains restrooms. Due to trains running below, this pavilion had to be set off at a distance to accommodate its plumbing. Because of this, and the pavilion’s purely utilitarian function, we decided that it should simply say what it is. A recycled shipping container would serve as the armature for a discreet comfort station.
Once we were committed to this design, the biggest challenge was constructing the merged ovoid pavilion. There are many examples of successfully executed complex architectural geometries out there in the world today, but few of them were done quickly and on a small budget. The design team attempted multiple approaches to the problem, but the most cost effective was also the most traditional: enlisting a shipbuilder. The details of this part of the project are explained in an accompanying essay, but suffice to say the integrity of the overall approach hinged on the success of this particular component. Without it our Zen garden would revert back to a parking deck.
Lastly, we wanted an element that referenced both the Beaux-Art symbolism of the Daniel Burnham designed station next door, and contrasted with the semiotics of the logo-laden shopping and food courts it contained. We knew that the ovoid pavilion would have to be carved into to provide entry points and fenestration, so we took the opportunity to use those carving “planes” as a messaging surface. This surface would serve the same function as the classical frieze on Beaux-Arts buildings, where a story might be told in statuary, or the names of iconic personages might be inscribed. The design team settled on Death Cab for Cutie lyrics, translated into Morse code dots and dashes, and programmed into a 3D router. The resulting surface was painted a bright yellow and applied wherever the ovoid was carved out.
The final composition transforms a placeless place into a place for placelessness, where waiting for a bus inspires excitement for travel, incites the pleasurable theatricality of the street, and provokes a deeper reading of the signs and codes of the traveler’s environment. We hope that our project will help continue the renaissance of long-distance bus travel and add to the tradition of inspired design that Burnham’s Union Station, and the sleek bus depots of the mid- 20th Century represent.
Jonathan Grinham, Project Designer
Studio Twenty Seven Architecture
Since their debut, digital design and fabrication tools have driven innovation in architecture. However, to date, digital fabrication technologies are used mostly for high-profile, large-budget projects. This leaves a nagging doubt as to whether these tools are capable of addressing small scale and limited budget construction projects. For small projects, the gap between possibility and reality looms large. Below we explore three design and construction processes considered by Studio Twenty Seven Architecture to create the complicated geometry of a 500 square foot retail and ticketing pavilion on Union Station’s inter-city bus deck in Washington, DC.
In the end, only one of these processes was used to complete the project. However, we feel it is important to share the research into each alternative approach. Alongside the limitless terrain of virtual, digital landscapes within which many of today’s architectural muses reside, there is a complementary need for real-world applicability of these designs. Standard contract models, the skills of locally available workforce, fabrication technology, and limited client budgets, all conspire to suppress ambitious digitally derived projects. 1 This project successfully mediates the ground between a digital exemplar and traditional analog craft, creating a model for future practice.
As explained in the previous essay, Studio Twenty Seven Architecture was commissioned to design a waiting area, ticketing station and bathrooms, on the first level of a four story parking garage behind Union Station. The garage was recently repurposed as the terminus for Washington’s intercity bus traffic, but it lacked amenities for the passenger population. The site presented logistical difficulties for construction within these conditions, and the project schedule was considered fast track. 2
The decidedly unspectacular and spatially interrupted site suggested that each program piece be small and iconic, dramatic and inviting. To the design team, the transitional landscape of the bus deck called for a figural form, a pavilion that was to be an iconographic object within a field, but also accessible, and tactile, inviting interaction and commerce. The design team employed a metaphor derived from a Zen rock garden that would be a spatial and temporal signifier. Three options for this trope were developed, each based on a slightly different design and fabrication model. The design team felt that the only way to bring this project in on time and on budget was to consider multiple ways to create the project. Below we present each option.
- The construction of the pavilion was through a standard AIA Owner – Architect, and AIA Owner – Contractor model. Representative cost comparison used here is for the pavi