One of the highest-profile infrastructure improvements in the City of Vancouver, completed for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, was the $2 Billion Canada Line, the city’s newest extension of its rapid transit system. Connecting downtown Vancouver with the international airport and the City of Richmond, the Canada Line has both below grade and elevated alignment and stations with entry plazas at key locations along its route.
As part of a large P3 team and partner VIA Architecture, Architecture49 provided the architecture for a selection of key stations including Bridgeport, Marine Drive, City Centre, and Yaletown, and provided full conceptual design for all 17 stations during the proposal stage.
“In helping to prepare the City of Vancouver for the Olympics, we faced intense time and budget pressures. The Canada Line had to be a highly functional and beautiful transit system—in the end, it was completed on-budget and three months early. We worked collaboratively with the P3 team to ensure the end design did not only meet but exceeded the overall requirements, is a catalyst for transit oriented development, and will continue to operate well into the future.” Elisa Brandts, Former National Sector Leader, Transportation
From deep tunnel stations, shallow tunnel stations to elevated stations and urban plazas, the design of a transportation system is highly complex. Our scope included exit studies, platform sizing calculations, station, concourse and grade level capacity studies, transit oriented development studies and intermodal bus loops. The Canada Line spans two municipal authorities and travels through widely differing urban and suburban contexts. Construction included bored tunneling as well as cut and cover through dense urban environments with commercial and residential surroundings now enhanced through new transit oriented development.