Art & Architecture

This station is marked by simplicity in materials and layout. The cut-and-cover platform level takes the simple, elegant form of a plain rectangular prism, in equally simple materials: panels of orange glazed terra cotta blocks, stainless steel, glass, bare concrete, and black granite. The terra cotta panels form bays, flush with the surrounding concrete columns. Spotlights throw pools of orange and blue light onto the wall above each bay.

Wide staircases lead from the platforms to the crossover, glassed in for fire safety reasons, and on to the spacious ticket hall that opens directly onto it. The ticket hall forms a single continuous space with the very wide stair and escalator well up to the exits. This escalator well is topped with a clerestory window, to admit daylight and help passengers orient themselves.

Moreover, the stairs and escalators unload onto the sunken central part of an atrium facing a broad, two-storey glass wall that floods the space and the escalator well with light. Part of the sprawling entrance complex’s more idiosyncratic design, this split-level triangular atrium leads to staircases ascending to two exits at its opposite ends, at the acute-angled corners.

The triangular shape serves to unite the aboveground city and the metro. The right-angled sides of the triangle, with largely glass walls, emphasize the urban fabric by being set parallel to Boul. Cartier and Boul. des Laurentides, while its hypotenuse—highlighted by a stark black granite plane intersecting the building—lies parallel to the metro line. The triangular form is made more obvious by the roof, which slopes from the hypotenuse down to the right angle, making the shape more visible from the front.

The broad glass wall looks out onto an impressive sunken garden in front of the headhouse, a natural element designed to humanize the busy intersection and bring light and nature into the station. Several of the opaque walls feature clerestories to admit more light; clerestories are also found in the adjacent bus terminal.

This garden is the site of the station’s artwork, a tall stainless-steel spire set on the garden’s edge. The work by Jacek Jarnuskiewicz, entitled L’homme est un roseau pensant III (“Man is a thinking reed III,” based on a quotation from Blaise Pascal), has multiple meanings.

First, on a formal level, its verticality complements the horizontal spread of the headhouse. Second, the sculpture and the sunken garden together evoke a wetland, which in fact existed long ago where the station is now located; the sculpture could be a reed, as in its title, while its slender form could also suggest a marsh creature such as a heron, bittern, or dragonfly. Finally, the sculpture is meant to serve as a landmark, a beacon displaying the station’s presence in the neighbourhood.

The rear of the headhouse hosts a major terminus for Laval, metropolitan, and intercity buses. It consists of indoor waiting and commercial areas, two jetties hosting bus stops, and a 465-space park-and-ride lot. The terminal is accessed through the landing of the entrance at the southern end the atrium, as well as by the elevator from the metro ticket hall to the surface. A central hall leads to the bus platforms, while a wing to the south contains shops and services around a corridor leading to a ticket booth, the intercity bus stops, and the parking lot.

While the station was still under construction, the addition of a second entrance was announced, to allow safer access from the other side of the busy intersection of Boulevard Cartier and Boulevard des Laurentides. The new access was opened on May 22, 2009. Branching off from the sunken area of the main headhouse and skirting the edge of the garden, a long tunnel crosses under the intersection to emerge as a narrow covered entrance. This secondary headhouse is clad in the same materials as the main headhouse and also features its own small drop-off loop.

Overhanging the stairway inside the secondary headhouse, suspended from the ceiling, is an artwork by Yvon Proulx, a sculptural ensemble entitled Dessins suspendus (“suspended drawings”). This set of three suspended semicircular metal elements recalls the lily pads of the former wetland here, like Like Jacek Jarnuszkiewicz’s work. Its curved wires project patterns of shadow onto the ceiling and walls.