Art & Architecture

This station emphasizes lightness and space with its high volume and its wall cladding in pale bricks and travertine panels. The colours and materials were chosen to evoke the historic towns of Italy, in honour of the significant Italian population of the neighbourhood. The station’s graceful angles and lines, though contemporary in origin, have a timelessness in keeping with the ancient theme.

The deep, wide central volume was built cut-and-cover and clad in tawny-coloured bricks, while the ends of the trainroom were built in tunnel, with the walls clad in irregular travertine panels. The floors are paved with alternating sections of dark and light tawny ceramic tiles, separated by angular lines made of narrow stone slabs. The platform benches are made of wood, in keeping with the warm, earthy colours.

The platforms are enlivened by numerous small bas-reliefs by Jean-Charles Charuest, framed by the travertine wall panels. These works whimsically depict merchants and scenes from the nearby Jean-Talon Market.

Like all blue line stations, the station currently has part of each platform closed off to accommodate the six-car trains used on the line. However, uniquely, the open sections are widely offset from each other, each occupying the two-thirds of its platform at the tail end. This has the fortunate effect of allowing all the murals by Jean-Charles Charuest to be seen from an open part of one of the platforms, whether directly or across the tracks.

Above the trainroom, the stairwells lead to the low-ceilinged ticket hall, located just below street level; a parapet facing the gateline overlooks the volume and platforms.

From the turnstiles, a corridor, separated from the fare-paid zone by smoked transparent screens, leads back past the ticket hall to the Saint-Laurent Est entrance, which is integrated into the ground floor of a residential building. (There is an indoor access to the building, but it is either restricted to building occupants or closed entirely.)

Diagonally across the intersection stands the Saint-Laurent Ouest headhouse. The stairwell leading down to the ticket hall level actually forms a continuous space with the side volume next to the Saint-Michel platform, with the U-shaped staircase is suspended in space, supported by two imposing corbels. Fitted with fluorescent lights on its underside, the monumental staircase seems to hover in the high side volume, a striking element of the station.

The wall along the staircase is lined with a travertine dado featuring three more reliefs by Charuest. Then, in a dramatic touch, the travertine appears to spill down the high, angled wall of the side aisle and form another dado panel at the platform level, featuring a final, larger relief—an architectural and artistic gesture that ties the levels of the station together.