Art & Architecture

This fairly utilitarian station was the terminus of the original section of the green line from its opening in 1966 until its extension westward in 1978.

Built in open cut, it is centred on a broad ticket hall, built on a mezzanine, whose central concourse provides access to its underground city connections and to the De Maisonneuve exit.

The control zones at either end of the concourse form balconies that overlook the platforms, making the station feel more spacious, although these overlooks were enclosed around 2015-2016 with full-height glass windows for fire-safety reasons. Only the eastern row of turnstiles has a ticket booth.

The elevators between the ticket hall and the platforms are each enclosed in their own separate fare-paid zones, despite being located adjacent to the existing gatelines. The elevator to the Angrignon platform is located at the northeast corner of the ticket hall, extending along the hallway to the De Maisonneuve entrance. The elevator to the Honoré-Beaugrand platform is located at the southwest corner, next to the entrance to the Alexis Nihon complex, which was remodeled to accommodate it. There is no independent elevator to the street; the station relies on the elevator in the Alexis Nihon complex.

The walls are in brick glazed in various shades of beige, in a pattern reminiscent of the architects’ other station Place-des-Arts. The colours are matched with brown floor tiles. However, white bricks are used in the elevator alcoves on the platforms and the one serving the Honoré-Beaugrand elevator on the concourse.

On the north side of the ticket hall, black metal grilles separate the fare-paid zones (including the independent one leading to the elevator to the Angrignon platform) from the hallways leading to the De Maisonneuve and Westmount Square accesses. Similar grilles are located at the centre of each stairwell down to the platforms.

On the platform level, the stairwells on either side of the concourse lead down to broad, long side aisles separated from the platform area by massive piers.

The station is served by two headhouses. The main one is built immediately above the station at Avenue Atwater and Boulevard De Maisonneuve. Situated in front of Dawson College, it repeats the lines and coloration (straw-yellow brick and verdigris hipped roof) of the college’s modern building facing Boulevard De Maisonneuve; this in turn referenced the design of the historic convent building that houses the college.

The other headhouse is a block away, in Square Cabot; it serves Terminus Atwater, an important hub of bus routes, which wraps around the square. This headhouse is connected to the station indirectly, via the lower level of the Alexis Nihon shopping centre—the only separate entrance building in the network that is connected to its station by an intervening building.

The former Square Cabot headhouse (see Trivia, below) was demolished in 2017 and replaced with a smaller building whose walls are almost entirely glass. This measure was imposed by the City with the stated goal of improving safety in light of the crime problems present in the area. However, some commentators denounced the measure as an example of “hostile architecture,” that is, a redesign meant to make the space more inhospitable to homeless people, much like the addition of armrests on the platform benches to prevent lying down.² Despite the reconstruction, the STM closed the headhouse for the entire winter of 2024-25 to prevent “undesirable and dangerous acts”;³ after being closed again for winter in November 2025,⁴ it has remained closed ever since.

The new headhouse is diamond-shaped and has exits to the left and right of the staircase, diagonally facing Rue Sainte-Catherine and Avenue Atwater. It has glass walls on all four sides, with a single enclosed area clad in slate-grey brick at the northern corner. The glass at the western corner, facing Avenue Atwater, is emblazoned with a large metro logo, one of the few stations to use the symbol architecturally (along with Monk, Préfontaine, and De la Concorde). The glazed brick in the tunnel between the headhouse and Complexe Alexis Nihon was also changed from the beige shades elsewhere in the station to a similar pattern in light and dark grey.

Atwater is the nucleus of a separate section of the underground city, linking the Complexe Alexis Nihon, Dawson College, and Westmount Square. The latter is connected to the station by a tunnel more than 200 metres long. To lessen the impact of its length, the tunnel’s width and height vary along its course, and portions of it are enhanced with mirrors. The entrance to Westmount Square at Boulevard De Maisonneuve and Avenue Wood is adjacent to the end of the tunnel and is signed as a metro entrance, remaining open outside the Westmount Square shopping centre’s opening hours (though not always throughout the metro’s).

The choice of cladding, the large, flat expanses of walls, and the unornamented rectangular forms are characteristic of the International Style, a modernist architectural style that informed many design choices for the initial network.