Art & Architecture

This station’s platforms, built in tunnel, extend northward from a deep cut-and-cover volume. At street level, the single, large headhouse is surrounded by a bus loop. The entrances recede some distance into the façade of the building; a lengthy canopy protects the stops on the south side of the headhouse, with substantial shelters on the north and east.

The interior of the headhouse is split-level, with the raised eastern side serving the bus stops at the east and south sides of the station. The elevator is in an addition at the front of the headhouse; at the rear is the mouth of a light shaft, lit by slanted windows, over the main escalators below.

The low but fairly wide ticket hall is located directly below the entrance, with the stairs down from street level leading directly to the gateline. After the turnstiles, passengers make a U-turn to reach the escalators down to the trainroom; unusually, a row of panels separates entering from exiting passengers in this area. The pillars and ticket booth partially hide the view of the deep, impressive escalator well, so that it comes as something of a surprise.

On the southwest side of the ticket hall, a walkway passes between the stairs from the headhouse and the escalator well, overlooking the latter. Previously closed to the public (see Trivia), it was pressed into service to provide access to the elevator to the surface. The elevator down to the platforms is at the northeast corner of the room.

The foot of the escalators leads to another U-turn to reach the balcony-style crossover, over the tunnel mouth at the southern end of the platforms. This is surmounted by the lofty main volume of the station, supported by two massive pillars rising past the platform stairs. The stepped wall over the trainroom vault features an array of imposing, slanted ventilation outlets, highlighted by their orange colour.

The walls of this space and of most of the station are clad in ridged white precast concrete panels, which reflect and enhance the lighting. The pale decor is brightened by a consistent and attractive colour scheme of autumn colours. The vividly coloured polymer concrete benches at platform level, and the stripes in the ceramic tile flooring, all follow a sequence of yellow, orange, red-orange, and red, with each bench strikingly matched with a set of floor stripes. Consistently, the yellow side, suggesting the sun, is the side closer to the exit—that is, closer to the daylight. Various other details are also highlighted in yellow and orange.

The same set of colours is used in the station’s main set of artworks, two murals by the station’s architect André Léonard, each made up of a set of five huge polymer concrete disks. They decorate the ticket hall wall facing the turnstiles and the wall of the transept level facing the foot of the escalators; two additional disks are located on the walls at the far end of the platforms.

The successive rotation of the clefts in the large circles produces a rolling effect, while the colour scheme matches the benches and floor, with yellow pointing to the exit and purple closest to the darkness of the tunnel. This creates an impression of movement and direction along the passengers’ route, subconsciously making the space easier to understand.

The construction of the station’s elevators, completed in 2022, was accompanied by a new 1% artwork, another series of mural sculptures by Marianne Chevalier entitled La correspondance des strates. Placed above the elevator accesses at the platform and transept levels, the four sections of the work explicitly quote the shape, colours, and sequence of André Léonard’s circles, this time varied with biomorphic shapes and patterns, and pierced by blue stripes: horizontal at the platform level to represent the trains, and vertical at transept level to represent the elevators themselves.

The vivid and consistent colour patterns make for a bright and lively space.