Art & Architecture

This station’s trainroom was built in a shallow open cut, and follows a unique trapezoidal section, with slanting bare concrete walls rounded off at the top corners. The seats and the distinctive recessed lighting strips are in a bright red colour that stands out from the concrete.

The station’s original access is housed within a large trapezoidal headhouse surrounded by a bus loop. Inside, a sunken ticket hall is surrounded by hallways at street level, on the north and south side, which serve as waiting areas for the many buses that terminate here; each has entrances at either end, with a central entrance on the north side facing Boulevard De Maisonneuve and leading directly to the main stairs down to the ticket hall.

The two hallways are connected by a bridge through the main volume above the platforms. Just beyond this bridge, over the feet of the stairs down to the platforms, a stained-glass window by Marcelle Ferron admits natural light and tints it brilliant colours, as a large spiral-shaped linear sculpture of stainless-steel tubes reflects the light throughout the volume.

The exterior of the headhouse takes its rounded form and blue and steel colours from the look of the vintage buses that once used its bus loop.² When it later became an intermodal station, the same design serendipitously suggested the commuter trains as well. The diagonal walls are formed by a stepped series of window bays, each with a concrete bench both inside and out to provide ample seating for waiting commuters.

From the ticket hall, a tunnel leads to a commuter train station on the rail line behind the headhouse, which provides an intermodal link between the metro and the Vaudreuil-Hudson, Saint-Jérôme, and Candiac commuter train lines.

The commuter train station consists of two platforms at ground level; a third track was added in 2015 along the south of the existing station, turning the southern platform into an island platform.

The tunnel from the metro station’s ticket hall connects to stairs that lead up into the two older shelters on the train station platforms. The oldest one, on the south platform, features a truss framework in maroon with curved brackets and spherical finials, in common with the historic stations on the Vaudreuil-Hudson line. The north platform features a more recent access with blue mullions.

The 2015 arrival of the MUHC, the McGill University megahospital, led to extensive modifications to the station’s layout. First, the tunnel to the commuter train station was widened considerably, and extended at its far end to reach a new headhouse on the hospital campus (supplied with an elevator, although no elevator is available on the station side).

Strangely, the hospital complex was initially built without any direct underground city access. Although the tunnel abutted the wall of the hospital’s underground parking garage, the only access was through a service door that was initially kept locked. It was eventually opened to the public to provide a basic pedestrian access, albeit crossing the driveways through the garage, and later a wider door was installed.

Doubling the width of the entrance to the tunnel required sacrificing the staircase leading up to street level on the south side of the station. Although the opposite staircase was also doubled in width, an additional exit was deemed necessary for safety reasons. Accordingly, a broad staircase was built between the parapet of the fare-paid zone and the then-disused bridge, turning it into an additional one-way exit with turnstiles on either end. For several years, this still left the south side of the headhouse with no entry to the metro, although it was still available as an exit and as a waiting area for buses. However, sometime around 2025, turnstiles allowing entrance were installed, so that users arriving in buses could enter via the south side once more.

While the new staircase blocked most of the view of the platforms from the ticket hall, it had the benefit of reopening the previously closed bridge, offering passengers its excellent views of Marcelle Ferron’s artwork.

The opening of the MUHC campus highlighted the lack of wheelchair accessibility, a significant problem for a station serving a major hospital. However, the constraints of the station’s architecture meant that the only feasible solution was to add an entire new access to the station. Users had to wait another six years before a wheelchair-accessible link between Boulevard De Maisonneuve, the metro station, the commuter train station, and the hospital was finally opened in 2021. This facility consists of a secondary headhouse adjoining the building just east of the bus loop, leading to the metro and to a tunnel passing under the commuter train tracks.

The new concrete and glass headhouse is divided in two lengthwise, with the metro entrance to the west and the commuter train and hospital access to the east. The austere, monochrome decor on both sides is disconnected from that of the rest of the station, and is frankly something of a missed aesthetic opportunity.

The metro entrance is entirely glazed on the side facing the bus loop, with a succession of rectangular frames forming the structure of both the outside wall and the roof. Although unstaffed, it features two ticket barriers, one facing the street and the other controlling access from the other half of the headhouse, a somewhat confusing layout. Elevators and broad stairwells lead to the platform level below.

The access to the train station and hospital, to the east, is essentially a hallway leading directly to the stairs and elevator down to the pedestrian tunnel. It exits onto the train station platforms via new International-style headhouses with adjacent matching shelters.

An approximately 150-metre-long tunnel to the hospital follows, largely in bare, smooth concrete.

The new construction was accompanied by a new work of art: a series of three large blue mosaics by Patrick Bernatchez, entitled Bleus sténopés : de l’atelier à la station Vendôme, le 8 septembre 2019. The works incorporate fragments of photos of a metro trip between the artist’s workshop and the station, taken with a pinhole camera and screenprinted on thousands of triangular ceramic tiles. The mosaics are located above the staircase to the Côte-Vertu platform, over the stairwell leading down to the pedestrian tunnel, and partway along the tunnel to the hospital.

Finally, another work was installed in the new tunnel under the commuter train station in 2023. The cartoon-style black and white work by Laurent Pinabel, entitled Ici et un peu partout, was commissioned to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Exo, with scenes of transport, work, and leisure.