Art & Architecture

This station’s forms symbolize the swiftness and movement of the passengers and vehicles. The ends of the ticket hall and the transept form wide semicircles, representing fluidity of motion while also making traffic flow more efficient.

The station’s most prominent feature is the long, deep, unified volume enclosing its transept and the main stairwell between the ticket hall and platforms. The relatively narrow excavation is equal in width along its whole length, a canyon-like space that offers dramatic perspectives into the station from the top of the escalators. Impressively, the volume continues beyond the landing at the ticket hall level, projecting out of the ground into one of the main headhouse’s two clerestories.

The form of the volume also enhances wayfinding: the straight sightlines down to the transept help departing passengers easily visualize their path down to the trains, while the natural light guides arriving passengers up to the surface.

Unfortunately, the very narrow stairways to the crossover are unequal to the traffic flows that this station faces as a terminal station. This is probably because this station was intended to be a terminus only temporarily, as the orange line continued its northward expansion. Sadly, its progress halted here and has remained stuck for more than thirty years.

The walls and floors are done in neutral materials, with terracotta on the walls and earth-toned granite and sandstone tiles on the floors. To brighten the space, the housings of the standard platform lighting elements are lemon-yellow, as is a unique “gateway” in the transept incorporating light fixtures and wayfinding signage. The platform floors feature distinctive tiled semicircles, which formerly indicated the position of the trains’ doors (the arrival of the Azur trains, whose doors are configured differently, has made them obsolete). These echo the semicircular forms of the transept and ticket hall, as do other semicircles elsewhere in the floor tiling.

The largest of the station’s three headhouses is the Côte-Vertu Nord entrance, located just above the ticket hall. The brick structure features two wing-like clerestories facing in opposite directions. One, already mentioned, admits sunlight into the main volume, and incorporates a huge full-height window on the west side of the building. The other, facing east, illuminates the stairwell down to the ticket hall.

As the deep stairwell volume emerges from below into the headhouse, it is traversed by a walkway leading to an indoor waiting area for the adjacent bus terminal. This section was added to the north side of the building in 2005, when the new bus loop and terminal were built to host the numerous STM bus lines that terminate here.

The two identical southern headhouses, standing back-to-back, were added after the station was opened. Though barely more than small shelters for staircases, they do have a pleasant design in brick, metal, and glass, a postmodern quotation of traditional residential architecture with gabled roofs and exposed roof trusses. They are linked to the ticket hall by a lengthy corridor.

The southernmost entrance formerly served an important STM, STL, and AMT bus terminus; however, the available space was quite insufficient for this task, hence the construction of the new terminus at the Côte-Vertu Nord exit. The remnant of a bus terminus remained for another 12 years, serving STL and AMT (now Exo) buses, until the largely redundant bus loop was redeveloped as a public square in 2017. Simple on-street stops near this exit continue to serve the suburban bus lines.

As for art, the transept features two complementary mural sculptures by Yves Trudeau, entitled Relief, négatif positif, on the walls above the platform vaults. They feature crumpled stainless-steel surfaces belted by a yellow stripe that runs along the walls of the transept and main stairwell. The yellow ribbon symbolizes a trace, like Ariadne’s thread from the myth of Theseus, allowing passengers to find their way through the underground world represented by the exposed bedrock-like faces. The southern mural had to be slightly modified to make way for the installation of elevators.

The new bus terminus brought with it a new work of art, as part of the government of Quebec’s 1% for art program. This mural installation, L’Homo urbanus, represents a crowd, shown as a set of tiny photos, turning their backs to avoid seeing violence. Its highly polished metal reflects the real crowd’s movements. This work by Éric Lamontagne is located in the north wing waiting area of the Côte-Vertu Nord headhouse.