Heart of Steel

摘要

The racetrack that is Vauxhall has just got a shiny new pit stop. Resembling something like a Chinese dragon visiting an American diner, Arup Associates' bus station slices its steely way along the re-orientated road layout of this notorious south London traffic hub. A Transport for London competition in 2002 had called for a scheme to consolidate all the disparate bus stops around the site and attracted a number of proposals from architects that presumed a commercial element not specified in the brief. But in the end, it was a simple and sleek terminus design from Arup Associates that won over the judges. The visualisations of the winning scheme gave a clear sense of what the primary design concept was - a single line of roof, sliced into three ribbons, sailing over the site along its 200m length. The central ribbon moved independently of the outer two, peeling away to sink to ground level to form bench seating for waiting passengers before rising up again to morph into the roof. This fluid transition from outside to in, from refuge to utility, is one of the scheme's overriding strengths.