Design director in the New York office of SOM, Olin McKenzie is strongly influenced by his experience of cities and the kind of spaces and iconic buildings that contribute to the novelty and pleasure of urban living.
At Design Experience Series in August, Olin will be talking about how our growing understanding of urban health and civic cultures can help change the way we envision the future of transit hubs.
“More often than not, large scale transit hub projects represent once-in-a-generation opportunities to exact massive impacts on the cities that house them,” says Olin.
“Transportation hubs are urban hybrids by nature: they exist at the crossroads of infrastructure, architecture and civic space. The meanings that these institutions project and the effects that they introduce into a city’s complex ecosystem, make them some of the most critical endeavours of our time.
Olin is well versed in this subject having recently completed a significant ‘Transport Oriented Development’ (TOD) in Miami, where the hub had a larger role to play than simply getting people out of their cars and into public transport.
Miami Central Station (Image: SOM)
“Where this train station was built in Miami was actually a kind of parking lot since the ‘60s - a totally derelict, horrible, five block kind of gash in the city. This development became an opportunity to stitch together a part of downtown that had for some time, had this big chasm in it,” he says.
“There are these four very distinct neighborhoods that circle around the site: one of them a three or four block judicial district at the southern end of the station; a university area with student housing; an entertainment district where the Miami basketball team plays with where high end condominiums and high end shopping have started to emerge; and then on the opposite side of the station, an African-American historic neighborhood called Overton that has been under-privileged for a lot of its history.
Miami Central Station, 6th Street elevation (Image: SOM)
“All four neighborhoods, which on the face of it have nothing to do with one another, and all operating at different time-scales - the judicial district is churning throughout the day, with lots of people in suits and at night, it is a ghost down. And then, the entertainment district has a different time scale. And Overtown which is largely residential, but also has commercial pockets, has its own time scale.
So we saw this project as an opportunity to cultivate a heart that might at its best offer a way to kind of suture these neighborhoods together.
River Gondola, Brooklyn Bridge (Image: SOM)
In the suturing process, the transit centre development needed to encompass, mixed use housing, retailing, hospitality and other amenities that allowed all districts to become part of a larger vision.”
“There's a really deep arcade that runs for about 900 feet on the site and the goal, and what we think it creates, is a district, not just a piece of architecture; but instead of saying, ‘Oh I'm going to the train station,’ you understand that the train station is part of a larger neighborhood.
“It's probably too soon to say if it's going to be a lasting success, although it has been an initial success. I think that's something that doesn't happen overnight, cities take a while to adjust to any change, but that's most certainly the thesis for this project.”
Singapore High Speed Rail Station atrium (Image: SOM)
“It's one of those topics that I think only becomes more and more critical to us and to the success of our cities as cities get denser and denser - which we of course see happening all over the planet right now,” says Olin.
To learn more about how transit hubs can positively influence the environment around them, see Olin McKenzie at Design Experience Series in August, in one of three stops throughout the country.
