With the longest platforms, the largest tunnels and the quickest trains on your entire London underground, the Elizabeth line boasts a dizzying checklist of superlatives, carrying extra individuals a day than every other practice line within the nation. It’s now deemed to have the perfect design, too – being named because the winner of the 2024 RIBA Stirling prize for the best structure within the UK. The competitors was stiff: from the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London to the renovation of the Park Hill property in Sheffield, from a Dorset dairy farm conversion to a avenue of social housing in Hackney and the 67-acre regeneration of King’s Cross.
The Lizzie line is a worthy winner, offering a stunning demonstration that, for all chaos surrounding HS2, Britain continues to be able to pulling off gargantuan transport infrastructure tasks with type and panache. Stepping off the escalators and getting into its streamlined white tunnels is like being teleported to a parallel universe, worlds away from the remainder of the creaking, sooty tube community.
From the ethereal, clutter-free concourses to the comfortable acoustic, calm lighting and clear signage, each element has been honed to make the passenger expertise as easy and stress-free as potential. It’s a mannequin of standardisation and prefabrication, constructed with uncommon precision, its easy class belying the fiendish complexity of coordinating the 73-mile-long endeavour, and the transformative impact it has had on the lives of hundreds of thousands.
“The Elizabeth line is a triumph in architect-led collaboration, providing a flawless, environment friendly, fantastically choreographed resolution to inner-city transport,” mentioned RIBA president Muyiwa Oki, chair of the Stirling prize jury. “It rewrites the foundations of accessible public transport and units a daring new commonplace for civic infrastructure, opening up the community, and by extension London, to everybody.”
The prize has been awarded to the “line-wide” design of the stations beneath floor stage, led by Grimshaw Architects, with engineering by AtkinsRéalis, way-finding by Maynard and lighting by Equation. Completely different architects have been accountable for every station above floor, with extra blended outcomes. Unusually for the architecture-centric award, the opposite consultants have been named as equal co-designers, reflecting the collaborative nature of the £18.6bn endeavour, which led to a really built-in end result.
Whereas different tube stations are cluttered with indicators and lightweight fittings added haphazardly over time, the Elizabeth line has condensed and rationalised all the things right into a unified entire. Service “totems” on the concourses – impressed by the uplighter columns of Charles Holden’s Thirties tube stations – combine all the things from lighting and cameras to signage and audio system, as do seamless panels above the platform edge screens, all simply accessible for upkeep.
Corralling collectively all of the gubbins signifies that the complete quantity of the tunnels might be expressed, without having for suspended ceilings and partitions to cover the providers. The end result feels terribly spacious, with broad concourses that soften into large cross-passages, all clad with sinuous white panels, as if your entire line has been moulded from a single substance.
The fluid geometry helps to minimise blind spots and enhance individuals move, and it additionally displays how the tunnels have been made. Reasonably than utilizing iron or concrete retaining rings, which type right-angled corners as seen elsewhere on the underground, concrete was sprayed instantly on to the uncovered earth after excavation, creating softer tunnel intersections. This easy, tubular world is lined with a steady pores and skin of white glass fibre-reinforced concrete panels, whose design was honed to scale back the variety of panel sorts from 80 to simply 9, saving prices and materials – the carbon payback time ought to be about 10 years.
Full-size concourse mock-ups, inbuilt a warehouse in Leighton Buzzard, allowed the design crew to excellent each element, and enabled the contractors to see what they have been anticipated to do, and refine their very own prototypes. It paid off: the end result has the exact high quality of a factory-made product greater than a constructing.
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There are intelligent particulars all through, which few will discover on their commute. The lighting temperature shifts subtly, from hotter subtle gentle on the platforms and concourses, to a cooler tone within the “quicker” cross-passages, to encourage individuals to maintain shifting. Above head top, the concrete panels are perforated, with acoustic matting hidden behind to soak up noise. This provides to the sense of calm, and helps make the road accessible to those that discover tube journey demanding or intimidating, together with step-free entry all through.
For all of the ingenuity on present, it’s not excellent. The concentrate on line-wide consistency underground, and various “contextual” design at avenue stage, appears again to entrance. It might make extra sense for the stations to be constant and simply recognisable on the road – just like the gleaming oxblood pink tiles and arched home windows of Leslie Inexperienced’s iconic Edwardian tube stations – after which totally different at platform stage, so you possibly can simply spot the place you’re from a crowded carriage. The Lizzie line’s environment friendly blur of beige might do with a couple of extra splashes of character, like Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics at Tottenham Court docket Street, or Annabel Gray’s enamel panels at Marble Arch, or the slanting indigo tiled columns of Will Alsop’s North Greenwich. As an alternative, public artwork is confined to a couple bolt-on baubles above floor.
Equally, the marvel of those cavernous underground cathedrals quickly fades away if you go away central London, as the road makes its approach to the outer reaches of the capital above floor. An immense quantity of design intelligence was lavished on the central stations, however the peripheral stops really feel distinctly second class. They could sport the identical regal purple roundels, however the banal packing containers of Ilford and Ealing Broadway have little in the way in which of award-winning structure. Was it an excessive amount of to hope that the road’s Stirling prize high quality might prolong past Zone 2?
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