Monorail station designs: flair or function?

By Mike Lindblom
Seattle Times staff reporter

ZIMMER GUNSUL FRASCA Architecture firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca's concept for the monorail's King Street station includes leaning walls, glass floors and exposed trusses to provide a landmark at a busy transit hub.

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So the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) spent $2.3 million commissioning seven architecture firms to design custom stations for each neighborhood.

A King Street hub was envisioned with leaning walls, glass floors, bamboo in an Asian garden, a roof with 15 peaks, and exposed trusses to complement the nearby stadiums. Near the Space Needle, designers imagined a station of vertical, illuminated glass walls. The design for a Ballard stop featured umbrella-shaped curved roofs.

But the sole company bidding to build the monorail isn't obliged to use any of the designs — and chances are, the actual stations will wind up more modest and much cheaper than the images the SMP has released so far.

	NBBJ NBBJ architects designed a station at Fifth Avenue and Broad Street with illuminated walls and greenery for an airy, lightweight tone to offset the huge overhead monorail switches above Fifth Avenue.

The architects for Cascadia Monorail Co., the sole bidder to build the 14-mile line, have created their own station drawings, so the stops will be more uniform, according to Jeff Fielder, a lead Cascadia negotiator. The public still hasn't seen precisely what Cascadia has in mind because confidential contract talks are still unresolved.

SMP board members Kristina Hill and Rick Sundberg, both architects, have publicly pledged they will not vote for a system unless they are satisfied with how it will look.

Still, Hill says simpler stations can be attractive. She and Sundberg have already started paring away pricey flourishes such as unnecessary glass walls, Hill said. "This is a transit system," she said. "You don't have to be building great cathedrals."

Some critics have questioned the purpose of the early station work, part of an overall $12 million expenditure for urban design.

It never made sense to Dick Falkenbury, the tour-bus driver who founded the city's monorail movement. He said it contradicts the agency's integrated "design-build-operate-maintain" (DBOM, pronounced "d-bomb") contracting method, which places full responsibility on the builders for final design of the monorail.

"Stupid! They never should have done that," Falkenbury said. "This is a DBOM, so why the heck are we having 70 designers design the thing?"

SMP board member Cleve Stockmeyer likens his agency to a homeowner who solicits multiple remodeling ideas, discards some, then settles on a pleasing look.

	CARLSON ARCHITECTS For the Market Street station in Ballard, Carlson Architects designed roofs that are curved and tilted like umbrellas. The design project sought station plans suitable for individual neighborhoods.

"I think it's money very well spent, to open their minds and unlock the creativity," he said. "We really got the message across that we want excellent design. One way to make that happen is to give the illustrations."

Goal: "excellent design"

The monorail's original cost estimate of $1.75 billion presumed basic stations costing $5 million to $7 million, built from a common "kit of parts" layout. "They are not seen as highly individualized or decorative," a cost consultant said.

But after winning the 2002 campaign for a new monorail tax, monorail leaders named "excellent design" as one of six goals. The SMP barnstormed the city, writing down hundreds of ideas from the people: a Scandinavian theme in Ballard, glass mosaics by teenagers at West Seattle Junction, the red neon "SODO" sign reinstalled near Starbucks Center.

The Stranger, a weekly paper that is strongly pro-monorail, lampooned the forums in an article titled "Laugh Track: Monorail Meetings Lack Practical Guidance."

In June 2003, the agency's governing board approved the custom station planning as part of a larger urban-design contract with VIA Suzuki, which had done neighborhood-based design for the Vancouver, B.C., SkyTrain.

"They're going to help us define, in great detail, what the contractor is going to be asked to build, so this is one of those fundamental building-block contracts for us," SMP Executive Director Joel Horn said at the time.

But monorail opponent Henry Aronson believes the designs were produced "for political purposes, to convince the people the monorail is going to be beautiful," since there's no requirement to use them.

Money for custom stations — as well as passenger capacity and contingency funds — is constrained by a shortage in the income from a citywide car-tab tax, currently running one-quarter less than originally planned.

No price has been released for the stations designed by Seattle architects.

Hill, the SMP board member, believes architects were told to draw concepts that would cost $5 million to $7 million to build. But one of the architects says they were never given a limit. "I'm not aware that we were working within an actual design budget," said Patrick Gordon, a principal in Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, which produced concepts for two stations.

Cost-cutting, simplifying

As the Seattle architects worked, the agency made several cost-cutting changes to the monorail operating requirements, which made the station layouts a moving target.

Boarding platforms were shortened from 180 feet to 130 feet to roughly 100 feet, the minimum for a wide 200-passenger Hitachi train. Tall, bi-level "iris" columns, once considered for 14 stations, were reduced to eight, then made optional. Multiple elevators rather than escalators are now proposed to allow more-compact stations, so the SMP can buy less land while improving access for cyclists and the disabled.

Meanwhile, Cascadia has tried all year to simplify the project.

The team talked SMP into dropping several proposals: for 7,000 public drawings; a train and station mockup for pre-opening tours; an initial one-mile segment to open in late 2007; and the station aesthetics. Documents show that Cascadia thought a "collaborative effort" with the local architects and communities would lead to costly change orders.

At Cascadia's request, the station images were relegated in the final bid specifications to merely "architectural visions and preliminary concepts."

"It turned out, they threw the thing out the window," Falkenbury said.

Some members of the city's advisory Monorail Review Panel (MRP), an amalgam of design- and planning-commission members, have been frustrated by the lack of certainty that the images will become part of the final design.

"In my three-year experience on the Seattle Design Commission, no public or private project provided less information on what was being proposed than the Seattle Monorail Project has given to MRP," said panel member Iain Robertson.

The SMP originally planned to keep the Seattle architects involved during construction. However, SMP has ended its contracts for station design. The agency's lead architect, Alan Hart, of VIA Suzuki, who once worked nearly full-time on the monorail, has been scaled back to on-call duty. That happened, in part, because of an effort to reduce expenses, said SMP spokeswoman Natasha Jones.

But monorail officials insist the designs will have an impact in the final product.

Seattle architects contributed features that might be usable because they are less elaborate, or have strong support from monorail board members: solar-power collectors, wood beams, pedestrian plazas and roof plantings, for example. There also is much support from Seattle Center officials for the original KeyArena station design, a hoagie-shaped building with a large pedestrian plaza.

Several of the local ideas will be "embedded into the design," said Cascadia's Fielder, without elaborating. Horn added that he refers to the local design concepts daily during contract negotiations with Cascadia.

SMP board member Cindi Laws said that until a tentative contract emerges, it's too early to judge whether the investment in design work paid off. But she's also certain that if the agency hadn't made the effort, cynics would complain about that, too.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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