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Plymouth Gateway: Plymouth Train Station

Part 1 Project 2011
Daniel Stiff
University of Plymouth | UK
A train station can be seen as a temporary building, ever fluctuating through its functional use and the type of user. The existing station at Plymouth fails to control these events and the experience of the user is continuously flawed. When designing for a station, there are many key aspects to interrogate: a sense of arrival, congestion, peak and off peak flux and event. These temporary yet important aspects had driven design.
I designed with a contextual response throughout, utilising the framing of events through gates, expressing the fluctuation of use through moving canopies and developed structural form that will respond to the landscape as well as providing a sense of memory and heritage of rail travel through its materiality (old rail tracks re-used in the major structural frame.)
To users, the station will provide clarity in circulation, a knowingness to the arrival into Plymouth with its materiality and views aimed to the city and a memory of the station being triggered by self-moving canopies and history reference through a rail track structure. The existing tower (Intercity House) already provides the station with a visual beacon to the city, this has been adapted to ensure its asset to the City is kept but utilising height and orientation with louvres the tower can be appropriately tied into the station (of which it currently fails).
The final scheme is a complex arrangement of grids, plates and frames. Frames that are housing the waiting spaces, the market place, platforms and subways as well as marking arrival and departure (the key element when discussing journey.)

Daniel Stiff

Tutor(s)

2011
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