Houston Light Rail fountains: Railroad Beautiful for the 21st Century
20ish years ago, I came across the term "railroad beautiful" which referred to the architecture (H. H. Richardson) and landscape of stations (Olmsted) for the Boston & Albany Railroad ("A Railroad Beautiful," Journal of Education, 1904).
It was a precursor to the City Beautiful movement, and is what I call "transportation infrastructure as civic architecture." Which I argue should be a key planning element for transportation projects. Out here in Utah there is a lot of this for freeways--bridges and walls--not so much for transit.
I have an old post:
-- "Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods" (2013)
that discusses this more in terms of neighborhoods if you look at the title, but in fact treats the entire system as a design product
-- "Branding's (NOT) all you need for transit" (2018).
Some systems do this in a systematic way, most don't, focusing on transit as a conveyance. But if you want people to ride transit, perhaps for many it needs to be more design forward.
-- "Design forward trains and streetcars: Haga-Utsunomiya Light Rail and Brightline" (2023)
I haven't been to Houston in decades, so I didn't know that the Houston Light Rail terminal station on Main Street called Main Street Square, has a water feature--a fountain--and plantings, marking a recapturing of the concept of railroad beautiful for the 21st Century.
Labels: design method, graphic design, integrated public realm framework, transit infrastructure, transit marketing, transportation infrastructure, transportation planning, urban design/placemaking
posted by Richard Layman @ 2:33 PM&Permanent Link
2 Comments:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/old-city-hall-is-a-monument-to-our-big-time-ambitions-letting-it-rot-is/article_2e8d3866-e3df-11ef-9f5e-d757bdb47627.html
RC Harris... To me, he is an historical celebrity, on the Mount Rushmore of Toronto political characters. He may not be that familiar to everyone: though he and his works were fictionalized in Michael Ondaatje’s novel ”In the Skin of a Lion,” he probably isn’t a household name. But his work lives on.
Old City Hall is a monument to our big-time ambitions. Letting it rot is a reminder of how we’ve let Toronto decay
2/6/25
Harris built the Bloor Viaduct that connected the east and west of the city (and roughed in a subway tunnel many decades before Toronto ever had a subway), and he oversaw construction of the “Palace of Purification” water treatment plant in the Beaches. He formed the Toronto Transit Commission, modernized the then-horrifying sewage system and established a network of water reservoirs and filtration plants. He built more than 1,000 kilometres of roads and sidewalks. In 2012, the journalist John Lorinc noted we were still basically living in the city he’d built.
He saw infrastructure as art, as a monument to the city and its people. “A drain well dug is as glorious as an opera or a picture,” he said once.
In 2012, Lorinc speculated that living at Old City Hall, next to the notorious slums of The Ward during a water-borne illness crisis, may have shaped Harris’ later priorities. But wandering around the semi-abandoned Old City Hall building Wednesday and marvelling at its architecture and craftsmanship, I wondered if living in that glorious, grand civic palace also helped refine Harris’ sense of the standards that should apply to our city’s works.
Looking at it today — admiring its size and ornate architectural flourishes, the care that went into the carved wooden stair rails and marble pillars and floor tiling, its palatial hallways and stained-glass windows, the intricate stone work on the exterior — it’s a wonder that it was ever built.
Meet the man who shaped 20th-century Toronto
https://archive.ph/GDAp1#selection-2289.0-2289.44
Globe and Mail, 5/18/12
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