The Monday Metropolis: Of Boxes and Red Roofs — Beijing Subway Station Designs
You are familiar with Subway Line 10, are you? It’s one of those new subway lines opening in about two months here in Beijing, and when it’s reality, you’ll be able to zip from Zhongguancun to the CBD in about half an hour. Eternally consigned to the history books will be those intolerable waits on the eastern 3rd Ring Road and bus rides that seem to take forever and a day.
I’d like to take a look at Line 10 today from an architectural point of view, or rather, point de vue. (Excuse my Français.) The average Line 10 station looks like one of these fellows below:
The Beijing Subway seems to be in box mode these days. Ever since the Mozart Line, or Subway Line 5, became reality in early October 2007, we seem to be in the Box Era, subway station design-wise. Boxes inside the 2nd Ring Road tend to get a bit more “traditionalistic”, blending in with the surroundings a bit more, while boxes outside the ringway look more like a mix between the Beijing Subway and Steve Jobs (as in that famous Apple “brushed metal” look). Above-ground stations look more like the designer got brainwashed with too much The Jetsons than anything else, with Beiyuanlu North looking especially way-out-there.
Most stations on Line 10 are of the boxed variety. However, the ones which also happen to belong to Line 8 look very different:
We’re not sure if these fellows are considering making all future Line 8 stations look like red roofs when the line gets extended further north (and south!) after the Games. From the looks of it, however, it looks like the Red Roofs are here to make a statement: “We belong to a very special era in the history of the nation’s capital!” (The Olympics!)
What we don’t get, however, is why no subway station was directly modelled after the Bird’s Nest… isn’t that supposed to be a Beijing 2008 icon instead? Ah well…
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