Moscow's historic train station park a winner
SWA/Balsley and 5+design have won an international competition to create a park at the front door of Moscow’s historic train station.
Paveletskaya Park is, “poised to become the city’s next great urban park and public attraction.”
Paveletskaya Park will sit at the front door of Moscow’s main train station.
When the Paveletskaya railway station was built in 1900, it faced a garden square, but eventually a new road split the park and isolated the station from its surroundings.
SWA/Balsley’s design reestablishes this lost connection with a, “harmonious fusion of urban park with below-grade retail creating a new civic destination that will spark the public’s landscape imagination of 21st century city life in downtown Moscow.”
The design includes retail pavilions and spaces for events as well as transit activity.
Two iconic retail pavilion entrances appear to emerge from a parkscape, blurring the line between public plaza and retail destination.
The sculpted landscape softly descends to the restaurants and shops below, with lawn terraces and sculptural overlooks, park venues to accomodate events, and public metro and transit activity.
The railway station was built in 1900.
The central plaza will be multi-purpose and flexible, fostering, “a vibrant rhythm of urban life throughout the day, evenings and seasons.” With a fountain, stage, and ice-rink, it can be used for performances while also offering space for day-to-day enjoyment.
Retail entrance pavilions are raised above ground, with the east featuring an iconic glass canopy edged with landscape that extends from the park into the interior court below.
To the west, a level change exposes a second entrance below a green lawn extending over its canopy, and birch soffit supports a cantilevering lawn and extends inside the arrival hall.
These retail entrances are linked by two strands of light-wells at the plaza level, both integrated with planting, seating and sculptures. Light-wells let daylight into the shopping interiors, which in turn cast light up from the concourses at night.
A crescent promenade links the pavilions, and vehicle access on the northwest road will be limited, reclaiming the pedestrian connection between the station and plaza. Tightly spaced native fir and birch trees create urban forests on the west and east flanks of the park, with narrow bench-lined paths carving through.
The park features light-wells which help with illumination day and night.
SWA/Balsley had to work within strict height limitations, and the park gives a visual balance between the station and retail entrances.
“The design team was intent upon creating a unique ‘place’ where a day-in-the-park can pause for shopping and a family shopping expedition is relieved with a dose of nature and public life for all ages,” say SWA/Balsley. “Paveletskaya Park is a model of landscape urbanism and the unexpected benefits that can emerge from a borderless collaboration of park design disciplines and architecture.”