Southern Cross Information

Grimshaw was appointed to work with Jackson Architecture on the redesign and expansion of Spencer Street Station in Melbourne, which was renamed Southern Cross.

It takes up a full city grid square and so the design integrates the station with the surrounding street pattern, extending the city centre towards the regenerating docklands area. The key to the scheme is an undulating roof plane that shelters the concourses from heat and rain while exploiting prevailing winds to natural ventilate the enclosure of hot contaminants.

To complement the roof design and in an effort to further improve the quality of the station Billings Jackson Design teamed up with Honeywell to develop the customer information systems. Key to this was developing a generic housing, capable of incorporating any form of LCD or Plasma technology that may be used in the station over the next 30 years.

The principle challenge was the technical issue of how to keep hot running screens cool in the heat of summer.  The team developed a plenum cooling system with Southport Engineering to maintain a clean, cool working environment for the screens. 

Billings Jackson also developed solutions for platform furniture, deliberately keeping them as simple as possible to preserve the focus on the dynamic roof structure. Each bench is unitised into a series of building blocks, which can make up a single seat or a large-scale waiting area.  The benches can be relocated and reconfigured as the station is "tuned" during its use.