Railway upgrade plans receive prior approval from Oxford city council
Oxford City Council Planning Authority has granted prior approval for Tenderstream member IDOM’s design for the new entrance building to the city’s railway station. IDOM, who is working with Network Rail as part of the Design Services Framework, was commissioned for the project as part of a wider scheme that will increase capacity along the Oxford Corridor and include works to create a new Platform 5. The scheme itself is also a catalyst for the larger redevelopment of the Oxford station masterplan.
IDOM’s proposal takes references from the urban language and materiality of the city. The new western entrance building is conceived as a simple, elegant, linear, and frame-like “gateway” building that straddles over a plaza inspired by the form of a quad. The frame invites the passengers towards the entrance, while also integrating the back-of-house and retail units beneath a continuous green roof.
Javier Quintana, IDOM director (London), stated: “The main challenge was to create a building in front of an extremely long retaining wall. Oxford features a unique sequence of the public and private quads defined by the walls and accessed by crossing doors. We have looked at how these walls and doors incorporate elements that tell stories, how they are constructed and how they relate to public spaces. It is not a purely historical approach, but an analysis that hints at how structural elements relate to the public spaces. The building is designed from the public perspective, to act as a transition between the public realm and the subway under the tracks. The design challenge was to introduce a pattern, texture or detail to enrich the narrative of this retaining wall element.”
The building has been conceived following a sustainable approach and will be developed to comply with BREEAM “good” certification.
Lucy Nordberg
Tenderstream Head of Research
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