For many years, the Great Hall of Toronto’s Union Station was arguably the grandest hamburger stand on the planet. Constructed over a 14-year period and completed in 1927, Union Station (original architects: John M. Lyle, Ross & Macdonald, and Hugh G. Jones) epitomizes Beaux Arts refinement and monumentality. But think back, those of you long acquainted with the Great Hall’s barrel-vaulted vastness, to what you saw when you stood near its centre, facing south: straight ahead, a heroic Corinthian-columned portal, leading down to the VIA Rail concourse, flanked by imposing archways leading…nowhere. Well, not nowhere, exactly. The east one cycled through various mundane service and retail uses, and the west one dead-ended as a Harvey’s burger joint.
The first comprehensive makeover in Union Station’s history commenced in 2007 and is now at last nearing completion. It has eradicated many peculiarities that this designated National Historic Site accumulated over time. (R.I.P., Great Hall Harvey’s; hello, new concourse-level access.) Encompassing restoration, renovation, a massive dig-down expansion, and the financial collapse of the first two of its three contractors, the project has transformed what was originally a railway station accommodating 40,000 passengers annually into a facility aligned with its present status as Canada’s busiest multi-modal transportation hub. Sixty-five million passengers flow through Union Station each year—and it is now positioned to handle double that volume in years to come.
Scenarios for this long-overdue overhaul began percolating in 2000, when ownership of the station building (a.k.a. head house) and below-grade GO and VIA concourses passed from a rail consortium to the City of Toronto. (Metrolinx, which operates the GO regional commuter transit network, owns the train shed’s tracks-level space.) In addition to federal, provincial, and municipal funding, the project required a private revenue stream. Possibilities ranging from a professional sports venue to station-topping condo towers were floated. And then a 2006 feasibility study led by NORR and heritage architecture specialists EVOQ got traction with a logistically complex but compellingly unobtrusive proposal: carve out additional space under the tracks and below part of the head house. The ensuing 270,000-square-foot expansion has nearly doubled the size of the previous Bay Street GO concourse and added a similarly sized York Street GO concourse, along with 160,000 square feet containing stores and a cosmopolitan profusion of restaurant and food-court space.
NORR’s Silvio Baldassarra, Executive Architect in charge of the Union Station Revitalization from 2006 until 2024, when he stepped down as NORR Chair Emeritus, says that an operational transit facility’s successful renovation is contingent upon enabling the public to flow through in a safe, unruffled way, even as “sparks are flying and parts of the building are missing” on the other side of construction partitions. Below Union Station’s train shed, 185 columns were jacked up ever so slightly, had their loads transferred onto bedrock-supported micro-piles, and were then cut away. To prevent track sag, this bravura engineering feat’s execution required remarkable precision. “We had a commitment to Metrolinx that the movement of the tracks would be less than six millimetres, and in fact it was less than three millimetres,” says NORR Structural Engineering Principal Hassan Saffarini. Amazingly, eleven of Union Station’s twelve tracks remained operational at all times throughout construction.
Other structural challenges abounded, ranging from seismic upgrades to the head house to a desire to space columns in the main new double-height retail zone wider apart than in the pre-existing column grid above them. (There’s an Easter egg on the new lower levels for the structurally observant: if you’re amid rectangular columns, you’re under the head house, and if the columns are round, you’re below the tracks.)
The revitalization addresses many issues relating to configuration and usage changes, including some quirks that actually predated the original facility’s completion. The head house was constructed not only before the tracks, but before consensus on whether tracks would be accessed from above or below. Those blocked-off Great Hall side vaults would have accommodated the from-above route not chosen. The revitalization has converted them to concourse access points.
Union Station’s narrow track platforms were configured to handle relatively modest numbers of long-distance rail travellers arriving at relatively infrequent intervals. Today, rush-hour commuters swarm through the station every few minutes. The large, new GO concourses provide multiple new access points to the platforms and are essentially holding areas that mitigate track-level overcrowding: commuters don’t know which platform their train is departing from until electronic signage and announcements provide this information a few minutes prior to departure.
The station’s newly opened-up east end visually connects the old architecture to the new. A key move the design team made just east of the Great Hall was to truncate a light well and alter the floor height, bringing the main floor of the east wing level with the Great Hall’s floor. The base of the shortened light well is now a laylight over this main floor, and a new aperture cut through the floor, directly under the laylight, provides views down to the new retail space. Limestone wall panels extend the Great Hall’s materiality into the renovated space, while details such as the opening’s glass-panelled steel railing are minimalist-contemporary. “Part of our strategy was to use noble materials to connect to the original building in a modern, complementary way,” says David Clusiau, NORR North America’s Vice President of Design.
Read the full cover story in Canadian Architect.
Article by Pamela Young. Excerpts republished with permission.
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