The design of the Stadium MRT Station was born out of an architectural design competition organised in 2000 by the Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) in association with the Singapore Institute of Architects. The competition aimed at design excellence for the Stadium and Bras Basah MRT Stations by focusing on good design and innovation.

Led by Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell, architecture firm WOHA emerged the winner of the competition with its proposed designs for both stations. The team acknowledges the LTA’s role both in seeking innovation and in achieving the station’s grand design. “LTA was highly committed to a good design outcome, since they had organised the anonymous design competition. The design competition focused purely on good design and innovation, and did not require a proven track record or that a firm be of a certain size. They took a leap of faith in awarding the contract to us, and provided the technical backup to help us understand the issues with underground stations.”

Stadium MRT Station’s design was inspired by European train stations of the nineteenth century, when train stations were grand, inspiring spaces that gave commuters an exciting architectural experience as part of their journey. Says the WOHA team, “These classic train stations are also important urban landmarks. We wanted Stadium MRT Station to achieve this aim, in addition to providing efficient commuter facilities.”

The winning design for the Stadium MRT Station had a “dramatic rebirth”. The design team had originally proposed lifting the existing road, Stadium Boulevard, and making it a bridge, thereby creating a public space that flowed under the road and connected all the surrounding buildings. As WOHA explains, “Once we started work, LTA did a traffic study on our bridge and came back with the conclusion that the road could be removed! This bridge was the central element of our design, and it was gone.”

Forced to return to the drawing board, WOHA started again using the same principles – a public plaza, a very clear diagram, and simple large elements. “We turned the design on its side – instead of the bridge arcing over the ground, we made a curved plane, previously the bridge, and played it off against a straight vertical plane, previously the ground.” While the team had won the competition with a design that was quite different in form, they felt that “the new design was simpler and stronger than the original competition-winning scheme”.

As the station’s location is adjacent to the existing National Stadium, the design team had to address the scale of the large buildings in its vicinity and the need to accommodate surge crowds spilling out from events at the Singapore Indoor Stadium and the National Stadium. To cater to large ground-level crowds, the station was designed with a ground-level open-air concourse and plaza, with plenty of space for crowds to mill around. The resulting form of the station was shaped by both the flow of crowds down into the station, and inflected by the sweeping curves of the stadium. Contrasting a linear element against a curved one, the station was designed as a dramatic silver canyon that is breathtaking in scale.

Inside, the architecture is about the tension between the straight side and the curved side, and the way they nearly touch in the centre. A central skylight creates an attractive, day-lit platform. Openings in the aboveground forms allow views down to the platform from the ground-level plaza. The curve of the station, and the grey banding of the cladding are both visual references to the National Stadium, and will serve as a reminder when it is torn down and redeveloped into the upcoming Sports Hub.

At the platform level, the interior of the station is derived from abstract geological forms, creating a glassy grotto below the opaque striated elements above. Pedestrian movement dramatises perception of the space, as the escalators slide below the curve above, transporting commuters from the concourse at grade to the platform at Basement 2.

Keeping the space at the Stadium MRT Station free of structural elements was challenging as “it was not easy to make it look so clean, light and airy”. To solve this, the ribbed aluminium cladding system was custom designed to create an ambiguous material – sometimes soft like fabric, sometimes hard like stone, sometimes metallic – that changes with the quality of light and the time of day.

Over the course of the project, the design team recalls three turning points: “We had three breakthrough moments: in the original design, where we lifted up the road and suddenly had a great solution to the problem of holding the surge crowds; a second in the revised design, where we realised we could have such a simple clear diagram; and then a third one, where LTA agreed that the impact of the design required a central volume free of any bracing structure, although it would have been simpler from a structural point of view to have beams crossing the space.”

The WOHA team notes that the Stadium MRT Station has garnered very positive feedback, underscoring its own views on the need for good design in public spaces. Says the team, “Stadium MRT Station is a strong architectural space that many people pass through every day. We believe that all public buildings should be of the highest quality, as they are the setting for our daily lives, and so have immense impact on all of us and our quality of life. It is possible to achieve excellence through the right procurement process and by clients understanding the value of design; we wish this were done more often. We hope the very good outcome and positive feedback that the stations have generated will encourage more government projects to be procured with this focus on design.”