Award of Merit - Renovation

West 8th Street Station

Now, the Cyclone roller coaster isn't the only thing that can catch a visitor's eyes at Coney Island in Brooklyn.

The West 8th Street Station on the Coney Island Line of the New York City subway system underwent a $31 million renovation that the awards panel called "a monumental project." It included the reconstruction of mezzanines to reorganize and add station facilities, the rehabilitation of station platforms, and the replacement of the windscreen and canopy materials.

"They had to not disturb any of the infrastructure and keep the traffic going," said a judge. "It's so far out of the norm of typical construction."

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The three-level elevated station is adjacent to the New York Aquarium, Coney Island's beach and boardwalk, and amusement attractions such as the Cyclone. With its south façade located along Surf Avenue, the station is one of the few in the subway system entirely visible from a distance, giving the design team lead by Daniel Frankfurt, P.C., an opportunity to explore innovative windscreen design to better define the station within the context of its surroundings.

Prior to the renovation project, the windscreens along the outside edge of the platform consisted of corrugated metal. This structure blocked the views of subway passengers to the beach and boardwalk. One major goal of the project was to open up the windscreens to enhance views and to employ creativity in the design of the windscreen panels themselves.

To accomplish this transformation, the team melded the normally horizontal and vertical steel windscreen tubes and panels into a more sinuous form, evoking the imagery of a wave - or even the nearby Cyclone roller coaster. The team turned normally flat planes into three-dimensional undulating volumes.

Under the new design, the façade "undulates" up and down as well as back and forth. It bulges out to enclose the subway while still offering views. The façade of one level fits in between the waves of the other, almost as if the entire wall was breathing.

The project team had to install the unique design features of the windscreen while also keeping within the parameters of New York City Transit design standards. The transit authority had recently adopted design standards for windscreens that included material and color selection, among other items.

The design team used the windscreen design standards as the basis of its plan, and then stretched the parameters to create the final distinctive design, which the agency approved.

During construction, however, fabrication and installation of the artwork panels presented a challenge. The sinuous nature of the windscreen required the project team to use a computer-aided design model of the station in order to precisely map all components of the undulating windscreens in three dimensions. That enabled the fabrication to account for actual field conditions.

The computer model also allowed the team's structural engineers to perform detailed calculations to ensure the structural integrity of the windscreen panels.