Infrastructured – Fourth Door transport related features
Infrastructured – Fourth Door transport related features
New features accompanying Fourth Door’s 2025 INTERSECTIONS micro-symposium alongside other transport related material.
Click through to three new transport related architectural features (see in more detail below.)
I – Perkins & Will’s PEARL
II – White Arkitekur’s Växjö rail station/city hall hybrid
III – Leitplan and ifb engineers Eberswalde Cycle Hub
Going live to accompany INTERSECTIONS: between sustainable transport infrastructure, digital tech, cycle networks, architecture, and the built environment micro-symposium.
Infrastructured – new features
I – Even better than the real thing
UCL’s PEARL lab – a one-off research environment can run the tape forwards on the real world by creating life-sized false ones.
II – Two for one: Växjö’s timber city hall-rail station hybrid
The south Swedish town of Växjö has enhanced its international wood city reputation with a rail station that doubles as the city’s new Kommunhus.
III – C21 Transport synergies: Wood Town Eberwalde’s funky timber cycle hub
In the Northeast German town of Eberswalde, local cycle culture now has its very own showcase in the form of a stylish new wood cycle storage hub.
Further Infrastructured
Fourth Door Review and Unstructured transport and the built environment related features
Green Light for Go Cycle
Sarah Wigglesworth Architects transport and infrastructure design in Kingston, South West London, illustrates how cycle infrastructure is seeping into UK urban design. (Unstructured 11)
Roads to the Mountain
2017 marked Norway’s National Tourist Routes programme turning twenty. With a second cycle of projects getting underway, this feature looked at its early years, its current state and where the road goes from here (Unstructured extra 8)
Stuttgart 21’s Tunnel Vision
Stuttgart 21 underground station and rail tunnel project was super-controversial, triggering the largest German protests in forty years. With Stuttgart one of the country’s most dynamic sustainable architecture, engineering and research hubs, the Stuttgart 21 grand rail project cast a spotlight on the sector’s relationship with public participation and planning decisions. (Unstructured 5)
‘Reading Station’
‘Drop time’: a sensual vibrating techno-hymn designed by sound artist kaffe matthews for Reading station’s waiting travellers. ‘drop time ‘,played from the glass pod in the station’s forecourt in autumn 2002. (Unstructured 2)
Soundtrack
Jony Easterby writes about his specially commissioned Cycle path sound art installation built halfway through an old railway tunnel, near Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Using sensors and recordings Easterby brought the tunnels remarkable acoustics alive with the sound ghosts of times past. (Unstructured 2)
Buildings in motion – Rail station architecture meets sustainable design
In Norway new rail stations in and around the capital Oslo are vivid illustrations of integrating ecological design into public transport infrastructure, adding another layer to the meanings of sustainable transport. (Unstructured 1)
Sound for airports: Washdown time again
At Oslo’s glittering new Gardermoen airport, Anna Karin Rynander’s sound sculpture installations offer an aural washdown for the tired and weary. The Sound-Showers installation provide a routeway into reimagining sustainable transport for both new media art and soundscaping communities. (Unstructured 1 and Fourth Door Review 5)
Fourth Door Research – transport related projects
The Cycle-Stations Project
The Cycle-Stations Project – this Fourth Door Research project, live between 1998-2008, married sustainable transport with timber construction and sustainable architecture and design. It envisaged a network of deep green overnight stay facilities, acting as a new layer of the National Cycle Network helping support the growth of UK cycle culture.
In Depth
Fourth Door worked with leading architects and engineers, including dRMM, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Millimetre and the Architecture Ensemble on a variety of design variants, and with Sustrans, CAT and Brompton Bikes on the project’s development and promotion.
In collaboration with Brighton University, the Cycle-Stations Project was awarded a six-figure three-year Interreg grant running between 2004 and 2006. Other student academic collaborations have included working with Goldsmiths College Design Futures, Falmouth Art School. And Sheffield University Architecture School.
Riding on Empty, an exhibition about the Cycle Stations Project was live between 2006 and 2010.
MediaCycle
MediaCycle is a hybrid Cycle Station/New Media building typology, aimed at marrying constituent elements of the Cycle Stations concept with a distributed network of environmentally focused new media hubs and nodes.
In Depth
MediaCycle develops the ecological education dimension of the Cycle Stations concept, envisioning the hubs and nodes and cycle path networks as a distributed exemplar ‘learning and teaching instrument.’ It highlights the environmental overlaps between the physical sustainable built environment – embodied in Cycle Stations – and the natural world. Here, cycle routes provide a network of ‘linear parks’ (ie, the broader ecology along and beside cycle paths) with their ecological systems partially conveyed and communicated through new media. MediaCycle’s design focus also underscores relationships between lo-tech building design, materials and technologies and hi-tech communications media, and a symbolic meetings space between the physical and virtual.
River/Cycle/River – A post-local cycle infrastructure proposal
River/Cycle/River is a multi-layered proposal bringing together ground-breaking cycle infrastructure provision in the Lewes environs and Sussex’s Ouse Valley, by connecting local sustainable design and making to cycle infrastructure, and ecological education.
In Depth
River/Cycle/River enhances local cycle routes envisaging a suite of cycle infrastructure/furniture highlighting post carbon locally sourced natural materials and made by local maker-designers.
A parallel ecological education strand integrates the water-cycle and the river’s catchment watershed into designs, with the different cycle infrastructure integrating and illustrating elements related to and helping convey hydrological cycle processes, and natural ‘watershed’ boundaries. Both the network of projects, and individual pieces enhance the local cycle routes network while imaginatively supporting the cycle network.
Particulate
Particulate was a November 2023 Lewes workshop organised by Fourth Door as part of the town’s STEM festival. Focused on the town’s air pollution, the workshop was an instance of citizen science, run by the Dutch De WAR Fablab founders, Diana Wildschut and Harmen Zijp.
In Depth
Using Arduino particulate reading sensors attached to bikes participants mapped air pollution levels across the town, before creating an open-source map of pollution hot spots and providing the basis of real time community created air pollution monitoring system.
The Particulate workshop was the first, introductory step to developing a fully active air pollution citizen led monitoring network in and for Lewes. In Amersfoort, in the intervening period after the workshops started eight years ago some 800 sensing devices have been made and spread across the town. These send real time data and information regarding a cross-section across a range of air pollution related variables back to the citizen science group, who now run the programme. The sensors are located both in public places and in people’s own homes, and gardens, etc as well as other sites. Amersfoort now has a sophisticated air pollution data gathering network in place, which informs pollution reduction, and the town councils longer term strategy air pollution and policy.
Wildschut and Zijp have initiated similar workshops in Utrecht and in Bergen Norway. Along with Amersfoort all three now have ongoing citizen led air pollution monitoring groups.
This Infrastructured page will be developed further over the next months.
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Fourth Door – Making the Connections