Janet McAllister: Unexpected delights in new rail stations

Panmure Station on opening day when its impressive design was unveiled. Photo / Elizabeth Clarkson

Although traffic fixes seem super-slow, the efforts of our transport czars to beautify the Super City along the way have been a nice surprise. New Zealand Transport Agency's eye-popping, swooping pedestrian motorway overbridges and even Auckland Transport's amusing Lichtenstein-inspired pop-art bus ads are unexpected delights.

Then there are the beautiful train stations. In just over a decade, several new-look Auckland stations have been built including (but not limited to) Britomart, which is ageing well; sleek, criminally hidden Newmarket; and art-clad New Lynn.

The latest is Panmure Station, which, like New Lynn, is part of a bus-train interchange. I went there last week, to meet some of the Opus team responsible, including Chilean architect Victor Hugo Rojas and architectural team leader Stefan Geelen. Bonus: I got to travel on the Eastern Line, which includes one of the world's most beautiful stretches of suburban train track, crossing lagoons on its own causeway.

The Panmure site is not so pretty. The station, with its impressive statement frontage, stands as a handsome beacon of glass, stone and wood in the midst of a pedestrian-unfriendly commercial semi-wasteland (features for cyclists are still part of the work in progress). But the station is designed to help kick-start a more human cityscape: pleasingly, AT's brief asked for an open public plaza and for quality, in order to attract good development.

In response, the station, like Newmarket's, is minimalist and uncluttered. But unlike the realist murals at Newmarket's junction, "local" is not made to be synonymous with "kitsch".

The designers have embedded references to nearby geography, geology and history in their elegant design. Even on the utilitarian basement train level, supporting columns are clad in basalt (referencing lava flow) and are tapered to evoke potaka (Maori spinning tops), while native climbers will create a "green wall" for valuable softness.

Upstairs, along with the view of neighbouring Mt Wellington/Maunga-a-Reipae through aqua-tinted glass (referencing local springs), the eye is drawn to significant lines; appropriately, many are lines of travel.

One line brings people inside the main entrance: a dark path of tessellated basalt lozenges which evokes marks made by dragging waka between the Manukau and Waitemata harbours. The pattern, on a larger scale, continues on the plaza outside.

On the ceiling, as part of a remarkable local skylight compass, that same portage line is named: Te Tapotu a Tainui. The compass infographic also marks the flightpath of the sparrowhawk, cardinal compass points in both Maori and English, and the direction of various landmarks and events.

Here, history, legend and the present are mingled (we continue to travel ancient paths); people are not isolated from nature; and Maori and Pakeha histories are not segregated.

The result is attractive and meaningful. Frustratingly, it's also more informative than any of the signs or information boards in the station - or anywhere else in the public transport network for that matter. What does AT have against maps? I hope the compass guides AT to the truth that core-business information is beautiful, too.