Last week I went up to Boulder by bus from Market Street Station. All the way I thought about the ugliness of bus stations, and how they could be nicer. What happened, I wondered, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when all of those imposing old train stations were built, and the mid/late twentieth century and its ugly utilitarian bus stations and car parks? Well, concrete happened, for one thing - but it's possible to build nice things out of concrete too. Did they just decide that we would use these things no matter how ugly they were, and stop trying?
I went out the next day to look again at Market Street Station and at other things. I went to Union Station - the train station - and appreciated the greenish stone and the spacious waiting room lit by those big elegant windows.
But when I went back to look at Market Street Station I realised that it isn't all bad. It went up in my estimation, too, when I ran across the Denver Bus Station which is served by the Greyhound buses and which seems to have no redeeming features at all. Market Street Station is, first of all, underground. All you can see above ground is a pair of greenhouse-like vestibules from which you descend to the middle of the station by escalator. Underground, the station consists of a central area where you wait for your bus, surrounded by a concrete tunnel. The buses come in at one corner and have to drive all the way round to get back out, stopping somewhere along the way to let us in and out. Between the two areas are glass doors and glass-block walls.
The glass-block walls and the greenhouse-vestibules do attempt to give the place a light and spacious feel in the manner of old stations - but for some reason someone decided to tile the floor in dark brown, a colour which should really be used only for chocolate, certain forest-dwelling animals, and autumn. The most beautiful thing about the station is also the most ugly, however, and it is what set me thinking about this in the first place. It is the tunnel you go round when you get on your bus. Imagine - you have to find a way to get a long tin cylinder around in a circle without either scraping its sides or crumpling it and damaging any of its contents. So, the tunnel is built as a square with slightly rounded corners, and at each corner the driver drives the bus until its nose almost touches the wall before swinging the front of the bus around. It is poetry in motion. But the tunnel is so ugly.
The tunnel should be more beautiful. Its walls are of bare, stained concrete with pipes showing, and it is lit a dim orange. I'd like the walls to be covered in optical illusions - parallel lines getting closer together, or a trompe-l'oeil of a bus coming towards you filled with panicked-looking people. I admit this might be a little distracting, though, so I'd settle for walls covered with those white metallic sheets they use in London Underground stations.
Multi-storey parking garages should also be more beautiful. Could it be that I didn't learn to drive until my mid-30s because things associated with cars are so ugly and boring? First, the external appearance - perhaps more of them could be round instead of square. Even if they have to be square for the sake of spatial economy, it would be nice, for instance, to stick on a snake's head and tail and paint the coils in between in colourful stripes.
Looking around Denver I find that they often try to make the outside of parking garages blend in with the buildings they serve, which is better than nothing - but no-one ever seems to care about the inside, which is also visible from outside. They are always that same stained and dirty concrete as the bus tunnel, with pipes and wires on show as if you built a house and then didn't bother to put in the interior walls. I'd design parking lots as places of fantasy - you could have giant twisting vines and jungle plants made of green-painted metal, and pipe in the sounds of parrots and monkeys. Even better, you could have real plants and try and offset some of those carbon emissions. Again, though, I'd settle for clean sheeted walls rather than grey concrete.
Elephants too could be improved by a smooth, glossy coat.
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