Balancing the demands of aesthetic pleasure, construction pragmatics and sustainable design is the essential challenge for architects in this century, said architecture professor Mark Clayton.

Sophomore architecture students were assigned a project to design a train station for the A&M campus with the aid of the college of architecture’s digital fabrication facility at the A&M Riverside campus.

The project exposed students to contemporary architectural design theory and craft that exploits 21st century technology to create expressive forms inspired by the fluid curves of nature and mathematics.

“The project refers back to the days when students arrived in the fall to attend A&M College of Texas via train at the ‘College Station,’” Clayton said. “A post office has held that name since 1877, but the town of College Station eventually took on the name but was not incorporated as a city until 1938.”

The project allowed students to fuse current technology with the historic train station that was west of A&M’s campus.

“The College Station train depot project took an innovative 21st century approach that would be an exemplarity train station some 134 years after the founding of A&M,” said architecture professor Rodney Hill. “The original station was the node and emblem that was the destination from the rest of Texas to College Station.”

Students were asked to design a train station with specific services, follow National Railroad Passenger Corporation guidelines and find greener materials for a more eco-friendly train stop.

“Students were challenged to design a station with services such as a ticket office, baggage room, waiting room and rest rooms,” Clayton said.  “A second challenge was to design a canopy over a 240-foot-long platform. The canopy was to be a curvilinear and expressive form. They designed the canopy using Autodesk Revit Architecture software, a cutting-edge advanced Building Information Modeling software system. Revit allows them to create 3D solid models with curved surfaces and provides analytic data to support cost estimating, construction schedules and energy consumption simulation.”

Computer methods allow designers to design and execute ideas that would have been out of the question just 20 years ago, Clayton said.

“The project was challenging,” said Presciliano Martinez, senior environmental design major. “Being able to convert your ideas into models was really cool, and I learned a lot working in the shop and working with all the technologies that are available to us. Working with something as historic as the train station and trying to find contemporary and eco-friendly ways to make a piece of history better was a challenge, but a fun one, and to see our work displayed at Langford was really cool.”

History

• The Houston and Texas Central Railway  was built through the area in 1860
• In 1871 the site was chosen as the location of the proposed A&M College of Texas, which opened in 1876
• A railroad depot was constructed in 1883
• College Station received electrical service in the 1890s
• One of many electric interurban railways in Texas was established between Bryan and College Station in 1910
• Texas A&M initiated a major expansion program in the 1960s, and College Station has grown with the school

SOURCE: Handbook of Texas