PRIMIS: A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

What if walking into a subway station felt like a breath of fresh air? Or if waiting for the train to come, meant taking time to stop and smell the flowers? We think it should. So we’ve designed a state-of-the-art underground garden that aims to surprise and delight citizens with the creative transformation of one of the most commonly used public spaces: subway stations. In addition to improving public transit experiences, this project will also enhance the built environment, improve air quality and offer educational opportunities for natural engagement and enrichment.

This unique design will feature floor-to-ceiling vertical gardens powered by LED grow lamps. This living wall will add depth and texture to the ordinary subway experience and environment by inviting the transit users to touch, smell and enjoy these underground gardens while waiting for trains. It also integrates energy harvesting flooring system to harness the kinetic energy of transit users’ movement through the station and direct this energy to power the garden’s grow lamps: a complete ecosystem. Educational interfaces could be used to display information about the garden as well as real-time data on the system’s energy use, generation and collection.

The project will incorporate air-filtering plants, such as ivy and snake plant, to effectively remove common volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for indoor air quality improvement – a critical need in many subway stations. We believe that this improved air quality will lead to healthier and happier transit experiences. 

IMPLEMENTATION

We look forward to working with the City and its transit agency to identify an underground subway station that could both accommodate and benefit from this sort of innovative design. While the design’s footprint is relatively small, we believe that it would be advantageous to install the design on a platform with ample circulation space to ensure user safety and enjoyment. This would allow transit users to actively engage with the living wall and would allow it to be seen from a distance.

This design could be easily adapted to stations and be implemented at a variety of different scales. Ideally, we would like to treat this project as a beta for a larger-scale version that could be used to transform an entire platform or station.

We look forward to working with the city to develop a set of design guidelines that will allow this project to be successfully implemented without compromising the safety or efficiency of the transit system.

TEAM

Sae Kim, Director // Joon Choe, Designer // Julia McElhinney, Strategist and Project Manager