Article content

Charlie Hoang was so shocked by what he saw leaving the sound-and-light show in an underground LRT station last year that he immediately called his colleague as he made his way up to the street level.

It wasn’t the multimedia extravaganza in the Kontinuum Ottawa 2017 attraction that had the transit architect quickly dialling up Danielle Sernoskie.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Architects of LRT tunnel stations aim to 'celebrate' unique transit cavern Back to video

It was the natural light cascading down the escalators.

“I remember calling back to Danielle when I got out of the entrance on the west side (at Queen and Lyon streets),” Hoang said. “It was around 4 p.m. and I took the escalators and elevators, and said, ‘Danielle, did you see the amount of light coming down at that entrance?’ I was shocked that we managed to get that all the way down to the concourse.”

Successfully steering natural light into a cavernous environment is a big win in subterranean architecture, which on the Confederation Line LRT is the responsibility of IBI Group. Hoang is the firm’s director of transit architecture and Sernoskie is the project architect for the Confederation Line’s tunnel stations.