Five insights into Melbourne’s new Parkville Station

Parkville Station — one of five new stations for the forthcoming Metro Tunnel Project in Melbourne, Australia — is set to connect passengers to the heart of the city’s world-renowned health and education precinct.

Here, we reveal five little-known facts about the design of this newly completed landmark for the city, due to open to the public later this year.

1. Parkville Station is conceptualised as a street beneath a street — a subterranean reflection of the new ​‘boulevard’ above, providing places to meet and interact.

2. A central design feature is a 54-metre-long glass and steel canopy which, together with skylights, draws natural light into the station concourse.

3. You can see the sky from the platform, which is 25m below ground. 

4. The station has some of the tallest uninterrupted concrete columns on the entire metro project, where one column is a whopping 21m high. That is the rough equivalent of a seven story building.

5. Artist Patricia Piccinni has created Vernal Glade (pictured above) — an expansive field of handmade tiles located on the entrance wall that responds to the precinct’s identity as a place of medicine, healing and learning.

In addition to the new station, a grand promenade and biodiversity corridor along Melbourne’s Grattan Street has been created to complement the city’s vibrant health and education quarter — a place of exploration and ideas. The generous streetscape design connects the station with the many tram, bus, cycling and walking routes, creating a gateway to The University of Melbourne and hospitals. 

The design for the Metro Tunnel is a collaboration between leading design practices Hassell, WW+P Architects and RSHP.