In the past a city’s train station was the gateway to the city, as with New York’s Penn Station “one entered the city as a god” [Vincent Scully]. Today, with the decline of rail travel in the united states, they are more likely relegated to cinderblock buildings and other nondescript utilitarian structures, especially across the Midwest, but the idea of the grand space is not gone. The Topeka transit center can resurrect the idea of the train station as a civic space built as much for the community they serve as the rail companies.

It is critical to consider the traveler’s experience from their arrival at the transportation center to the point they board the train, and perhaps even about the train’s approach and departure as this structure will be the passenger’s introduction to the city of Topeka. This building is a place where many networks overlap and the structure’s job to join them, to bridge between pedestrians, bicyclists, bus, and train passengers to become a hub in all of these networks simultaneously. This creates an active, vibrant space in what is now a postindustrial wasteland.

As desolate as the site and surrounding area seem now, they have not always been that way, and with the proper intervention, will not remain so. The station must exist in the current environment, but should be designed to shape the new environment, the new site, which will develop around it and its function. The building can express the larger scale connections in the area, to the highway, to downtown Topeka, rather than to the dilapidated warehouses nearby.

As a hub of transportation, the transit center will be a point of arrival and departure, not necessarily a destination in itself but a gateway, a way to reach other places, a point of overlap in a series of paths, or a machine to move and sort people as they arrive and depart by their various means. This does not mean it should be a non-place, or an unpleasant place, but that it should facilitate movement and express the activity and motion of people in its form and layout. This is not some static object, a set piece or a box which occasionally fills with people, but a collection of moving streams of humanity, a place of activity, but not a place with no tranquility. As a gateway, the station must balance itself with the community of which it is a part and inject some, frankly, much needed activity into the community of Topeka.