In Between Notes and Rails : bringing music to the city

Music operates as a collective cultural practice capable of shaping social interaction and public life when embedded within everyday urban environments. This thesis examines how musical production can function architecturally as civic infrastructure, repositioning transit space from a site of passage toward one of sustained public engagement. Waterfront Station, Vancouver’s primary transit hub, concentrates movement, accessibility, and daily occupation, yet its architecture remains oriented toward efficiency and throughput, and industrial identity. This thesis challenges approaches that frame transit environments as exclusively logistical systems. Transit stations function simultaneously as hubs of movement and as urban magnets, but their capacity to support duration, encounter, and cultural activity is often underdeveloped. The project proposes an integrated music centre within Waterfront Station that aligns learning, rehearsal, composing, production, and performance with the station’s operational rhythms. By situating musical production within a part of the transit core of the city, the thesis advances an architectural model for redistributing cultural infrastructure toward sites of maximum accessibility and public overlap, reframing transit architecture as an active civic space in the city that aims for collective and individual connection.